The Face of God (Particles)

The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva Switzerland may have caught a glimpse of the elusive “god particle” – a subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics. This particle, officially named the Higgs boson, is called the “god particle” because without it, the universe as we know it would simply not exist.

Last week – as America was celebrating Independence Day – European scientists were also celebrating.  CERN announced the discovery of a new particle – a boson that fits the description of the Higgs. They were careful to call the data preliminary, and stated that more analysis was needed, but discovery of a particle that fits the parameters of a predicted particle is exciting at least and world-shaking at most.  If the results are verified, we could essentially have proof for one of the most important theories in modern physics. And I, for one, am confident the results will prove to be the Higgs boson. The scientists said there is approximately a one in two million chance that the data from the collision would not correspond to the Higgs boson. You don’t have to know much about science to know that those odds are pretty good.

While scientists at Europe’s CERN research facilities are hesitant to say they have conclusive proof of the existence of the Higgs boson, the reaction in the science world to this discovery places this in the ranks of significant finds. This particle – first proposed by Peter Higgs over forty years ago to explain how the masses of other elementary particles are determined – is a lynchpin in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model is the best explanation we have about the interactions of the tiniest parts of the universe – the subatomic particles that make everything larger tick, so to speak.

The Higgs boson is by definition extremely challenging to identify.  It requires colliding particles in a massive particle accelerator at enormous speeds, and even if the particle is created in the explosion, it decays almost instantaneously, so scientists are forced to infer its existence by looking for the particles created when it decays.  The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva was fortunately up to the task, and since 2010 scientists have been conducting experiments to reveal this fundamental particle. 

More questions remain, as is always the case.  If the Higgs boson confirms the validity of the Standard Model, there is still the problem of unifying the Standard Model with relativity.  As it stands now, the two theories, while they describe the universe when taken separately, do not play nicely with each other.  This is generally not an issue, but there are a few special and significant cases in which they are both used to describe the same phenomenon.  As far as we have come, there is still so much left to know, and the discovery at CERN raises some interesting questions about limits in scientific research. The amount of energy required to discover the Higgs boson was immense.  The amount of energy required to test some of the unified theories, most notably string theory, is even more vast. These are the challenges that modern physics faces, and with a lot of thought and ingenuity, we will surely conquer them.  We've come this far, already.