There are several different ways to study the nature of matter, but one of the most fun is to smash very tiny particles into each other at extraordinary speeds and see what happens.
This is what they do at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) one of the largest, most complex, machines ever built. This $10 billion proton beam smasher on the Swiss-French border was built for one main purpose: to determine if the Higgs boson actually exists. What is a Higgs boson? Great question. Go to Wikipedia and read about it.
Particle physics is not generally a pop-culture vocation. But this week, particle physicists were all over the news. It seems that there is a 99.99 percent chance that experiments at CERN have given us our first look at a particle that, according to a spokesperson, "is consistent with a Higgs boson as is needed for The Standard Model."
Try to contain your excitement.
The Higgs boson is considered, by a significant number of mainstream physicists, to be the "missing link" to "The Standard Model" of particle physics. According to Wikipedia, "The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles." So this discovery is exciting because confirming the existence of this predicted particle helps to validate The Standard Model.
But, even if this new particle is not a Higgs boson, there is still good news. It may be the first of a new type of massive subatomic particle that will completely alter our understanding of the universe. So the news this week was win/win for scientists everywhere.
That said, scientists are pragmatic, so after saying "Thanks, nature!" Fabiola Gianotti, one of the CERN team leaders, told reporters that, "The Standard Model is not complete ..." but, "the dream is to find an ultimate theory that explains everything -- we are far from that."
There is no practical use for a Higgs boson and we are not any closer to understanding gravity, nor dark energy, nor a unified theory of everything, so what have we learned from this 17 mile long, $10 billion atom-smasher?
Well, first, we learned that there is a huge value to pure scientific research. Science for its own sake can take us on a journey towards the answers to mankind's oldest and most basic questions. And, although none of the scientists I spoke to would even venture a guess about the practical use of this discovery, I can't help thinking that it is both inspirational and aspirational.
How many kids will start asking questions like, "What is everything made of?" or "Why do we need a theory of everything?" How many adults will be inspired to learn about the forces of nature and the scientific method? How many of us will aspire to learn all we can learn about the world around us, and our place in the universe? I love these questions and the thousands more that will come from this remarkable discovery.
I also love the complexity of this particular problem and the technology, mathematics and computer science needed to solve it. We may invent new kinds of math to help with this search, build new kinds of computers, rethink materials handling, change the nature of manufacturing or learn to do a thousand other things from the science needed to do this kind of research. It's simply awesome!
Get excited about this. Read about it. Tell your friends about it. Think about it. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we made of? Why do things around us behave the way they do? What is our ultimate fate? What can we do to change the world? There are so many more questions you can ask... so ask! Congratulations to the teams at CERN. Striving to understand who and what we are may be our highest, best purpose.
Follow Shelly Palmer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@shellypalmer
Science funding is not as arbitrary and as guaranteed as the public believes. It took 28 years to get LHC funded and built.... the next one could take even longer.
The best case scenario in the unfortunate case that LHC hits the "energy desert" would be to put more of the high energy physics budget in dark matter searches, cosmic ray and neutrino detectors, but even that would require a complete re-structuring of the field.
Why is the speed of light throughout the Universe presumed to be 300,000 km/sec rather then
say, 299,000 km/sec or 301,000 km/sec?
Because that's the rate at which the medium transmitting it - space, resists acceleration, or to
put it another way, because this specific value reflects the actual INERTIA of space...
INERTIA?
"But does not the inertia of any medium depend on it being endowed with some kind of mass?" William of Ockham might have asked many centuries ago...
"Hmmm...if this is so, then maybe all THINGS that swim within space in fact borrow their mass from space?" he may have pondered, seeking the simplest solution to the quandary of mass.
Mark Gendala on Kindle
And then nature would have told him that, no, that's not how everything gets its mass. Only a tiny fraction of the universe gets its mass that way.
:-)
The reason why the discovery of the Higgs is not good news for physics is trivial: we already knew about it. No, it won't turn out to be something else. It is the Higgs and it is right smack in the middle of the energy range where it is the least useful. It does not help to make the standard model better. The standard model today is the very same that it was before the discovery announcement.
NOTHING NEW HAS BEEN LEARNED.
That is a tragedy in science, not a reason to celebrate.
The really bad news, of course, was given in dozens of talks at ICHEP, after the public had stopped listening. It was a series of analyses which confirm the standard model down to the iota. No new physics anywhere on the horizon. Not a single cloud in a big, blue, high energy sky that could point us to the direction we have to go to next.
And that, in the language of laymen, that simply sucks giant lemons!