This week has been very exciting indeed! I've monitored, closely, the progress of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at the CERN facility in Geneva for some time. A series of penny farthing type tubular arrangements have been installed underground at the French/Swiss border accelerating two opposing beams of protons in order to collide their paths at strategic positions. Using incredibly sensitive hardware sensors, the collisions will be recorded and resulting collateral fragments of matter will be analysed.
It is impossible to envisage the proton beam 'packet' travelling - when fully accelerated - 11,000 times around the 27km ring every second [99.9999% the speed of light].
Much excitement has been aroused surrounding the potential for the LHC to 'discover' [or at least provide evidence of the existance of] the Higgs Boson particle - a particle imagined to be responsible for giving mass to other particles in the universe. Personally, I have never liked the concept and have felt for some years like the elusive Higgs was an easy way to explain away the inauguration of mass. I can't wait to see if answers are provided one way or the other, though.
The most exciting thing for me is the potential light the experimentations might shed on dark energy and dark matter.
Whatever happens, it feels like a precipice of breakthrough for me and I'm very excited..
1 comment:
I’ve been following this too, albeit not as closely as you, and agree with your comment:
Personally, I have never liked the concept and have felt for some years like the elusive Higgs was an easy way to explain away the inauguration of mass.
Now, I’m no particle physicist, but (if I read your direction of thought correctly) this ‘magic’ particle notion does feel a little messy. Introducing a little anthropological theory raises interesting philosophical questions: not necessarily of the ‘God’ (or 'god') variety, but more about how we might associate the fundamentals of nature with the ontological desire for simplicity, order, balance and aesthetic ‘fit’. The Higgs Boson speculation does not ‘feel’ elegant. That’s not to say its wrong; rather, I perhaps hold a conception that the solution should be simpler than that which is being proposed. Perhaps nature, as CERN may discover, is in reality rather messy; and of course, we shouldn’t forget that the discovery of the Higgs Boson will in no doubt lead to further levels of atomic order and speculation.
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