4th July 2012
I cried when I watched Peter Higgs on television this afternoon, standing there, just as the head of the CERN laboratory confirmed, with 99.999% certainty, that the Higgs Boson had been discovered. “I would have never thought it possible in my lifetime,” explained the 83-year-old physicist.
The subatomic particle had been predicted by Higgs and other colleagues in the 1960s and it is considered crucial to the explanation of mass in the universe, in line with the Standard Model. This generally accepted model, which defines matter, needed this missing link for its cohesion. The discovery depended on the Large Hadron Collider, a circular 27 kilometre underground tube, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva. By using this particle accelerator to smash two protons together at velocities close to the speed of light, scientists are supposed to create conditions comparable to the immediate aftermath of the big bang, where particles would have been more independent. The particle discovered has the mass of about 130 protons.
The particle had been nicknamed "the God Particle" because of its role in giving substance to everything that exists. Of course the particle represents quantity, rather than quality which would certainly have been closer to any definition of God. Nevertheless, this fairy-dust, does possess a certain magic, being so close to the unfolding of reality as we know it. I look forward to buying some as soon as it is available in the shops.
Location of the Large Hadron Collider which straddles Switzerland and France
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