Image courtesy of CERNland
www.cernland.net
picture: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN
On Wednesday, 4th of
July, there was a buzz in the world of science when physicists at CERN in
Geneva, Switzerland announced that they had found the God particle! For those
who don’t know, CERN is the world’s biggest particle physics laboratory and it
stands for Conseil Européen
pour la Recherche Nucléaire in French. In English, it is known as the
European Organization for Nuclear Research. If you’re confused because
you’ve heard about the Higgs particle or Higgs boson at the same time they
announced the discovery of the God particle, they are all actually the same
thing!
What is it?
The Higgs particle is a proposed elementary particle in
the Standard Model of particle physics.
Why is it called the Higgs particle? In 1962, Peter Higgs predicted the
existence of this particle because physicists at that time were wondering, “How
does Nature decide whether or not to give mass to particles?”. Particles are
what everything in the universe is made of, the same way DNA or deoxyribonucleic
acid, is the very thing that all living things are made of. Understanding how
they get their mass and why a few of them do not have mass will help us
understand how Nature and the universe work. This discovery is just like the
discovery of DNA or the theory of
relativity to the world. It is the most fundamental discovery in the world
of physics because it explains everything in that subject.
Why is it so important to scientists?
That’s because without the
Higgs particle there would be no mass. Without mass there would be no stars, no
planets and no atoms and definitely no human beings! If the Higgs particle did
not exist, then most of what physicists think they know about the universe
would be wrong. So it does affect the
whole universe but it definitely isn’t God particle, because it does NOT
explain creation!
How did they discover it?
It was discovered using the Large Hadron
Collider, a giant machine at CERN which sends protons round a ring 27km in
circumference in opposite directions at almost the speed of light so they will
collide head on with enormous energy! When this happens, the energy is
converted into other particles, which then decay into even more particles until
they find what they are looking for.
Scientists around the world have
been looking for this particle for fifty years and now they have discovered it.
But the mysteries of the universe are far from being solved. There are many
more puzzles to be untwisted by scientists and this is just the beginning of a
new chapter in physics!
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