There is nothing so special about the mountains on the French-Italian border, I thought as I passed them en route from Geneva to Chamonix in the alps.
Sure, they are stunning scenically and the highest point in Europe, but no more so than 50km along the continent.
But I knew what made this section important was what was happening in a subterranean labyrinth of scientific endeavour, called CERN.
The Large Hadron Collider was having the finishing touches put on it, proclaimed proudly as the most complicated single feat of engineering ever completed by humanity.
An enormous circle over which protons and other sub-atomic particles are accelerated to close to the speed of light, in opposing directions around the circle, to be smashed pitilessly (excuse the anthropomorphism) into each other in hope of yielding
In subsequent painstaking autopsy of the collisions, Physicists hope to find the elusive Higgs Boson particle.
This is the last of the twelve types of fundamental particles that make up all matter in the cosmos under the Standard Model. However, this last link has – since postulation by British Physicist Peter Higgs in1946 – eluded capture.
The so-called “god particle” as it is often termed by controversy-courting atheists in the media – would complete the Standard Model of subatomic life, constituting twelve fundamental particles and six basic forces. The idea that the discovery of this particle would mean scientists would have an epiphany in their understanding of their
Analogous to if biblical scholars knew eleven of the disciples from the last supper but the twelth eluded identification, the discovery of this particle is the main motivation behind the enormous particle accelerator at CERN.
Sure, last year there was some controversy when the inaugural experiment was marred with technical difficulties, but we are dealing at the frontier of humanities understanding of the cosmos, so lets cut the guys some slack. Trial and error is what makes it science rather than technology right?
In a highly anticipated seminar this week, the two rival teams competing in the search for the Higgs Boson revealed they have strikingly similar results in a sense of a particle that is a very likely contender to be the “god particle”. As I am decidedly undecided on religious issues, an ambivalent agnostic I compromised by refusing to capitalise the deity in this moniker. I presume there are some Muslims in the teams any way, so reluctant to use it and do so only in order to connect with the ubiquitous recognition of this name.
The scientist in charge of the ATLAS project says there is no way he thought he would be so confident that we would discover the enigmatic particle if you had asked him a year ago.
So although reluctant to enumerate his poutry prior to hatching, there is an unmistakeable confidence and optimistic excitement in the air at the world's premier nuclear research facility right now.
Watch this space....
Either we could find the “last piece” of the Standard Model of subatomic physics, or we could end up with a sea-change, a contradiction of accepted theory and a paradigm shift – either way a landmark point in modern Physics, indeed in Science in general, is on the horizon and approaching with each passing hour, with each million collisions studied.
They are over a trillion proton collisions and counting now.... God things take time!
They are over a trillion proton collisions and counting now.... God things take time!
