The God Particle, Beyoncé & Job Security
What if Beyoncé were to walk into a room of crowded people and simultaneously you walk into the same room? To who would the paparazzi and the other people in the room be attracted? There is no apparent physical force attracting them to Beyoncé and there is no observable force pushing people away from you. So what force is at work? Is it a force at all? Or, perhaps it is something more subtle.
Physicists ask the same question about matter. Why do atoms come together to form molecules which then form us? They have, in fact, been searching for the answer to this question for more than 40 years. They called this their quest the search for the “God particle”; the tiny subatomic particle that creates a field of attraction which enables mass to coalesce and form structures.
In the early 1960’s, a Scottish physicist named Peter Higgs submitted a paper to CERN, which they rejected, that argued that there was a particle that would create this field of attraction. In an ironic twist, decades later, CERN would end up spending billions of Euros to try to validate Peter Higg’s theory and prove that this “God Particle” actually exists.
The Large Hadron Collider1 (or the LHC) was created by CERN to find what was now being called the “Higgs Boson.” After many years of smashing trillions of protons together in the 17 mile magnetic accelerator ring that makes up the LHC, scientists were able to finally, in 2012, prove the existence of the Higgs Boson.
As the universe cooled from the Big Bang this Higg’s field of attraction expanded, causing any particle that interacted with it to acquire mass2. The more a particle interacts with this field, the heavier it becomes. The Higgs boson is the ‘visible manifestation’ of the Higgs field, analogous to waves at the surface of the sea3.
They were able to do this by applying the most famous equation in history, E=MC2. By finding a particle that weighs 126 GeV4. (in energy terms by applying Einstein’s famous equation), they located the Higgs Boson. It is this ‘heavy’ Higgs Boson particle that produces the field of attraction that creates matter and mass.
But, in Physics, the answer to every questions leads to more, deeper questions. Does the discovery of the Higgs Boson constitute the final step in understanding our creation?
Alas, after the discovery, the Higgs at 126 GeV seems too light to work in the standard model5. The issue is that the mathematics (theory of supersymmetry6) indicates that 5 Higgs Bosons need to exist due to an unfamiliar entity called dark matter that is offsetting the subatomic anomalies.
So, the good news is that Physicists have job security…there is much more to know7. While we have found a God Particle, we haven’t found all of the God Particles and so our quest continues….