The Quest For ‘God Particle’

An epoch-making moment in the history of science as scientists, armed with the largest atom-smasher, gear up to explore the fundamental nature of the universe. A $10 billion endeavour, 15 years in the making, CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider aka LHC is the world’s largest collider, a ring accelerator spanning 27 km, 100 m underground along the Swiss-French border, that will be switched on tomorrow. As the protons collide in the LHC, they will recreate energies and emulate a condition a split-second after the big bang, the colossal explosion that created the universe 14 billion years ago. Thousands of scientists from all over the world will be looking for dark matter particles, new subatomic forces and perhaps extra dimensions of space. The elusive Higgs Boson particle, dubbed the ‘God particle’, might be unveiled as well.

It will still be one month later when the two proton beams travelling in opposite directions at almost the speed of light will collide. Until then, you don’t know if the dream machine of the physicists is really a doomsday machine – whether it will produce an all-encompassing black hole or convert the entire earth into ‘strange matter’ – as has been claimed in a lawsuit filed in a Hawaiian court. Read more about the LHC controversy.

CERN has played down the theory of a man-made black hole eating up the earth or that of ‘stranglet’ production. According to them, the LHC will only recreate the natural phenomena of cosmic ray collisions under controlled laboratory conditions. They go on saying that any micro black hole, if at all formed, will disintegrate immediately. See The Safety of the LHC.

The operating principle of the Large Hadron Collider is nothing new. Colliders have been working since decades. I have read about them an umpteen number of times in science features and also in the Physics text book Resnick Halliday. A collider is designed to accelerate subatomic particles to a very high kinetic energy and bring them into collision. An electromagnetic field is applied to control the velocity of the fired particles. To make the wires to these large electromagnets superconducting, a very low temperature is essential. So there are elaborate cooling arrangements to maintain a very low temperature (something to the tune of minus 271 degrees). The high energy impact transforms the colliding particles to other particles, that is to say, newer particles from which physicists hope to gain newer insights. These new particles created have a very brief lifespan. To detect them you need super-sensitive & highly sophisticated detectors. These elaborate arrangements make the construction of a collider such a lengthy and expensive process. There are already several colliders esp. the Fermilab collider in the US which has so far failed to dig out Higgs Bosons.

What the biggest scientific experiment till date is all about? Kate McAlpine, a Michigan State University graduate at CERN, has found an innovative way to explain that – a video where she herself raps and dances in the tunnels and caverns of the LHC. The Large Hadron Rap video has drawn millions of views on youtube. Upon wide public interest, Kate McAlpine has put up the original mp3, lyrics, and vocals at this link.

Angels & Demons connection: Even if you ain’t a sucker for science news like me, you might as well recall ‘CERN’ if you read Dan Brown! I suddenly remembered this – the picture of Robert Langdon walking along the LHC tunnel flashed in my subconscious, then looked up Google and found yes, I was right. (Credit goes to Dan Brown for his pictographic writing, I remember most of the novel so well even now.) Googling also revealed that the antimatter bomb theory propounded in A&D was more of a fiction than anything and had been dismissed by CERN – see Spotlight: Angels and Demons.

Bong connection: The elusive Higgs-Boson belongs to the family of boson particles which are named after the noted Bengali scientist Satyendranath Bose.