The coolest place in the universe
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a thing of wonder – not just for smashing 600 million protons together a second, but for uniting 10,000 scientists from 113 countries in the pursuit of knowledge
The discovery of a Higgs-like particle by the Large Hadron Collider at the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (known as Cern) was the greatest scientific story of 2012. It is also a spectacular demonstration of what can be achieved when the intellectual power of theoretical physics is coupled with engineering and international collaboration. In those first two sentences, I’ve already used two hyperbolic adjectives; let me explain why I feel justified in doing so.
The Higgs boson is a fundamental subatomic particle whose existence was predicted in a series of papers in 1964 by a group of theoretical physicists including Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs and Tom Kibble. The prediction was made partly on aesthetic grounds – by which I mean it was introduced to make the equations that describe how subatomic particles interact with each other more elegant. Technically, the Higgs mechanism is a means of preserving certain symmetry properties of the equations which are considered to be desirable, or even “beautiful”. As such, the successful prediction of the Higgs boson can be regarded as a prime example of what the physicist Eugene Wigner termed “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences”.
Its job is to give mass to the other fundamental particles, including the electrons and quarks out of which we are made. It does this by interacting with them, and the strength of the interaction determines the mass of the particle; electrons are less massive than top quarks because they interact more weakly with Higgs particles. The Higgs particles fill all of space. Every cubic meter of the room in front of you is crammed with Higgs particles. They occupy all of the space inside your body, outside your body, and throughout and between every galaxy in the observable universe.
How did the Higgs particles get there?.. Read more:
