God Particle
The Large Hadron Collider is a proton-smashing collider built in a 27-km or 17
mile tunnel - a long machine created by
physicists, where trillions of protons are made to collide with one another at
mind-boggling speed in the hope that from the debris of these collisions
scientists may spot the elusive particle that would explain the formation of
the stars and the planets.
This experiment is guided by the theory
associated with the British physicist Peter Higgs who, with five other
physicists, proposed in a paper in 1964 that space is permeated by a force
field. This invisible field, a kind of “cosmic molasses,” coats other particles
when they pass through it and gives them the mass that allows them to combine
into bigger forms of matter. You can’t see the molasses, but it should be
possible to establish its presence by the traces it leaves behind. The Higgs
boson is its manifestation, but even this eludes observation.
Six thousand physicists who were
involved in this amazing experiment hailed the discovery of the Higgs boson, or
what looked like it, as a milestone in the quest to understand nature.
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