God's particle

This may sound off topic for this section, but allow me to bring this latest discovery up into this little nook of ours. You see, the European Organization for Nuclear Research or popularly known as CERN (in French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) made a very exciting announcement recently that they are 99.999 percent sure that they have found the Higgs Boson or what is touted by the press as “God’s particle”.

So what on earth is this God’s particle in the first place? What makes it so exciting that all the physicists around the world are now celebrating this historic discovery that have long eluded them including great scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawkings?

This is how I humbly understood this whole thing from a purely non-physicist standpoint. We all know pretty much in our high school Physics about Isaac Newton and his compelling theory about gravity. Much of Newton’s theories are still used to this day by physicists, and in Classical mechanics. But just as we thought that Newton knew every square inch about gravity, well not really.

Einstein came and made an even more bold assumption that Newton was not entirely correct especially with reference to bodies in outer space. Einstein discovered that there is more to gravity than just attraction between objects and that the Newtonian view does not cohere or make sense in the celestial domain. Thus, Einstein forwarded the proverbial General Relativity theory where gravity is not really just about a pull between objects but a geometric curvature of space-time that influences motion and things.

At the turn of the 20th century, physics got more exciting. There are those who are interested in celestial physics (astrophysicists), and there are those who dwell in the smallest of things or what we call quantum physicists. Since Einstein, relativity was thought to be the “final theory” that would solve the conundrums that bog scientists for ages and that if relativity makes sense in the cosmic domain, there is no reason for it not to work in the terrestrial domain. But wait, yes relativity does work well here on earth but not if you talk about atoms. Relativity doesn’t make sense at the level of atoms much less at the level smaller than atoms (quantum level). Despite Einstein’s insistence that relativity is the master equation of all, and that “God does not play dice.” scientists like Neils Bohr, proved Einstein wrong and answered back, “ Einstein, don’t ask God what to do.”

Bohr observed that at the quantum level, the atoms behave differently. He could not a make sense of what was going at the particle level. Particles can appear and disappear or be at many places at the same time! In other words, the laws of physics as we know them do not make any sense at all down there. And Bohr was right -- Einstein and Newtonian physics crumble when you speak on the behavior of atoms.

Thus, this encouraged more scientists to explore quantum mechanics. And we owe it to quantum mechanics for the many inventions that we enjoy today such as consumer electronics, space technology, and all these digital devices we see on the shelves. Despite the advances in our understanding of quantum mechanics, much has remained unexplored.

There are many things that scientist would like to make a sense out of in this little planet of ours. They believe that when we are able to explain what’s going between at the sub-atomic level, we may be able to explain, why dark energy consists a large part of outer space yet contribute so little to move the expanding universe of ours. They may be able to explain if there are other universes outside our universe or perhaps figure out why there are other dimensions outside of the three dimensional sphere we perceive. But more than that, scientists want to explore the many applications of quantum mechanics to modern living. In fact, the idea of teleportation is no longer sci-fi as we ordinarily see them in the movies. Teleportation is for real and several experiments have already been done proving that teleportation is possible. Science has already teleported photons – and we all know that photons are elementary particles that form part of everything around us.

Now going back to the Higg’s boson or God’s particle, CERN spends around 10bn dollars to explain the origin of mass – how or why atoms got its mass when they were first formed. So why is it so important to know how matter got its mass? To begin with, our physics textbook does not explain it. And now that we know that the Higgs field really exist, it is a leap forward to our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature even at the subatomic level. The discovery of God’s particle, in other words, attempts to provide the missing link that troubles scientists why the laws that govern the cosmos, the earth, and the small things that we are made of do not jive – thus, we are not so far in arriving at the final theory or the master equation. The discovery of God’s particle will eventually lead us to make a sense of everything in this planet and beyond.

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