![]() ![]() The Higgs particle is a manifestation of the “Higgs field”, which pervades all of space and “clings” to all the other particles. Otherwise, they would be massless and travel always at the speed of light, which would make for a relatively dull universe. The goal was to provide a means by which the most elementary particles that make up the universe – electrons, quarks and so on – can have mass. The Higgs particle was thought up in the 1960’s, and the ideas were contributed by several theorists including Peter Higgs himself, who works at Edinburgh. The discovery was twenty years in the making and involved very considerable sums of money and large teams of scientists and engineers from all over the world. It required a high energy proton accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, that generated proton beams with enough energy and intensity to produce this very massive object. On July 4, 2012, scientists at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, at Geneva, announced the observation of a new elementary particle which is probably the long-sought “Higgs particle”. Likely discovery of the Higgs particle at CERNĭr Peter Bussey, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow CiS committee member Rodney Holder shares his thought regarding the newest findings about the Higgs Boson.Īrticle on the Higgs Boson (pdf) (text below) by CiS member and elementary particle physicist Dr Peter Bussey, who outlines what the Higgs boson is and what its discovery means for Christians. Interview with Revd Dr Rodney Holder on Premier Radio. Now, that would be truly astonishing.In response to recent findings about the Higgs Boson (or “God Particle”) CiS have collected together one or two responses from our members: “For instance, we might see something that proves to be the stuff of dark matter, or we might detect a loss of energy in a proton collision, suggesting that a particle has moved into another dimension that we can’t see. “The only thing more exciting will be to see entirely new discoveries that we can’t even anticipate,” he says. That will be the crowning achievement of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that attempts to describe all matter in the universe, according to Tuts. At that rate, physicists expect that a Higgs boson will appear about once every five seconds within a couple of years, scientists hope to have enough data to identify its properties. The LHC will produce 1 billion proton-on-proton collisions per second. But it has never been observed because no particle accelerator has produced enough data to verify its existence. The Higgs boson, which is named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and is often called God’s particle because of the deep secrets it could reveal, was described by theorists in the 1960s. The ATLAS team is looking for the elusive Higgs boson as well as other particles whose existence physicists have yet to even hypothesize. ![]() institutions who are assigned to one of the LHC’s four main research projects, called ATLAS, which stands for A Toroidal LHC Apparatus. Mike Tuts manages about 400 physicists from U.S. ![]() Radiation detectors will monitor the energy emitted by these particles, many of which will disappear within a fraction of a second. LHC scientists expect that in early 2010 they will begin accelerating beams of protons to near the speed of light and then aiming them at each other, causing the protons to burst into sprays of constituent particles. Built at a cost of roughly $4.5 billion over 13 years, it operated briefly in September 2008 but soon was shut down for repairs before being fired up again this past November. The LHC, which is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, lies in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel below the Franco-Swiss border. In other words, the Higgs boson explains why matter, even at the scale at which it is composed of single points of energy, has mass.Ībout 20 Columbia physicists, including professors Gustaaf Brooijmans, Emlyn Hughes, John Parsons, Michael Tuts, and students and postdoctoral researchers, are among thousands of scientists from around the world who are about to begin searching for the Higgs boson at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The particle, which theorists have dubbed the Higgs boson, is crucial to scientists’ understanding of the universe as hypothesized, the Higgs boson interacts with other elementary particles in a way that slows them down as they move through space. (Maximilien Brice / Cern)Ĭolumbia physicists hope to soon observe the one elementary particle yet to be discovered of the 17 predicted by contemporary theory. Physics professor Michael Tuts, pictured here at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, manages about 400 scientists who hope to discover new types of elementary particles at the LHC. ![]()
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