Higgs Particle Confirmed: God Exists - In Physics
After a few days of climaxing anticipation – and five decades of theoretical supposition – scientists finally announced today that the Higgs Boson has emerged from physical theory to physical reality.
The $6 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which smashes together atoms in an environment that briefly reaches temperatures a hundred thousand times greater than the Sun, was able to smash particles together hard enough to generate the energies necessary to recreate the so-called God particle, which is the particle responsible for the mass of all other particles – you, the Earth, the stars; everything.
The 17-mile long machine speeds particles up to nearly the speed of light to cause terrific explosions; then, it uses 3,000 high-speed computers to analyze the resulting subatomic debris for the new particles that are often created. For over half-a-century, since the theories of physicist Peter Higgs, there was a final theorized particle that had yet to be discovered to complete the Standard Model of Particle physics; it’s only fitting that it would arguably be the most important particle of all.
What does the Higgs particle do, exactly? In short; it slows us all down by endowing us with the mass. If the Higgs particle weren’t around, every single particle would flit around at light-speed, incapable of forming more complex particles because they could never slow down enough to clump together. The problem with actually “seeing” the Higgs particle in action all this time is that it takes a lot of energy to perturb it enough to cause it to pop its head up for a look-around; the LHC, as the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, finally reached the energies necessary to create enough Higgs-emergence events for us humans to see it.
Scientists in at CERN in Geneva had to sift through trillions of particle collision events to locate the Higgs, which, despite the massive energies of which the LHC is capable, still only shows up about once every thousand-billion subatomic explosions. At about 125 GeV (units of mass measurement used by particle physicists), the Higgs particle is absolutely huge; it’s a single fundamental particle that’s bigger than many transition metals.
Two separate teams independently found the same signal that the Higgs exist; which means that the confidence level that it isn’t some other particle masquerading as the mass-giver is sky-high – although cross-checks will continue throughout the weeks and upcoming months.
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