Still Searching?
And lo, certain wise men spotted a strange star in the east and wondered what it didst purport. And then, verily, 2000 years later, some more wise folk did almost very possibly glimpse the mechanism that allowed everything to gain mass directly after the big bang and also did wonder, what couldst this mean?
Those intrepid scientists who keep Geneva's Large Hadron Collider shipshape might sound to some of us like overgrown Scalextric addicts, spending their days whizzing particles around a 17-mile ring in order to smash them together. Why? To uncover a cosmic-sized mystery at the heart of the universe.
If my meagre brain serves me right it's something like this. A big bang produces lots of particles and lots of energy, with particles zipping about all over the place at nearly light speed. So how did some of the particles actually stop moving about and combine in order to make the building blocks of the universe? What force glued them together?
Enter the Higgs boson particle stage left. The physicist Peter Higgs and his gang came up with this theory in the 1960s as a way of explaining why particles have mass. Mass, as the BBC website helpfully points out, is 'quite simply, a measure of how much stuff an object - a particle, a molecule, or a Yorkshire terrier - contains'. The Higgs boson is understood as an invisible energy field through which other particles pass and pick up mass, without which particles would zip through space at the speed of light, unable to bind together.
Now it's not certain that the elusive HB has been spotted in the LHC (go on, impress your next dinner guests with the acronyms); scientists are reluctant to call it a 'discovery' until it can be verified. Even so, this might be the most important science clue of the past 100 years - one more piece in the jigsaw that is our cosmos.
Amazing. In an age of constant movement and constant information overload, some days we need to pause long enough to be able to say 'Wow!' Like magi amazed at portents in the east, like David in Psalm 19 marvelling at the heavens.
So, do you realise where you are today? Do you realise who you are? Do you recognise how marvellous, magnificent and mysterious is the God who glued you together?
'Wow', just 'wow'.
Jason Gardner
Links
Q&A: The Higgs boson
Guide to the Large Hadron Collider
Comments
Good one!
Like Wow !
Date:
2011-12-20 14:19:31
Author:
peter harbord