 |
| Image courtesy of CERN. |
By Lawrence Krauss - Slate
Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical
speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t
happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in
their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually
surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron
Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva
reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle,
first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model”
of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes
three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with
every experimental observation done to date.
The LHC is the most complex (and largest) machine that humans have
ever built, requiring thousands of physicists from dozens of countries,
working full time for a decade to build and operate. And even with 26
kilometers of tunnel, accelerating two streams of protons in opposite
directions at more than 99.9999 percent the speed of light and smashing
them together in spectacular collisions billions of times each second,
producing hundreds of particles in each collision; two detectors the
size of office buildings to measure the particles; and a bank of more
than 3,000 computers analyzing the events in real time in order to
search for something interesting, the Higgs particle itself never
directly appears.
No comments:
Post a Comment