This past weekend, the Guardian ran a terrific story on the search for the "God particle," the as-yet unseen speck that would provide evidence for a theorized universal field that particle physicists believe is responsible for mass. From "The god of small things:"
Until recently, few even questioned where mass comes from. Newton
coined the term in 1687 in his famous tome, Principia Mathematica, and
for 200 years scientists were happy to think of mass as something that
simply existed. Some objects had more mass than others - a brick versus
a book, say - and that was that. But scientists now know the world is
not so simple. While a brick weighs as much as the atoms inside it,
according to the best theory physicists have - one that has passed
decades of tests with flying colours - the basic building blocks inside
atoms weigh nothing at all. As matter is broken down to ever smaller
constituents, from molecules to atoms to quarks, mass appears to
evaporate before our eyes. Physicists have never fully understood why.
While
working on the conundrum, Higgs came up with an elegant mechanism to
solve the problem. It showed that at the very beginning of the
universe, the smallest building blocks of nature were truly weightless,
but became heavy a fraction of a second later, when the fireball of the
big bang cooled. His theory was a breakthrough in itself, but something
more profound dropped out of his calculations.
Higgs's theory
showed that mass was produced by a new type of field that clings to
particles wherever they are, dragging on them and making the heavy.
Some particles find the field more sticky than others. Particles of
light are oblivious to it. Others have to wade through it like an
elephant in tar. So, in theory, particles can weigh nothing, but as
soon as they are in the field, they get heavy.
In May the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will be switched on. Able to send protons
smashing into each other at 14 times the energy of the Fermilab
collider, the Higgs boson might be unmasked at last. If so, it would provide evidence of a universal - in the most literal sense of the word - physical canvas, stretching across the cosmos from beginning to end.
Elsewhere in the article Peter Higgs, after whom the elusive quarry is named, expresses misgivings about the
nickname that has stuck to the theorized particle. Why offend believers by calling it the "God particle?" I'm not offended. I'm not offended for this reason.
At their very best, human languages - whether mathematical or natural - always point to unknown lands.
Whatever the physics involved, whatever the
complexity of the math that expresses this reality, our ability to pin
down what is slips always ahead, conditioned by the unknown. And in fact, asking what is questions about what can only be conceived through language will often provide paradoxical answers.
It's us. Language has a thrilling but incomplete grip on reality. The mathematical suggestion that something like the Higgs boson even exists is thus a faith statement - warranted, yes - as is this paragraph elsewhere in the Guardian piece.
...Whatever name it takes, many scientists believe that finding the
particle will not only reveal the origin of mass, but will nudge open
the door to a new realm of unknowns. We can see only 4% of the matter
that makes up the universe. The Higgs particle may shed light on the
rest - the dark matter in which galaxies form, and the dark energy that
drives the expansion of the universe, for example. The particle may
also shed light on string theory, an ambitious but powerful way of
viewing the universe that sees every particle not as a point, but as a
vibrating string of energy, where different frequencies create
different particles.
And after that?
Only words can say.
Wayne
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