Last week there was a
curious piece of news tucked inside the pages of the newspaper (or if you watch
TV for your news, briefly flashed between much more important news of Anna’s latest
threat or Rahul Gandhi’s latest night out at some dalit village). It was that
the scientists, feverishly smashing protons into one another in the
mind-boggling CERN Lab, a 17 mile round particle accelerator, excitedly
announced that they were almost on the
verge of discovering the elusive “God-particle”! I wondered what is this goddamn “God-particle”?
And sifting through esoteric stuff I found online on the topic, this is
basically what I made of it.
Our middle school
science teachers have taught us that matter is made up of molecules, which are
in turn made up of atoms; atoms are made up of protons, electrons and neutrons.
Our Science teachers are most likely to
have stopped here, and with that all-knowing smirk on their face, so characteristic
of Science (and Maths) teachers, had drifted on to the next chapter. But for
the curious few, we got to know that protons and neutrons (electrons are
basically inconsequential when considering building blocks of matter) , are in
fact made up of fuzzy things called quarks (there are six different types
of them) and gluons (eight of them). Now can they be broken up even further into smaller more fundamental particles
or does it end here? I can assure you that no physicist, worth the name, can come out with an unambiguous answer to this question.
But the fun only begins here. These sub-atomic particles to
have the properties they have, and whatever else the scientists have been able
to find out about them using their fancy mathematical models, is theoretically
condemned to be actually mass-less! In other words, if our physicists had their way, the
Universe, we, our laptop, would actually be non-existent!
And here it is that
our dear scientist Mr. Peter Higgs
enters the picture and conjures up a particle -the God-particle (also known as the Higgs particle for the less sensational among us) and an all-pervasive force-field associated with it, it’s mysterious
presence permeating everything all over the Universe. It’s nature is to cling to the fundamental particles
wherever they are, dragging on them and making them heavy. Not all particles
though, find them equally sticky. Light or photon particles hardly care for
them, while some other particles wade through them like an elephant in tar. So
what it means is that fundamental particles actually weigh nothing, but somehow just as
the Higgs field, a consequence of God-particle, is turned on (and the best
guess is that it happened soon after the Big Bang!), these particles acquire
their mass! And we have our sun
and our moon, and everything else.
So mystery solved? The chicken soup tastes fantastic, its
only that the chicken is missing! Everything
is perfect, its only that this goddamn God-particle is just nowhere to be found!
And hence the frantic search and the feverish pitch on almost a super-human
scale in the CERN laboratory! Because unless it is found, for all it knows,
Physics just has no clue to confront the most fundamental experience-that we
exist as flesh and bones, if not as spirit!
Sources:
2 comments:
haha, debu. There is no end to the physical explanation of the existence of universe. There is no possible way for a scientist to say he has reached the end of road and has completed his search for the most basic elements of physics for explaining the universe. Not that I have been there and done that.... ;). But to read such news as nothing more than another series in the comic strip of life would drive man crazy (away from reality). For man must continue his quest in what ever way to seek God.
Nice post Debarshi! :)
Let me add a short note (extracted from wikipedia :P) in this regard.
Standard model of elecmentary particles describes the constitution of sub-atomic particles and the diferent interactions between them. The experimental verification of the physical properties (mass, charge etc) similar to that predicted by Standard model made this a popular theory. But still in order to be a so called theory of everything, it needed to answer many more questions including why most of the elecmentary particles are massive while photons and gluons (2 gauge bosons) are massless. To find an answer for that Higg's mechanism was incorporated later, which introduces a field ,named Higg's field to exist in universe. And the elementary particles, originally massless, becomes massive if they couple o this Higg's field. Photon and Gluon does not interact with this field there by having no mass of their own. The quantum mode of such field is called a Higg's boson, the so called God particle, which, by itself is massive, and should be observed experimentally under proper condition, if it exists at all. So far there has been no experimental proof of the existance of this Higg's particle. But the latest experiments in CERN in late 2011 claims that they MAY have found the God particle and thus keeps the hope/sensation alive.
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