The God Particle

Near the French-Swiss border there is a massive machine that covers 16.7 miles underground, called the Large Hadron Collider, also known as LHC. This machine consists of two large vacuum pipes connected to 1,232 magnets which accelerate protons close to the speed of light.The LHC is capable of creating “anti-particles,” a subatomic particle having the same mass as a given particle but opposite electric or magnetic properties. CERN is The European Organization for Nuclear Research and is responsible for the studies that come with the creation of the LHC. Fabiola Gianotti has been an Italian experimental particle physicist since 1994, and is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN. Their objective is to find what the smallest building blocks of matter are.

Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe. The universe is densely packed with dark matter but the thing is, dark matter can not be directly observed. It also keeps galaxies from colliding. Although we can not directly see this, it plays a huge role. Scientists know dark matter is responsible for the universe's expansion. According to NASA “known matter such as what humans are made of, accounts for less than 5% of measurable matter.” Now that we know a little bit of the basics about the LHC, dark matter and CERN, we can discuss a more recent topic that has brought some attention to the public, while also bringing a little bit of controversy with it. Of course we will also talk about the so-called “God Particle,” and the interesting backstory on why it was even named that in the first place (despite not actually being as interesting as the name suggests).

In more recent years CERN has announced that they had evidence of a particle that for years has been long theorized, the ”Higgs Boson particle,” most commonly known as “The God Particle” through the social media and to the general public. Its name brought a good handful of attention to the media when rumors started going around stating that CERN was trying to open a black hole or some kind of portal to hell. There have been many speculations over the years while scientists were working on LHC but most of these have been debunked. Aside from that, why is it even called “The God Particle?”,Well, for one, it has nothing to do with God or bringing us any closer to finding any kinds of gods, just to clarify that. Finding this specific particle has taken almost 50 years, while also having to use the most extreme complex machines humanity has ever built. Leon Lenderman, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner in Physics, actually named the particle “The Goddamn Particle” because of how long and how much effort it was taking to find it.

So why is the Higgs Boson particle even important? This particle brings us closer to our understanding of the universe. It can explain how atoms can exist and stars can shine. Higgs Boson was the last particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which is a sort of framework used to organize and describe elementary particles, somewhat like the periodic table (in the way it keeps things nice and easy to find based on a bunch of other factors and helps scientists stay organized.

There are of course a lot of different particles that go into the standard model that I can go on about. What is so special about Higgs Boson? +Not much actually but rather the fact that the Higgs Boson even exists is what makes it so important. Its existence points to something larger that solves a big issue with the standard model. It is a lot of information to take in and I could continue to tell you about all the stories that went into trying to find this particle and all the drama that occurred between these scientists during the journey. I wanted to keep it as simplistic as possible and highlight what I believe were the most interesting and important facts about “The God Particle.. Hopefully with its discovery we can continue to unlock the secrets of the universe and our understanding of it.