God's Hammering

Newcastle Herald

Tuesday November 28, 2006

WEIRD SCIENCE WITH STEPHANIE BRADLEY

A TEAM of thousands of scientists are looking for the Higgs Boson particle in the proton, the core of an atom, and if they don't find it they will be just as excited as if they did.

Nicknamed the "God particle", the elusive Higgs Boson is theoretically believed, along with its associated field, to be what gives matter mass. Make stuff heavy, yo.

To see if they can find the Higgs particle, scientists at CERN, Europe's Particle Physics Centre, are in the process of building a huge piece of scientific apparatus: a big hammer.

This hammer, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is housed 100 metres underground across the Swiss and French borders.

It is not switched on yet that's due to happen at the end of the year but when it is, its two proton beams will have as much power as a 400-tonne train travelling at 193 kmh. And it will have that power stuffed in the space of a millimetre.

Big magnets will guide the beams as they spin in opposite directions until they almost reach the speed of light.

Then the beams will be narrowed down to a point half the width of a human hair and smashed together.

What happens next is anyone's guess, but the LHC will reproduce the conditions that existed the second after the Big Bang occurred about 14 billion years ago.

Calculations have proved that the LHC will find the Higgs particle, if it does indeed exist.

If the scientists discover that the Higgs particle does not exist, that means there must be a more complicated mechanism, which they don't know about, behind the giving of mass to particles.

It is the final frontier for scientists, but if the Higgs does exist and we are able to manipulate the particle, the mind boggles with the possibilities.

With the ability to manipulate mass and overcome gravity, the stuff of Star Trek episodes, such as tractor beams, could become a reality.

© 2006 Newcastle Herald

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