Hang on to your freaking hats people
because today I'm talking to two senior
scientists from CERN and I'm talking to
them about how failure to find a
fundamental particle could end up being
the most revolutionary things to happen
to physics since science time. You heard, right?
I'm talking to two actual lead
scientists from the European
organization for nuclear research in
Geneva, Switzerland about a really
important
non-discovery in the world of nuclear
physics. And the news is that everything
we know about everything is probably
wrong and when it comes to understanding
how matter that is all the stuff in the
universe that has mass came to be will
likely have to go back to the drawing
board.
This is because physicists at CERN are
beginning to speculate that a particle
they've been searching for for years may
in fact not exist.
How do you just say derp? A derp. But
in my conversation with Sergio
Bertolucci, the director of research at
CERN,
here's how he put it. Imagine that you
are a fisherman
so what you do is
just your buy line, hook, bait and then
with your patience you go and
fish.
If you don't get the fish, you are left
with two possible explanations.
There are no fish in the pond or you
are a lousy fisherman. Now known as
actually saying that anyone here sucks
at angling what they're saying is they
went so far as to remove all of the
water from the pond and if there are no
fish in there,
there are no fish in there. So here's
what they're hunting. Since 2008 certain
researchers have been looking for a
particle known as the Higgs boson and
they've been doing it using the biggest
and most expensive and most powerful
piece of scientific equipment on planet
earth. That is the Large Hadron Collider
which we generally call the LHC. The LHC
is a 17-mile long tunnel that travels
under Switzerland and France that uses
thousands of magnets some as big as
four-storey buildings to smash together
high energy particle beams in an effort
to create miniature Big Bangs. The Big
Bang, of course, being the theoretical
explosion that caused all things to
exist
starting about 14 billion years ago. By
reproducing the Big Bang, scientists have
hoped
to find clues to unravel the greatest
mysteries of cosmology. Things like how
did matter form?
Why do things have mass? You thought you
were so clever when you were asking your dad
why the sky was blue but you forgot to
ask him why stuff exists? Those are the
questions, the most fundamental questions,
that these people are trying to answer. A
crucial piece in this puzzle has been
the Higgs boson and that's mostly
because it's the only piece that remains
missing.
It is the only particle predicted by the
standard model of physics that hasn't
yet been observed and yet one of the
most widely accepted theories of physics,
the standard model, predicts that the
Higgs must exist because it explains
within this model how all other
particles get their mass. But apparently
it may well not. Certain scientists
announced in the summer of 2017
that they have excluded the
existence of the Higgs with a
ninety-five percent certainty and they
should know for certain within a year's
time whether or not the Higgs exist. So
there's still a chance and to be clear
these people want to find it. But service
director general, Rolf Heuer, told me that
the real news here is that not finding
the Higgs would, in itself, be a total
game changer.
So we will make a discovery next year
and the discovery will be either that we
find the Higgs part, the famous Higgs particle
or that you will exclude the Standard
Model Higgs particle. Both would be a
huge discovery. Not catching the Higgs
means that assumption is that we've made
about particle physics that the 1970s
are probably really wrong and
that a whole new set of rules will need
to be figured out. Bertolucci told
me that this could likely revolutionize
physics as we know it.
Any else what we find up to now is
opening up a different question
which rides us to solve and we are also smart. In this way we'd
never get unemployed. So yes, even
scientists have the instinct of
self-preservation.
But what these researchers are showing
us is the best of scientific pursuit in
action about finding answers whether
they pleased our prejudices or not. We will
give you updated on whether or not the
Higgs ends up being the one that got
away
and for that news there will be a link
here.
If there's no link here we don't have
any new information but if we do then
click there and there will be new
information about the Higgs. Also you can
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