The Ultimate Quest for Our Origins
Our Universe is such an intricate mystery that it would confound even the Sherlock Holmes' and Hercule Poirots of our times. Since ancient days, people have come up with varied explanations for what's observed around us, and those that stood the sands of time began to be passed on from one generation to the other. These included pure fantasy, sometimes attributing a religious touch and sometimes a near accurate prediction of the actuality. Much later, as scientific thought process was applied (beginning with the Renaissance period) to account for the multifarious phenomena, a much better understanding of the terrene we live in was made possible. This quest continues even now, does it not?
This Tuesday, amidst thunderous applause from scientists all over the globe, CERN announced the discovery of a particle consistent with Higgs Boson, elseways called the God Particle, after decades of painstaking efforts. The multi-billion dollar experiment, one of the costliest as well, aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the universe, mainly the Standard Model that governs the all the aspects of the subatomic world (in general, matter) and the forces of nature. However, this model is short of explaining how matter assumes mass among many others.
In 1964, Peter Higgs et al proposed the Higgs Mechanism, the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. Termed as Higgs Boson (technically the Higgs Field), these particles have ever since been the cynosure of all eyes. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator built for this purpose across the Franco-Swiss border, began its operation in September 2008 when two opposing proton (one of the elementary particles) beams accelerated to high energy were made to collide against each other; the bombardment resulting in the creation of several particles known and unknown.
From trillions of such proton-proton collisions, scientists comb for the elusive particle that has a lifetime of only about ten-thousandth of a billionth of a second, after which it decays into several channels and experiments analyse the final products of such decays and see if these really came from the decay of a Higgs boson. (The Hindu, Jul 5, 2012) An interesting offshoot of this search was the World Wide Web (WWW), the proposal for which was made at CERN way back in 1989. WWW was originally created for automatic information sharing between scientists working across the world, but was later made free in 1993.
It's now hard to imagine a world without Web, where everyone can find the information that he wants by just launching the browser (provided he is connected to the Internet!). As Rolf Heur, the Director-General of CERN, said at the seminar witnessed by packed audience - This is just the beginning of a long journey. And yes, it really is. Kudos and best wishes to the entire team!
Note: This post was written as per my understanding of the subject. The mistakes, as always, are mine. Please feel free to point them out!
This Tuesday, amidst thunderous applause from scientists all over the globe, CERN announced the discovery of a particle consistent with Higgs Boson, elseways called the God Particle, after decades of painstaking efforts. The multi-billion dollar experiment, one of the costliest as well, aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the universe, mainly the Standard Model that governs the all the aspects of the subatomic world (in general, matter) and the forces of nature. However, this model is short of explaining how matter assumes mass among many others.
In 1964, Peter Higgs et al proposed the Higgs Mechanism, the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. Termed as Higgs Boson (technically the Higgs Field), these particles have ever since been the cynosure of all eyes. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator built for this purpose across the Franco-Swiss border, began its operation in September 2008 when two opposing proton (one of the elementary particles) beams accelerated to high energy were made to collide against each other; the bombardment resulting in the creation of several particles known and unknown.
From trillions of such proton-proton collisions, scientists comb for the elusive particle that has a lifetime of only about ten-thousandth of a billionth of a second, after which it decays into several channels and experiments analyse the final products of such decays and see if these really came from the decay of a Higgs boson. (The Hindu, Jul 5, 2012) An interesting offshoot of this search was the World Wide Web (WWW), the proposal for which was made at CERN way back in 1989. WWW was originally created for automatic information sharing between scientists working across the world, but was later made free in 1993.
It's now hard to imagine a world without Web, where everyone can find the information that he wants by just launching the browser (provided he is connected to the Internet!). As Rolf Heur, the Director-General of CERN, said at the seminar witnessed by packed audience - This is just the beginning of a long journey. And yes, it really is. Kudos and best wishes to the entire team!
Note: This post was written as per my understanding of the subject. The mistakes, as always, are mine. Please feel free to point them out!
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