the search for the God particle

David Adam, science correspondent
Thursday February 3, 2005
The Guardian

The journey down in the lift lasts barely a minute, but is the closest thing on Earth to travelling into another dimension. At the bottom of the shaft is a well lit tunnel that stretches as far as the eye can see, until its barely perceptible curve takes it around a distant corner. This is no ordinary tunnel. It carries no trains or gas pipes and is built in a perfect circle, running for 17 miles about 100 metres below the western suburbs of Geneva, squeezed between the lake on one side and the imposing Jura mountains on the other.



The citizens of Geneva have lived with the tunnel for decades. The citizens of Britain are now spending more than £1m a week to turn it into one of world's biggest and most powerful science experiments.

The only traffic passing through this tunnel when it opens for business will be high energy beams of subatomic particles. By smashing the particles together, scientists want to recreate conditions found in the earliest moments of the universe, billionths of a second after the Big Bang. By peering at what emerges, they hope to better understand the 14bn years that followed.

Professor Ken Peach, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, said: "We have a description of what goes on in the universe but what we don't have is an explanation. A description says this is how things appear, an explanation says this is how things have to be." This is the shadowy domain of particle physics and the giant experiment taking shape in the tunnel is called the Large Hadron Collider. It is the brainchild of physicists at Cern, the pan-European physics laboratory that celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and created the world wide web, but is best known in some circles for inventing technology used in a plot to blow up the Vatican in the Dan Brown bestseller Angels and Demons.




Britain's annual membership of Cern costs £76m. Across Europe the lab soaks up more than £350m each year, about 90% of which is currently put into building the Large Hadron Collider, the price tag for which stands at about £1.3bn. The collider was conceived in the 1980s and serious work to design and build it began in the late 1990s. Progress has been slower than expected - unearthing a Roman villa during excavations was one of the more colourful delays - but the scientists say they are nearing the home straight, which is why the Guardian was granted rare access to the underground facility this week.






When completed, the currently empty tunnel will house two parallel tubes. One will carry high energy particles called protons, accelerated to near the speed of light. The other will carry the same, but in the opposite direction. At several points around the ring, the beams will cross and the energy of the resulting collisions will tear the protons apart, liberating a spray of smaller particles.

Press some physicists enough and they invoke the possible discovery of new, unidentified sources of energy as justification for the colossal investment. But the new collider is more about naked scientific curiosity.

It is also about Nobel prizes. The collisions will release energy levels never before witnessed on Earth and could produce one of the most sought after prizes of modern physics: the Higgs boson, otherwise known as the God particle.

"If the Higgs particle is there then we will find it," said Professor Jim Virdee, a particle physics expert at Imperial College London, who works on the project.

Physicists are desperate to find the Higgs particle because it could plug a hole in a theory that is both their greatest triumph and their biggest headache.

Called the standard model, the theory has been pieced together over the last 50 years to explain how the soup of subatomic particles interact to make the universe tick. But the standard model is showing its age and, as physicists devise bigger and better experiments to test its theoretical predictions, they discover more and more anomalies.

One of the biggest problems is the discovery that even the tiniest, most fleeting particles have some mass - the standard model assumes that they don't.

The Higgs particle offers a way out because physicists think it somehow interacts with all other forms of matter to give them mass. Heavier objects merely interact more.

Prof Virdee said: "We are at a point where the theoretical physicists do not know what direction to take. Nature is a lot smarter than our theorists, so they're waiting for the results of our experiments to decide."

The "experiments" weigh thousands of tons and are the size of ships. Each must detect and analyse the spray of particles given off from each collision, so will be housed in giant underground caverns dug out around the points where the beam lines cross.

The cavern for one experiment, called the CMS, was officially opened this week. It measures 53 metres long, is 24 metres high and 27 metres wide - the result of 35,000 lorryloads of soil and rock being carried away. It is painted white and has a huge hole in the roof, which stretches up to the surface. The giant detector is being assembled on the surface and, when ready, will be lowered into position using a crane borrowed from a German shipyard.

If all goes well the beam lines and the detectors will be finished in time to turn the collider on in late 2007, a deadline set for political as much as scientific reasons. As one project scientist puts it: "One way or another this thing must have collisions in 2007, even if it's on December 31."

Collision course

· Dozens of countries have supplied expertise and parts - the brass in one detector comes from artillery shells salvaged from Russian warships of second world war vintage

· The combined strands of the superconducting electrical cable used in the collider tunnel would stretch round the equator 6.8 times

· The magnets used to steer the particles around the ring will be chilled to about 300C below room temperature, colder than outer space

· The detectors will analyse up to 800m collisions every second - data equivalent to 10,000 Encyclopedia Britannica · The vacuum pipes to carry the particle beams are checked for leaks so minute it would take 10,000 years to make a car tyre go flat

 

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Good post ...

Lets not forget it was the bloody idiot Democrats that forced the stoppage of the Texas Supercollider ...

 

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Unfortunately, in the US, science is about 14th on the list when it comes to funding for anything far-sighted. Unless you can see results in the next week or two, no one is interested. Well at least the morons on the left, the Democrats, anyway. I know you have to deal with the same lot of simpletons in England, the Labourites I think.

It really makes you want to cry that even SETI can't get funded here. I know I know its not science, but what if it is ...

So lets waste billions on "programs" for the worthless in society and starve science ... Good idea ...

Sorry for the rant it has nothing to do with your post. I'm just really pissed-off with the dim-witted/cynical politicians who make these decisions.

 

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Ignorance and hostility toward science is most definitely bipartisan. With that said, some scientific endeavors (SETI, ISS) are economic black holes and deserve to be scrapped.

 

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SETI is not only a bonafide scientific endeavor, it is also about the most inexpensive kind of meaningful scientific investigation possible today. A good SETI program costs only a few million $. That is about 100 thousand times cheaper than a manned mission to Mars, as proposed by G.W.Bush, which would cost hundreds of billions of $$. There are even amateurs who build SETI stations in their own backyards for only $2000 that can detect intelligent radio signals up to 15 light years away (see SETI-League). All that is required for SETI is an antenna, radio receiver, a computer, and some people to aim the antenna at various stars and analyze the data. Big SETI programs don’t even require any new equipment or facilities. There are already dish antennas in the world capable of doing SETI research and can detect signals hundreds of millions of light years away. All researchers need then is a little money to rent time on this equipment. Nothing needs to be designed or built, nothing needs to be launched into space, and very little energy or human resources would be needed to keep it running. That is why SETI is one of the cheapest national science proposals out there.



We do not know whether we earthlings are the only life forms in the universe. SETI research seeks to answer this profound question. Science is all about figuring out what is really happening and what is really out there. SETI is therefore a solid, credible scientific investigation. Nothing proves that there is not other life in the universe. In fact much of the evidence so far implies that there probably IS.



By receiving and demodulating radio waves from other star systems, we even have the potential of figuring out what extraterrestrial life forms might be saying. Such a discovery would be nothing less than mind-blowing. To discover and analyze intelligent life outside of our solar system would be a truly significant event for the entire world. It would be the first time DNA earth life makes contact with other life.



I think of life on Planet Earth like little mice living in an underground burrow. They run around down there, not knowing what’s going on above the surface. To have SETI would be like having a mouse dedicated to poking its head out of the hole so that it may see and hear what is going on above the surface. We humans need to know what’s going on out there. We finally have the capability to do so after millions of years of living without radio technology. To not tune in the radio universe now would be like, well, having our ears plugged up now that we finally have ears...



It’s a big universe out there- we now have the equipment to explore it for life, inexpensive and ready to go, but we aren’t doing it. Why? Why have we decided to keep our heads up our asses (well, at least only within our own little solar system)?



It is true that religious groups having political influence have discouraged SETI research. They are truly afraid of the implications to their faith if it is discovered that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe. It is also possible that the general public is misinformed about the research. They liken ET searches to crazy science fiction movies about aliens and flying saucers. So a lot of the factors working against SETI are actually based on irrational fear and ignorance. People may also think that anything having to do with space exploration is going to be expensive. The fact of the matter is that SETI is extremely cheap yet has the potential of making one of the most profound scientific discoveries humans may ever encounter. There is no good reason, therefore, why SETI isn’t more appropriately supported.

 

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There has been no direct evidence for the Higgs particle at this time. CERN thought it saw something interesting shortly before it closed down for the construction of the LHC. However it didn't stand up to statistical analysis. We have now looked past the most likely energy to see the Higgs particle at, LHC will easily find Higgs if it exists. I think if it exists we shall know soon after it opens. Its already known that the standard model is possibly going to break down in weak theory. I suspect that in the next decade standard model V2.0 will have to be created, doubtless the first version has been highly successful but it appears to be struggling, my feeling is that LHC will give us the evidence we need to develop a second more accurate itteration.

 

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They will find that God is not a particle but an infinite source of possibility that is within all things.

Sages, Wise Men, Yogi's and Religious Leaders have known this truth for ages.

 

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I realy wish it was not 'the search for the god particle' because then what ever is found it wil as usual continue the notion of god .

No offence , but people have been re interpreting the words of 'wise men' ever since they were first uttered... just to fit in with current thoughts .