Akhil Satheesh

User Type : Moderator
The God Particle: If Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?

The God Particle: If Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?

Post By : Akhil Satheesh

Post Rank : 1571th

Category : Social-Mania

Sub Category : Science

25 Jan 2014

 The universe is full of mysteries and it has always fascinated physicists since the beginning of time.

Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian astronomer and professor of physics, in 1927 proposed the theory of concerning the origin of the universe which he called his HYPOTHESIS OF THE PRIMEVAL ATOM and which later came to be known as the BIG BANG THEORY.

Imagine the universe 14 billion years ago …, when it was an extremely dense and hot lump of matter composed of only pure energy (and without mass). Then there was a sudden explosion! Amazingly the earth cooled down milliseconds after the event. It was at that particular moment, what now physicists call the fundamental atom that gives mass to everything in the universe, THE HIGGS-BOSON was born. The HIGGS-FIELD developed subsequently and everything that moved about aimlessly in the universe till then acquired mass and began to move in a well-established path.

But all this was unknown to the world until PETER HIGGS, a British physicist, made a revolutionary prediction. Particles in the universe are woven into a fabrics model known as the STANDARD MODEL OF PARTIVLE PHYSICS. But this model had a missing “boson” that gives mass to all particles. Peter in 1964 predicted that such bosom might exist.

From then on the science world was in a hunt to find world’s most wanted particle. Physicists wanted to recreate the conditions that existed at the time of Big Bang and this led to the construction of world’s largest ENERGY PARTICLE ACCELERATOR- THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER situated at the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

LHC can accelerate proton beams at flashing speed near to that of light! Proton beams from two ends are made to collide each other that releases enormous amount of energy. For fraction of a second, the condition of Big Bang, are found in the LHC. Detectors identify the footprints left behind by these fast dying particles.

Scientists at that LHC have discovered the existence of a new unknown atom, which according to them is 99% the HIGGS-BOSON, because it showed properties very much similar to that of Higgs-Boson.

Interestingly, it was LEON LEDERMAN, an American scientist and writer who first called Higgs-Boson, “the God particle”, in this book “The God Particle: If Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?”. Though science and religion virtually differs in their theories, the “god particle” seems to be clear exemption. After all Albert Einstein said,

                      “Science without religion is lame. Religion without Science is blind.”


Comments