The God particle...and blah blah blah...

Couple of days back I attended a talk by Prof B V Sreekantan on 'The LHC and the God Particle'. For those who do not know- LHC stands for 'Large Hadron Collider', the biggest particle accelerator ever built. A logical question to ask is 'Why the hell does one need a particle accelerator? leave alone the biggest. I hope to share my understanding of the subject through this post.

The basic question that every human being wants an answer for is sometimes as follows: Why am I here?
just four words long yet this questions has made the scientific community slog for centuries. It has made theists out of atheists and vice versa. It has had profound implications on philosophy, the way we think. In fact it has made us question the very reason of our existence.
The biological front has thrown light onto this through the theory of evolution perceived by Charles Darwin, which besides  being a theory does have a lot of physical evidence.
The physical front however just has a theory, and the onus is on the LHC to provide the necessary evidence!!!

Getting to business, let me clarify that I am not an expert in this field( not that I am an expert in anything else!), so do not rely solely on  what I say. If I have aroused enough interest do find time to enlighten yourself better.

The LHC is a technological marvel. The International space station is the only other experiment that matches the magnitude of this project. Its cost so far is about $5 billion(US), and still growing, there are about 10 thousand scientist all over the world working in coherence at any given time. In terms of physical dimensions, it is 27km long, uses 1232 dipole magnets, 1600 superconducting magnets and 27 tonnes of liquid helium, and is about 175 meters beneath the surface of the earth. It generates terabytes of data in seconds, leading to the development of the high speed network called The Grid. The enormity of the entire project transcends all human imagination.

 Whats the deal, why do we even need it? A fundamental question in modern physics has been to find the most basic particles in the universe, basic means- smallest and indivisible. It so happens that the universe is not only about particles but also forces, and hence the real search is to find the most basic 'particles and forces', from these everything else evolves, and hence they are called fundamental particles.
Physicists have come with 'The standard model' for the universe and according to this model there are about a dozen fundamental particles(electrons, quarks, leptons,...) and four fundamental forces (strong nuclear, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and gravitational). The fermions are supposed to be the ultimate constituents of matter. This theory is pretty solid, and answers most of the questions, however the problem with this theory is that it does not answer why some particles are heavy while others have no mass at all(you see we need a theory that answers all the questions). The answer may be the so-called Higgs mechanism. According to the theory of the Higgs mechanism, the whole of space is filled with a ‘Higgs field’, and by interacting with this field particles acquire their masses. Particles that interact intensely with the Higgs field are heavy, while those that have feeble interactions are light. The Higgs field has at least one new particle associated with it, the Higgs boson(this was infamously called the 'God particle' by Prof Leon Lederman, director at Fermi labs, Illinois, one should read his book 'The God Particle' ). If such a particle exists, experiments at the LHC will be able to detect it. The existence of such a particle  will answer questions related to the Big bang theory and the creation of the universe.

 It is believed that the universe has a dual nature. For example corresponding to something hot there exists something cold, if there is light there exists darkness, then newtons third law says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction and so on. One could then ask, since there exists matter, does there exists something called anti-matter? The answer is believed to be in the affirmative, and again we rely on the LHC to get some answers.   

 However there are doubts whether the experiment will be a success. Many physicists feel that creating conditions similar to that at the time of Big bang is virtually impossible. Presently the accelerator is running at low energies, at higher energies, they claim that the accelerator will give rise to mini black holes(objects with extremely high densities) which would cause the earth to collapse onto itself, hence bring an end to this planet and in fact the entire solar system. The desire to know how it all began might just lead to a premature end!!!

Towards the end of the talk, we were told that what we see is just 3.5% of what is there, about 70% is what is called the Dark energy and another 25% of Dark matter( seems like we are almost totally in the dark!!!). The physics that we develop here, is subject to only 3.5% of the universe, most of which is beyond experimental reach(since what we see is light years away), and most of the theories, including the 'Standard model and insanely extrapolated to all of it.

The problem lands into philosophical and theological realms and deeply entwines with the question of the existence of God. Are we trying to grab more than what our hands can hold? It would be in Gods best interest that we know the universe that He has created. 'Ask and you shall be given, knock and the door shall be opened, search and you will find'-yes we shall search with faith that we will find the answers someday. Till then carry on with research...