Unisa online - Our understanding of the universe is about to change...Physicists around the world waited in anticipation and excitement on Wednesday 4 July 2012 for the announcement of the discovery of a new subatomic particle that looks like the Higgs boson. The particle is key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe; it is what gives protons, electrons, neutrons and all the other particles inside atoms their mass, and was probably responsible for creating all the particles that first formed in the Big Bang when the universe began. The search for the Higgs boson has been the longest and most expensive search in the history of science. It began in 1964 when Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University was the first to point out that a new particle, the eponymous boson, was a by-product of a mass-giving field. The experiment to search for the particle was set up at CERN, the multinational European Organization for Nuclear Research centre, headquartered in Geneva. The CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. The world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature. CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the immense particle accelerator that produced the new data by colliding protons. The LHC is located in an underground tunnel and is some 27.36 km in circumference and cost about £2.6-billion. CERN is also the place where the Web was born. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. The Web stood the test of time for its original purpose and enabled two teams of about 3000 physicists, each from around the world, to send data and information, resulting in the unexpected quick success of the search for the Higgs in an experiment conducted in the last two years. The results announced on Wednesday capped weeks of feverish speculation and Internet buzz as the physicists did a breakneck analysis of about 800 trillion proton-proton interactions. Several South African universities and one research institution are involved in the SA-CERN programme and have been active participants in the search for the Higgs boson. Of these, the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal and the Witwatersrand and iThemba LABS were partners in the Atlas experiment in the LHC. The Atlas instrument was one of the two detectors – the other being the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) – which have discovered the new particle. “Discovery is the important word. That is confirmed,” said University of Johannesburg (UJ) Professor Simon Connell, President of the South African Institute of Physics and leader of the UJ-Atlas team. “We are at a new beginning. The LHC may also shed light on the primordial state of matter, shortly after the Big Bang, and on dark matter and dark energy.” (Dark matter and dark energy together make up the bulk of the universe, but neither can yet be directly observed, hence their categorisation as “dark”.) Connell indicated that although we don’t have a crystal ball to predict the full benefits to science and society from the discovery of the new particle, we note that most of today’s understanding of nature and the development of technology began with the discovery of now familiar particles like the electron. Who of us can imagine our lives today without television, computers and cell phones – all results from the discovery of the electron 100 years ago? According to reports in Geneva on Wednesday, a 1000 people stood in line all night to get into an auditorium at CERN, where some attendees noted a rock-concert ambience. Peter Higgs, the 83 year old theorist for whom the boson is named, entered the meeting to a sustained ovation. Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws – but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry. Leon Lederman, the former director of the Fermilab, called the Higgs the “God particle,” in his book of the same name written with Dick Teresi. This was to the eternal dismay of his colleagues. (He later said that he had wanted to call it the “goddamn particle.”). So far, little is known about the new particle. Physicists will probably be studying it intensively for years in the future to uncover its properties. In the spirit of practicing physics, a Princeton physicist remarked “Now some fun begins!” *Story submitted by Prof Ilsa Basson (Department of Physics) Information sourced from: Other Unisa online News | Latest | Archive |
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