Dr Paul Allen

Image via Wikipedia Michael Gerson gives the most lucid explanation I have found for what the Higgs boson--a.k.a. the “God particle”--is. He also explores the implications of the strange fact that mathematics, which is a function of the human mind, can actually predict what things exist in the external world: Modern physics can explain just about everything, except why anything has mass. The Standard Model of physics, which emerged four decades ago, employs an elegant mathematical formula to account for most of the elemental forces in the universe. It correctly predicted the discovery of various leptons and quarks in the laboratory. But the equation doesn’t explain gravity. So the Standard Model requires the existence of some other force that seized the massless particles produced by the Big Bang and sucked them into physicality. The detection of Higgs bosons would confirm this theory — which is why scientists are smashing protons into one another in a 17-mile round particl...

Image via Wikipedia So what exactly did happen a billionth of a second after the Big Bang ? That’s the question particle physicists from around the world are trying to answer via a little science experiment using the Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ). This week, researchers  reported  that they are one step closer to verifying the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson (a.k.a. the “ God particle”). If they find it, it will be one of the biggest scientific discoveries in 50 years. “Our whole picture of how matter exists within the universe depends on the existence of the Higgs Boson,” said project physicist Dr. Robert Orr. And it seems we’ll spare no expense or effort to prove it’s there. Budget? $10 billion. The plan? Fly protons around a 17-mile-long ring at 11,000-revolutions-per-second (99.99991% of the speed of light) and then smash them together. The purpose behind it all? To try to understand how ma Image via Wikipedia tter and mass came to be! To try to understand how...