So, does the ‘God Particle’ exist? Although
scientists at CERN are not 100% sure that they’ve found it, they are, according
to Joe Incandela, a leading CERN physicist, “right at the boundary of where you
might get a vague hint of something.” Pretty soon, the Higgs Field theory may
be validated, a finding which would tell us why everything around us has
physical mass. Although the potential discovery of the Higgs Boson may answer a
billion dollar question, it is just one of the theories that physicists are
hoping to validate…
What
is dark matter?
When you look up at the night time sky, what do you
see? Stars, galaxies, planets, etc. The naked eye tells us that the physical
things you see are the only things that exist. However, scientists say that
about 20% of our universe consists of matter, which you can’t even see. They
deduce this from the fact that the gravitational pull that galaxies exert can’t
be explained by visible matter alone. This means that you have dark matter
going through you right now. Although scientists think this dark matter can be
an undiscovered particle, all options are on the table as to what it is.
Why
is there so much matter and so little of anti-matter?
When the universe was created there were equal
amounts of matter and anti-matter. Because matter had a positive charge and
anti-matter had a negative charge, collisions between the two would result in nothing
but radiation. However, for one reason or another, matter somehow won the fight
and gave forth to the physical world you see around you. Had matter not won
this fight absolutely nothing would have existed and the universe would have
been an empty vacuum. CERN physicists have already trapped an antimatter
particle but have yet to determine why it tends to lose the war against matter.
Is
string theory correct?
String theory is a “theory of everything” which
tries to explain how the physical world works. Its implications are that the
Big Bang was the result of multiple universes colliding with one another, meaning
that there are other universes which we aren’t aware of. Many years from now
our universe will be too cold to sustain any form of intelligent life and the
only way for intelligent life to exist would be to escape to another universe.
How is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN able
to answer these questions? Think of what would happen in you smashed a clock
against the ground: you’d find out what the clock was made out of. The more
force you smash the clock with, the more details you are able to find out about
the clock. In LHC’s case, the protons are the clocks and their insides reveal
the origin of matter and, consequently, life.
