FINDING THE GOD PARTICLE!!!

Physicists from all over the world are racing to prove the existence of a particle that's surmised to be at the heart of the matter. Literally. Two months ago, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiment at CERN dominated the news headlines across the world, but today, that ‘honour’ has been taken over by Sub Prime Crisis.

The LHC is a 27 Km long tunnel built 150 meters underground on the French-Swiss border. Its purpose is to smash sub atomic particles at the speed of light and detect a certain Higgs Boson particle. Scientists from close to 20 countries, including our own, were involved in a multibillion dollar race to find the Higgs Boson particle. Dubbed the ‘God Particle’ by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, Higgs is a controversial particle which is believed to bestow mass to all particles. The particle plays a key role in Standard Model of Physics, the theory on which physicists base their entire understanding of matter of the Universe. And proving the existence or absence of this particle would have vast implications, as the particle is the only explanation scientists have for the existence of Mass. The purpose of LHC is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.

Now, at the beginning of my post I referred to the experiment as a “Multibillion Dollar Race”. That’s because the experiment costs could be compared with the annual GDP of many third world countries! Another reason is that the race is akin to the ‘Space Race’ of the Cold War period when the two superpowers were involved in a fierce battle to explore the frontiers of Space. But in this post Cold war era, bi-polar world has been replaced by a multi-polar world and Space exploration has been largely replaced by exploration into the hidden secrets of atoms and its nature. Now, almost every country seems to want a piece of the pie and are racing to find the ways and means of cracking the atomic code. With the launch of LHC at CERN in Europe, USA has gone public with its Fermilab in Chicago and China has unveiled its plan to build a 35 Km long Collider.

Many feel that science has lost its sheen and that the world with all its technical advancements has stopped focusing on science and looks more into economic prosperity, but if you ask me the true potential of science is yet to be unlocked. We live in a civilization shaped by physics. The laptop computer on which I'm writing uses microprocessors that would not exist had we not discovered quantum physics and the quirky behavior of electrons. World Wide Web was invented, at CERN, by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. IPods, wouldn't exist but for something called "giant magneto-resistance."

Although the LHC seems to have run into trouble now, (Helium gas has leaked into the ultra vacuumed tunnels) it is expected to be back in operation by the next April, so the world could look forward to a summer when many secrets of the sub microscopic proportionality would be revealed. But 100 years of particle physics has taught us that even the LHC is only a small step towards unraveling the secrets of nature.