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Quest For Higgs Boson: What Are We All Made Of?

  • December 29th, 2011
  • Posted by EUEditor

planets.jpgScientists engaged with the LHC collider in Geneva ended 2011 with a cautious disclosure, that they may have seen signs of the Higgs boson – an hypothetical energy field that would further explain the composition of matter.

collider-cern.jpgThe huge experimental device, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can pound atoms, to reveal more of their structure. (See EUAustralia Online, “The pending end of the Earth”, 25.9.08).

higgs-peter.jpgThe English theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs (picture), now 82, in 1964 posited the existence of an energy field permeating the universe, to explain why different sub-atomic particles had differential mass.

Work with the collider at the CERN laboratories (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva has now shown up a signal that fades, and warrants more investigation, in the search for the “Higgs boson”.

“If it’s there, we will find it in 2012”, said a researcher at an American laboratory closely monitoring data from the experimentation.

This month’s revelation caps a year in which scientific horizons have again been extended, with proposals like, the discovery of a planet that may have characteristics similar to those of Earth, and new grounds for considering the speed of light may be exceeded.

What’s a boson? Try, from WordNet, “any particle that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics but not the Pauli exclusion principle; all nuclei with an even mass number are bosons.”

See videos, on Higgs boson:

VoA, Washington, “Higgs boson particle video news : Geneva Cern Laboratory”, 17.12.11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1sd4zBsJ90, (29.12.11).

Don Lincoln, “What is a Higgs Boson?”, Fermilab, Batavia – Ill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIg1Vh7uPyw&feature=related, (29.12.11).