Higgs Boson at CERN
CERN Hadron Collider Tunnel
Every few months an item will appear in the news that someone saw the image of the Virgin Mary in a wall stain, or Jesus on a burned piece of toast. Or a cloud in the shape of an angel. The scientists at the Large Hadron Super Collider, the atom smasher tunnel which makes a 17 mile circle under the earth through Switzerland and France, announced that they have seen God in the shape of sub-atomic bit of quasi-matter. Okay, the “God Particle” is only a nickname that a real scientist would never use, but the researchers at the CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research, finally concluded that what they had seen last July is indeed the Higgs Boson, or at least something very much like what was predicted..
The boson, which gets its name from Peter Higgs, one of the scientists who predicted its existence in the essential function of the universe back in 1964, is the theoretical particle which essentially glues the other particles of matter together, allowing objects to gain mass. Researchers announced last year they thought they had seen a Higgs-like interaction and after months of going over their data, have decided that they have in fact discovered the essential piece of the universe without which nothing would exist, hence the reference to a diety many scientists don’t exactly believe in. Though, both the religious and scientific might truly join if one takes the view that on the first day, God created the heavens and the earth, but needed a bit of Higgs glue to do it.
The Large Hadron Super Collider is currently down for maintenance for a several months but the CERN facility, just outside Geneva, ten minutes from the airport, can still be visited with a little museum and collider mock-up tour to explore.
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