TORONTO – Imagine following a set of footprints in the mud for days, all in hopes to find who they belong to – and then you do. How excited would you feel?
That sense of excitement, multiplied by 45 years of research, is what scientists across the world are probably feeling on Wednesday after discovering what is most likely the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle most commonly referred to as the “God particle.”
The atom-smashing experiments at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, with help from scientists across the world including Canada, have now captured a glimpse of what appears to be just such a Higgs boson-like particle.
Global News spoke to the head of communications at Vancouver-based TRIUMF,Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, Tim Meyer and Donna Francis from the Ontario Science Centre to help break down what really matters for this discovery.
What is the Higgs boson particle?
Have you ever wondered why it’s harder to push something when it’s heavy, as opposed to when it’s light? Meyer explains that this discovery can help explain why that is. One theory proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs and teams in Belgium and the United States in the 1960s was that a new particle must be creating a “sticky” field that acts as a drag on other particles.Without mass, particles wouldn’t hold together and there would be no matter.
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Donna Francis, a researcher at the Ontario Science Centre says she and her colleagues help explain science to children all the time. For this particular discovery, she says to think about the particle as you would about the colour of a t-shirt. Imagine if there were no lights on. You wouldn’t be able to tell the colour of the t-shirt, because it’s only when you have light going through, that allows us to distinguish the difference in colour. It’s the same with the Higgs boson. If you don’t have Higgs boson, there is no mass. Mass is a characteristic depending on how it interacts with the Higgs boson.
Why is it important?
The Higgs boson is part of many theoretical equations underpinning scientists’ understanding of how the world came into being. If it doesn’t exist, then those theories would need to be fundamentally overhauled. The fact that it apparently does exist means scientists have been on the right track with their theories. But there’s a twist: the measurements seem to diverge slightly from what would be expected under the so-called Standard Model of particle physics. This is exciting for scientists because it opens the possibility to potential new discoveries including a theory known as “super-symmetry” where particles don’t just come in pairs – think matter and anti-matter – but quadruplets, all with slightly different characteristics.
“We talk about when the universe began, the ball of energy from the Big Bang and at some point some of that turned into matter,” says Meyer. “That’s really the concept. Where does this fit into our description of the Big Bang of where we are today.”
Will this explain everything to us?
The answer is actually no, says Meyer. Our current Standard Model does not explain what we see in the night sky nor do we understand dark energy. “Why are we made of matter? Why didn’t we just annihilate with anti-matter? It’s not yet predicted by the standard model.”
How much did it cost?
CERN’s atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, alone cost some $10 billion to build and run. This includes the salaries of thousands of scientists and support staff around the world who collaborated on the two experiments that independently pursued the Higgs boson.
What’s next?
Meyer says if you think about a voyage where you set out to discover land, this discovery is spotting that land. More than the abstract discovery “it’s the quest that develops the phenomenal tools,” that Meyer says he is excited about. He cites discovering the web with helping create e-commerce, for example. In the next 15 years, Meyer says we’ll see tools that will completely change our lives.
“We’re going to come across and we’re going to push the technology,” says Meyer. “When we get together, we can understand the most important questions…this is part of a human story for everyone.”
With files from the Canadian Press
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