IGM The Higgs Boson

Well, we’re all pretty excited around here. The Large Hadron Collider is essentially finished and about to go online. As I’m sure you know, CERN has been building the device in France and Switzerland for 8 or 9 years now and pay-off is just around the corner. The scientists will be doing all kinds of experiments, but the Big Fish is the Higgs Boson, a stealthy little thing also known as the “God Particle”.
I’m not sure why it’s important, but scientists all over the world are producing record amounts of saliva as they slobber over the possibilities. The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics—in fact the last missing particle in the Model—and it may be the thing that imparts mass to other particles, which, despite being completely counter-intuitive, is why they are looking for it.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost track of all the “elementary” particles they’ve found over the last 80 years or so. It started with atoms, then neutrons, protons and electrons, and now it’s like somebody left the barn door open. They’re everywhere; quarks of all kinds, leptons, WIMPS, photons, bosons, neutrinos, W and Z particles and on and on. Isn’t it fascinating how they can predict a particle mathematically, or based on the behavior of other particles, and then design an experiment to find it?
Years ago, my friend Brad Hill (who was taking a double major in Theoretical Mathematics and Celestial Mechanics) held the opinion (firmly tongue-in-cheek) that physicists create particles when they extrapolate them. Essentially, his theory was; “they make up a particle which doesn’t exist, then design an experiment to find it, which “calls” the particle into existence from the virtual world. We had more than a few laughs over that now and then. But now, I find myself taking the idea seriously. Science has come a long way since the early 70’s. Or maybe I have, who knows? Anyway, now we have Quantum Mechanics, in which virtual particles are real, and the Uncertainty Principle, which allows for things like made-up realities—which includes elementary particles.
So maybe the Higgs Boson doesn’t exist at all. But now that the theorists need it to complete the Standard Model, the Large Hadron Collider will not so much “find it” as call it into existence. There is some precedent after all. The concept could explain all kinds of things, like disco, pet rocks, Hillary Clinton and Sasquatch, to name a few.
So let’s lift a glass to the LHC and all those boys and girls who will be running it, looking for another particle that doesn’t exist, but very well may in the next few years. It’s an exciting time to be alive, isn’t it?