Searching for the “God Particle”

How the universe exists at all has been the most fundamental question of science since the dawn of organized thought. However, to narrow this down and ask how matter exists within this universe seems to be a more pertinent, and verifiable, extrapolation. Since Democritus philosophized that matter could be broken down into minute fundamental pieces called “Atoms,” the Greek word for indivisible, we have wondered and feared the implications. What we call atoms are verifiably divisible as we have known since 1897, when the electron was first discovered by J.J. Thomson. Now in the twenty-first century, we have begun to develop the technology to be able to finally see what might be Democritus’ “Atom.” But the question remains: What gives mass to the matter we see all around us and how can we exist at all? In 1964, physicist Peter Higgs theorized that a specific, yet undiscovered, gauge boson was responsible for attributing the quantum jitters that we know of as mass to the particles which make up matter. Since then, particle accelerators have undertaken the task of discovering such a revolutionary particle, without much luck. The Large Hadron Collider hopes to change this stroke of fate.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, for the French acronym) in Geneva, Switzerland, is the newest in a long succession of accelerators dating back to the mid 1920s. This was the era when quantum mechanics was first being developed by such notable physicists as Neils Bohr, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. The accelerators in those days were nothing like the circular colliders which are most commonly used today. A revolution in experimental quantum mechanics came about when beams of protons were pushed in opposite directions through magnets arranged in large circles and collided in detectors which would double the amount of energy converted to mass through Einstein’s equation E = mc². But it wasn’t until superconductors were invented that such an extravagant idea as the Large Hadron Collider could take shape.

Imagine a tunnel deep underground whose ten foot diameter is crammed with elaborate equipment including miles of wire, tubes of liquid hydrogen, millions of dollars worth of magnets, and a narrow path to traverse around its 17 mile circumference. The magnets used to accelerate protons to 99.999999% the speed of light would not be capable of doing so if it weren’t for an intrinsic characteristic to shed all resistivity, the tendency to resist the flow of electrons. Liquid hydrogen is used to cool the magnets to absolute zero, -273 ºC or 0K (Kelvin). Cooling the magnets with something as cold as liquid hydrogen is potentially dangerous. If it were to leak into the warm air in the tunnel, the extremely cold liquid would expand as it evaporates, thus decreasing the concentration of oxygen to the point where a person would suffocate. In a tunnel 300 feet below the surface, the last thing one would want is to be without a supply of breathable air. This very thing happened on the first test run by the LHC in 2008 after several preliminary delays, which brought many scientists to believe that some twist of fate might be inhibiting their progress for a reason. However, it was repaired and, in the last few years, has begun the slow power up procedure to reach its maximum potential of 14.0 TeV (teraelectron volts, a unit of energy in electricity). With that much energy being input into the system (imagine their electric bill!) and all of the technology required in the detectors, the LHC is the largest and most complex machine ever built by man.

Experimental physics wasn’t always so complicated. In fact some of the oldest accelerators were no more complex than a refrigerator. These particular machines were responsible for verifying the existence of electrons, protons, and neutron. When more intricate accelerators were developed, such particles as neutrinos and bosons were discovered.

Gauge bosons may sound like a confusing scientific concept, but the one which is most commonly referred to is the photon. Einstein theorized the existence of such a particle as far back as 1905, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that the field he helped inadvertently to invent, Quantum Mechanics, could verify why such a phenomenon as the dual nature of waves as particles was true. And it has to do with gauge bosons, the force-carrying particles. Think about it this way. There are four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Each force has a specific range of influence based on its mass and has its own defining characteristics. Gravity acts upon a wide scale and attracts mass to mass. Electromagnetism has infinite reach, creates the spectrum of light, and is responsible for electricity and magnetism. The strong nuclear force holds quarks together to assemble hadrons (protons and neutrons) and acts over a very short distance, less than a third the radius of a proton. And the weak nuclear force has the same range as the strong force, but, as its name implies, is nowhere near as strong, which is what accounts for the decay of radioactive material and the process of fusion which powers stars. Each of these forces has its own gauge boson which traverses between everything in the universe to convey the force. Think of them as ambassadors. Without bosons, there would not be interactions between different particles and, thus, no matter.

The Higgs Boson, however, is different. As far as scientists know, there are only four fundamental forces. How then would a fifth boson come into this zoo of particles? Whether or not the Big Bang Theory holds true is irrelevant. Its implications, on the other hand, have to hold true in order for the universe to exist at all. Matter condensed from somewhere. That is a fact. In the aftermath of the Big Bang, or so the current theory says, the four fundamental forces split from a single universal force which existed previously. As the universe cooled from its superheated state, different particles materialized out of the molten mess, which led to the formation of atoms, the forces which govern them, and their constituent bosons. Yet in this inconceivably energetic phase of matter’s history, there was something else lingering behind the scenes that is only now becoming apparent. This ethereal construct is what Peter Higgs theorized back in 1964: The Higgs Field. Vector fields in general describe the interaction of particles which have different magnitude and direction assigned to different locations in space. Think of magnetic field lines which surround magnets and you have the basic idea. Let us not delve into the complexities of vector fields, but just the implications of this specific one. According to the theory, the Higgs Field is everywhere. It encapsulates everything in the universe by interacting with matter through nothing less than the Higgs Boson and instills the intrinsic characteristic of mass to the particles it touches.

The theory of the Higgs Field/Boson has had such an effect on the physics community as to its inherent possibilities that it has gained the nickname the “God Particle.” Leon Lederman, director of Fermilab’s particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois, even wrote a book of that very title. In his book, Lederman explains that while his beloved accelerator, the Tevatron, had helped him to discover various other particles and earn a Nobel Prize, it would never be able to find the Higgs Boson. The energy requirement needed to create such an energetic particle as the Higgs is too great for the Tevatron’s meager (yet record breaking in its day) 2.2 TeV. He then expresses hope that the current project (in 1993) in Waxahachie, Texas, would offer the opportunity to extend the knowledge of physicists beyond their wildest dreams. While the ideal accelerator would have the circumference of the Milky Way Galaxy and could, ideally, recreate the conditions of the Big Bang itself to such a scale that every scientist dreams of, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), that was being built in Texas at the time, would suffice. Its monumental status as the largest collider ever constructed, being 54 miles in circumference and offering a mind-blowing 40 TeV per collision, would be matched only by the extreme disappointment at the withdrawal of government funding, thus ending the project before it was even a third finished. For nearly ten years, the fate of experimental particle physics seemed dire, until CERN announced its intent to rebuild its Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). When the Large Hadron Collider was completed and first powered up, a short in a wire caused an explosion which caused a serious delay. Now, however, the problems seem to be fixed and the search is back on to finding the Higgs Boson. It would prove an insurmountable testament to the coincidences and careful calculations of modern physics that Einstein’s goal was to “know the mind of God” and now scientists at CERN are searching for the aptly named “God Particle.”

While the Higgs still proves to be elusive, the hunt is on with renewed vigor. The next few years will prove to be a wonderful era in the realm of particle physics. Every hundred years or so, an esteemed physicist makes the mistake of saying that everything has been discovered and there are only a few loose ends to tie down. However, it is those few loose ends which eventually lead to a whole new branch of physics and the focus of the next hundred years. This very thing happened in 1897 before the electron was discovered, and again in the modern era when Stephen Hawking himself decreed that there cannot be much more to discover in physics. It will eventually prove false if the notion of the Higgs Boson is confirmed and may lead to a new revolution in our ideas of the universe around us. The physicists at the LHC are hard at work interpreting scatter plots and probabilities of decay reflections within the detectors and will find something in the mess of particle decays. What they discover may be something completely unanticipated. The only thing that is certain is that the universe exists and we are here to think about it. Realizing that we exist is only the beginning, and as Leon Lederman wrote, “If the universe is the answer, what is the question?”

List of Sources

Halpern, Paul. Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken, New Jersey, 2010. Print.

Lederman, Leon, and Dick Teresi. The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? Mariner Books, 1996. Print.

Quigg, Chris., “Higgs boson,” in AccessScience. McGraw-Hill Companies, 2008. Web.

Ridgen, John S., ed. “Higgs Boson.” in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics, vol. 1. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996. Print.

What dimension do you live in?

What dimension do you live in?

For centuries, we had believed that we live in a three dimensional world. Then early in the 20th century, Albert Einstein introduced the idea of time as a fourth dimension alongside our three spatial dimensions.

In the last hundred years, most people have come to accept the fact that time is just another direction in what we now call “space-time.” But what is dimensionality in its most fundamental form?

A dimension as defined by Webster’s dictionary is: Any measurable extent, such as length, width, depth, etc. Since Einstein, we should add time to that list of measurable extents. So, basically, a dimension is any direction that anything can exist in, positive or negative, forward or backward, up or down; whether it is in space or in time, right? That’s easy enough.

In the last few decades, physicists have developed several theories to explain the fabric of space-time and how we even exist at all. One of the leading theories by String and “M” theorists says that there are 11 dimensions: Ten spatial and one time. But if we exist in only four of those dimensions: Where are the others?

Take the simplest example in geometry: A point. A point in space has no direction and, thus, no measurable quantity. It is just a position in space and is defined as having zero dimensions. Now think of the next easiest example: A line, or the first dimension. Still pretty simple. Well, what if we add another direction and make it a two-dimensional square? Okay, still not too hard. And next: A three dimensional cube. Well, that’s comprehendible enough.

You can probably tell that by increasing in dimensions we’ve added a different direction each time. Pretty simple since we know how imagine these. Now, to explain our four dimensions that we are aware of, throw time into the mix and try to imagine what that would look like. Because: in our supposedly three-dimensional world, we don’t just meet someone at a certain location (i.e. latitude, longitude, and altitude), we meet at a certain time also. If you didn’t have all four coordinates, your meeting won’t happen.

But going back to the increasing dimensions now. So far, we have “squared” each previous dimension to reach the next or, namely, added one more spatial direction. But what would happen if we “squared” the cube to reach the fourth-dimension? That’s a little harder to imagine, isn’t it? And, likewise, to reach the higher dimensions, we would have to continually square our result. But we don’t need more than three dimensions to exist (or so we think) so our brains haven’t learned how to cope with more.

Why then do we need the 11 dimensions as described by M-theory? I’ll try not to get too technical here, but it’s all about the quantum jitters on the sub-quark level. (You know what quarks are right? They make the protons, neutrons, and electrons inside atoms.) So in a nutshell, the higher dimensions only apply when you get inside the stuff that makes up atoms.

It’s all a matter of scale (imagine fractals and you’ll have an easier time) and I can prove this with an easy example. Go back to when it was just three dimensions. Ah those were the days.

Try and wrap your mind around this: Imagine a clear dark night. All the stars up above your head are twinkling. Look at the moon. What shape is it? Well, we know that astronauts have flown around it and landed on its surface, so it’s a sphere, right? But from Earth, it looks like a circle! How can that be? Well, since it is farther than our eyes can truly comprehend, it appears to just be two-dimensional.

Look even farther now. What is the next thing you notice? If you’re looking south just after nightfall (in May), chances are that you’ll see Saturn. But doesn’t Saturn have rings? You might ask. Well: Yes. And it too is a sphere. But from here, it looks like a dot… or a point. A zero dimensional point! Case closed. No further explanation required.

From this thought experiment, we can conclude that dimensionality is based on the scale from which we look. And from where we are looking, we only see three spatial dimensions. Zoom out and objects appear to decrease in dimensions. Zoom in farther into the sub atomic world and more dimensions should become apparent. However, since the scale between dimensions increases exponentially, by the time we delve into quarks (supposedly three-dimensional spheres), strings (one dimensional lines that vibrate to create the illusion of quarks and, essentially, matter), or whatever else theoretical physics can cook up, modern science has difficulty “seeing” it; not to mention interpreting what higher dimensions might look like.

Once we develop the technology to probe into the scale smaller than the Planck length (Which is 1.616E-35 meters: Much smaller than the atom), we may find the other dimensions sitting there; infinitesimally small.

I know I’ve drifted away from the supposed original intent of this article, but I couldn’t help explaining some background for you. So now this question takes on new meaning: Which dimension do you live in?

This question involves so much more than just our understanding of the world that we can see with our own eyes. And at this point in the game, I can only give you the answer in the form of more questions.

Two of the main dilemmas for quantum theory now are: Is there an elementary particle smaller than a quark? And: How does matter even exist in the first place?

First: As far as the Standard Model goes, we may find that there are infinitely many more sub-atomic domains to be explored. Just ask particle physicist Leon Lederman who has devoted his whole life to this subject. How far might this “Russian Doll” scenario go? Perhaps this could be answered by the dimension proposition.

And second: Our best guess about the existence of matter now is that of string theorists, like Leonard Susskind, who say that quarks are the minute energetic jitters of one-dimensional strings that create mass through Einstein’s E = mc^2 which states that energy can turn into mass. I hate to use another question to answer the last (but not really), but what dictates these quantum jitters? Again, it could perhaps be the dimension proposition. But where does it end? Will there ever be a bottom to the rabbit hole? That is a question for the future of theoretical physics to answer.