I live in an accidental universe?

Yesterday, I penned - okay, I typed - some thoughts on the 2103 Nobel Physics prize. I am still thinking about that today. A few weeks ago, I was out in our backyard, as I am prone to be in the late evening since the two-year-old life form that abides with us demands it to be so. While Abby was snuffling around in the shadows cast by the floodlights, I stood gazing into the heavens.

There are two major schools of thought on how our amazing blanket of stars came to be:

1. Totally by accident
2. Placed by divine design or perhaps propelled into position by a divinely-caused event

Near the end of yesterday's missive, I asked, rhetorically, what the ultimate value of the Higgs boson - also known as the god particle - would be to mankind. It's not easy to take fifty years of scientific research and distill it down to a few understandable sentences. I have seen the Higgs boson described as the sub-atomic particle which is believed to give all matter in the universe size and shape. That is pretty strong stuff right there.

Representation of Higgs boson in collision

Apparently, physicists who adhere to something known as the Standard Model believe that the Higgs boson is key to our understanding of the formation of stars, planets and eventually life after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Since 2008, some of the largest brains on planet Earth have been slinging particles around a 27-Kilometer ring in Switzerland and studying what happens when they run into each other. I am probably over-simplifying and by no means is it my intent to demean what these scientists are doing. I am not mocking or belittling science and scientific theory; I am simply asking, "Why?"

What will come of these experiments? What will mankind reap from the knowledge we gain? What does understanding how a subatomic particle obtains its mass do for the survival of the human race?

These are big questions to which, I suspect, there are really no easy answers.

However, we live in the Internet Age. We have the magical YouTube portal that allows us to find information that would have never been retrievable in years past.

Nat Napoletano is really excited about Higgs boson...and it's potential benefits

I found the video above quite early in my search for the meaning surrounding the elusive Higgs boson particles. There are a ton of other videos posted up by Mr. Napoletano and hopefully I'll have time someday to review them. And while he does explain the theory of theories fairly clearly, Mr. Napoletano really doesn't give us much of an anchor regarding the benefits of this year's Higgs boson developments. He likens it to the 2,000 years in between the Bronze and Iron ages. In effect, because we have theories, we are better able to craft experiments that will test these theories and - hopefully - prove some hypotheses along the way. And as a result of our ever-increasing scientific knowledge, the pace of that proving is accelerating like a subatomic particle around a magnetically guided ring.

But all of this still doesn't balance in my head.

$9,000,000,000 and counting.

That is the amount of money that people have spent on constructing and operating the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Honestly? I'd like to work there; it has to be so cool to be a part of that. But I know I'm not smart enough. The science doesn't live in my head. I stink at any math I can't pull off with a standard 10-key calculator. The answers I'm looking for aren't forthcoming. Answers like, "So, we've spent over $9 billion dollars and look at this! A faster-than-light ship that humans can travel in," or, "You know that Dark Matter and Dark Energy we've been speculating about? Well, here's what it is...," or maybe even, "Hey! Check out my new lightsaber!"

But none of that sort of stuff is on the horizon in my lifetime, or probably the lives of the next several generations of my family. So I'll stand in my backyard again tonight and look up at the stars. I won't think much about Higgs bosons or quarks or dark matter. I will think about the one thing I believe explains why everything is: because it was created to be that way. My hope is that one day science and faith will come together and all the theories and all the experiments and all the explorations will collide with one indisputable fact.

God. And He's not a particle.

What do you think?

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Nothing from nothing leaves nothing...

"...but you gotta have something..."



The Nobel Committee announced the winners of the 2013 Physics award today.  The award went to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider" [Source: http://www.nobelprize.org/].

I think Billy Preston should've at least received an honorable mention.

If you attended school with me, you know that math and science are not my strong suits. So it will likely come as no surprise that my first thought about this was, "If a something is, doesn't that, by definition, mean it has mass?"

I mean think about it. A dust particle has mass. A snowflake has mass. I would assume that any thing, no matter how small, has mass. Otherwise, it would be no-thing, right?

Saharan dust particle (www.sciencedaily.com)

So what's the big deal? Isn't this akin to saying, "The sun is on fire so it gives off light and heat,"?

I'm going to say much smarter things now, thanks to the whiz kids over at Georgia State University (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mass.html):

The mass of an object is a fundamental property of the object; a numerical measure of its inertia; a fundamental measure of the amount of matter in the object. Definitions of mass often seem circular because it is such a fundamental quantity that it is hard to define in terms of something else. All mechanical quantities can be defined in terms of mass, length, and time. The usual symbol for mass is m and its SI unit is the kilogram. While the mass is normally considered to be an unchanging property of an object, at speeds approaching the speed of light one must consider the increase in the relativistic mass.

On the other hand, the weight of an object is the force of gravity on the object and may be defined as the mass times the acceleration of gravity, w = mg. Since the weight is a force, its SI unit is the newton. Density is mass/volume.

As any University of Alabama student can tell you, those GSU folks aren't very good at football, but apparently they know their physics.

Okay, think of the football as an ovoid, accelerating particle...

Now that we know (I say know, not understand) the difference between mass and weight, let's move on.

Apparently all the hullabaloo dates back to 1964, when Mr. Higgs and five other very smart guys first broached the theory of an elementary particle. The possibility of this particle existing was so exciting, scientists have spent the past forty years working to prove its existence. The search was considered so important that a multi-national team built the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) facility in Switzerland in an effort to find that little sucker.

When they say large...they mean it.

The LHC, as all the hip scientists refer to it, is massive. Since there's no way I could explain what the LHC does without help, I'll borrow some text from CERN's website:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.

Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to ‑271.3°C – a temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.

I'm all for discovering interesting and useful facts about the world - and universe - around us. Really, I am. But I'm wondering where the benefit for humanity comes into play here. I don't want to pour cold water on the achievements of Mr. Higgs and his colleagues, but I am struggling in my own simple way to determine how super-cooled magnets being used to guide high-energy beams around a 27-kilometer ring, only to crash them together, will solve world hunger, or even contribute toward our efforts to slip the surly bonds of Earth.

Maybe it's just because I don't play in the physics sandbox. I'm not a scientist and most people who are would simply say I don't understand - or possibly - that I can't understand. Perhaps. But while I will acknowledge the award's prestige and, if nothing else, the sheer magnitude of intellect it took to win it, I will quickly return to my own little corner of Earth and my never-ceasing efforts to put enough particles on the table for my family.

What do you think?

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