The apparent discovery of the Higgs boson particle may be as portentous an event in the history of the world -- and then some -- as the signing of an oversized parchment declaration on a summer's day 236 years ago.
They found "the God particle" after all, a basic building block of the universe, and confirmed a hypothesis that Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland first put forth 50 years ago.
"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," CERN director general Rolf Heuer declared before a throng of scientists and reporters who had gathered in a conference room at the center, formally known as European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
But what does it all mean? And if it is indeed, a "God particle" connected in some way to every other thing in the Universe, then surely it must have a bearing on the future of alternative energy, on everything from how we harvest the power of the sun to how we power and recharge electric vehicles.
At least that was our premise going in, as we grappled with what effect such a milestone discovery would have on that little corner of the world that we happen to write about.
Our first go-round wasn't promising, a press officer at CERN, responding with a curt, "Unfortunately the Higgs is not a source of energy and won't be used as such."
And frankly, even Heuer hedged a bit in making the announcement of discovery, describing the previously unknown particle as "consistent with the Higgs boson," but adding that the finding, "opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."
What was certain from Wednesday's press conference, which was broadcast live around the world, was two independent studies of data produced by smashing proton particles together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider produced a convergent near-certainty on the existence of the new particle.
If it is, in fact the boson Higgs predicted, then the new particle role is to bestow mass on other matter. This in turn, it is said, will ultimately explain how order grew out of the chaos of the Big Bang.
The science of the thing
Each of us in our professions -- if we are doing something we love -- is arguably after our very own great white whale: the perfect story, the perfect pie, the perfect work of architecture.
For scientists, or rather. more specifically, physicists, that Grail is the theory of everything, the one explanation that ties all the valid theories together and explains the formation and meaning of the universe backwards and forwards.
It's a pursuit that has stymied the best minds in history, and even led to a falling out between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr who seemed to never tire of debating whether or not quantum mechanics was the way to get there.
After Einstein's death in Princeton, N.J. in 1955, the scientific momentum coalesced around something that came to be known as the Standard Model of Physics, a theory that accounted for all the known forces and subatomic particles in the universe.
The problem was, the Standard Model falls short of being the be-all-and-end-all theory of everything. Physicists keep finding discrepancies in their calculations. Higgs boson may -- emphasis on may -- be the missing piece of the puzzle.
Perhaps the best explanation of what the Higgs boson is has been written by particle physicist Victoria Martin, a student of Peter Higgs, whose "A Layperson's Guide to the Higgs Boson," is posted on her former professor's University of Edinburgh webpage.
Martin was a member of Atlas, one of the two teams, friendly competitors, using the Large Hadron Collider to try to find the Higgs boson. The other team was called CMS, short for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS).
Martin wrote, "Just as everything is made of molecules and those molecules are made of atoms, it turns out those atoms themselves are made of more fundamental particles: electrons, protons and neutrons.
"We believe the electron is a truly fundamental particle: it isn’t built up of smaller building blocks," she explained. "However we know that the protons and neutrons are not fundamental; they consist of three even smaller particles we call “quarks”. Quarks come in different “flavours” and always stick together in twos or threes. For example, the proton is made of two “up” quarks and one “down” quark."
"This is where Higgs’ particle comes in," Martin continued. We can’t figure out why the electron and the quarks have a mass; unless, somehow, they obtain a mass by interacting in a special way with the so-called Higgs field.
"If this Higgs' explanation is correct and this Higgs field really exists and is present everywhere in the Universe, then one consequence is that the Higgs field can clump together and form a new kind of particle. This new particle is Higgs’ particle, which we call the Higgs boson. To see if Higgs’ theory is really true we will need to find some Higgs bosons and see if they really do interact with quarks, electrons and the other fundamental particles we know about," she said.
How it will be used, nobody knows
Particle physicists have been trying to make Higgs bosons at various colliders for a long time, two decades in fact. But until now, the best they've been able to do is better define what they were looking for -- a particle that weighs about 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and that, if they could create it, would decay almost instantaneously.
That means that to find it, researchers have to look not for the fleeting Higgs boson itself, but rather, the particles it leaves behind in its wake. That's what Heuer was referring to when he explained Atlas and CMS's "convergent" conclusions of a year ago.
Since then, the teams have been firing up the 27 km collider and smashing protons together at 99.99998 percent of the speed of light over and over again. Although the number of collisions it took to create the boson was not announced, the researchers had previously said they expected it would take on the order of one billion collision to make just 10 of them.
But of course, now that one gigantic piece of the science has been done, a new era beckons: that of inevitable distortion and misappropriation of scientific ideas as they make their way into the mainstream.
Physicists can talk until they're blue in the face about "quarks" and "bosons" and all manner of things "sub atomic," but until lay people can wrap their head around the subject, typically in some way that makes the science part of the popular culture -- a new Apple product perhaps? -- the larger world just won't recognize the discovery's significance.
By the time we got to posit our question about the significance of the Higgs boson to renewable energy research, some quarters were already clamoring for their little piece of the story. For instance, we heard of the immediate scheduling of a 1-hour radio programme to discuss the religious significance of the Higgs particle.
We also heard of at least one potential panelist for the program who declined to appear because he felt "there isn't any" religious significance to the discovery.
For our questions regarding the discovery's impact on the world of renewable energy, we turned to Peter Clarke, a professor of physics at Edinburgh who as a CERN fellow worked on the construction of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider.
Among his other activities at CERN, Clarke also worked on precision measurements of the electro-weak interaction, the properties of the Z and W bosons and indirect searches for the Higgs boson.
"I would have to say that in the short term there is no direct and immediate consequence of the discovery of a Higgs boson for development of renewable energy," Clarke said, adding, in the interest of clarity, that "to be exact yesterday's announcement was only of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson."
"There is no sense in which they can be produced and used," he said.
But Clarke continued, "Indirectly of course all advances made in understanding the way the 'stuff' of the universe works always contributes in some measure to technological advance in the long run -- Nobody at the time of the discovery of the electron predicted the iPhone!
"[Of course] I'm not suggesting that Higgs bosons can be used like electrons," he added, "only that it is a crucial and seminal advance in the understanding of the universe and adds to the pool of knowledge. How this knowledge will eventually be used no one can know today."
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