The large dipole magnet is symbolically lowered into the tunnel in Geneva to mark the end of a crucial phase of installation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Credit: AFP PHOTO / HO / CERN
LONDON: By the end of 2012, physicists say they could determine whether a theorised particle called the Higgs boson, which has unleashed a gruelling decades-long hunt, exists or not.
"I'm pretty confident that towards the end of 2012 we will have an answer to the Shakespeare question for the Higgs boson - to be, or not to be?" Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), told a press conference at Britain's Royal Society.
CERN has ordered the world's biggest particle collider to step up the quest to explain mass, one of the greatest puzzles in physics.
Find it, or rule it out
The key to this is believed to be the Higgs, a notional sub-atomic particle named after British physicist Peter Higgs who mooted its existence in 1964.
If it is found, one of the last pieces would be set in place in the famous Standard Model, which seeks to bring all the particles and forces in the Universe under a single, unified theory.
"By the end of 2012 we will either discover the Standard Model Higgs Boson, if it exists, or we will rule it out," said Fabiola Gianotti, who is the spokesman for CERN's biggest particle-collider lab, called Atlas.
Resolving the mysteries of the Universe
CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located in a 27-km ring-shaped tunnel 100 m below ground, straddling the French-Swiss border. It is designed to accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together in house-sized labs where detectors record the seething sub-atomic debris.
The smashups briefly stoke temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, fleetingly replicating conditions which prevailed split-seconds after the 'Big Bang'' that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
In this primordial soup, novel particles may lurk that will resolve mysteries clouding our understanding of fundamental matter, scientists say.
Battling shutdowns
Enigmas include the Higgs - dubbed 'the God particle' for being mysterious yet ubiquitous - as well as suspected 'supersymmetrical' particles that could explain dark matter, which comprises around 23% of the Universe.
The first proton collisions at the LHC occurred on September 10, 2008. The smasher then had to endure a 14-month shutdown to fix technical problems.
The LHC recently notched up the biggest-ever energy release from particle collisions, although this is still only half of its design capacity. It had been due to shut down in early 2012 for work enabling it to crank up to full power.
However, a decision was made several weeks ago to delay closure for a year to help the search for the Higgs, said Gianotti.
Gravity already deciphered
Can Higgs boson explain momentum, inertia and moment of inertia? Can it explain gyroscopic effects? Can it explain dark matter? No. The folks at LHC have now set themselves a deadline. But can there be a deadline in such matters? Only, if you already have some knowledge of something? May be, they know that the fundamental functioning of gravity has already been understood? So, they are now working on an exit plan after the USPTO screened my application for two months under secrecy review. Quite probable that LHC got a whiff of what was brewing at the USPTO. To put the matters straight, the actual discovery of gravity’s exact mechanism along with that of dark matter has already taken place, way back in autumn 2010. I know from my theoretical understanding that it is impossible to find any traces of Higgs boson as a quantum particle in the Hadron collider, neither can it show the existence of dark matter. Some details of my discovery of how gravitation exactly works are on http://www.anadish.com/ ; details of how it is produced in the framework of quantum mechanics has been disclosed to the US Patent Office and is to be published by them as a filed patent application. I consciously did not report to any peer-reviewed journal, fearing discrimination, because of my non-institutional status as a researcher. I had filed the US patent application (US 13/045,558) on March 11, 2011, after filing a mandatory Indian patent application on January 11, 2011.
Abundance of dark matter
The estimates of the amount of dark matter in our universe vary widely, but saying it's 23% is going out on a bit of a limb. In fact, many cosmologists now think that the matter of which we and the rest of our observable universe comprise as little as 6% of its mass, with the large balance being dark matter and dark energy.
The universe's visible matter may well turn out to only some local electronic turbulence that has developed around big blobs of otherwise inactive and invisible dark matter.