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Hunt for the God particle


Our understanding of the universe and its origins relies on the existence of an elementary particle no one has ever detected. Now a massive effort is under way to find the very elusive Higgs boson.


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Hunt for the God particle

Credit: Mark Evans

Like some medieval cathedral, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already outlasted some of its builders and will continue in daily use long after most are retired or dead.

And just like those vaulted temples of worship, the LHC commands silent awe from its visitors. As it should. The LHC is the most complicated and expensive scientific experiment ever, with the audacious goal of explaining the ultimate nature of matter.

Just to build the apparatus is costing upwards of a$5 billion (US$3.6 billion). Planning started 20 years ago, the first applied research began 15 years ago, and more than a thousand engineers, technicians and scientists have already been working on this project for at least a decade.

Visiting this cathedral to science, however, isn’t that simple. It’s hidden from most eyes, buried 80 to 100 metres deep as an oval tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva, enclosing an area big enough to squeeze in Bermuda, Monaco and four Vatican Cities.

There are occasional surface outcroppings – anonymous metal-sided sheds set well back from the roads. And there is a large jumble of nondescript off-white buildings that house the designers, builders and eventual users in a campus-like setting near the France-Switzerland border. But mostly there are cultivated fields, cud-chewing cows and placid villages, with the LHC’s tunnel passing below unseen and largely ignored..

Yet in mid-2007, if all goes according to plan, packets of high-energy protons will be accelerated in opposite directions around the 27 km tunnel, attaining velocities within a whisker of the speed of light, and then be deliberately smashed into each other at four separate locations.

Resembling the chapels in a cathedral, those four locations hold detection experiments. Fitting in with the religious analogy, two are multi-part detectors specifically designed to spot the ‘God Particle’: an elusive and theorised atomic fragment so called because physicists hope it will finally make clear how the universe works at the most basic level.

The God Particle’s real name is the Higgs boson, named after British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs who first proposed its existence. It is believed to be the last missing piece to the puzzle of the so-called Standard Model – the 20 fundamental forces and particles that, in various permutations and combinations, account for everything around us – light, magnetism, gravity and all forms of matter.

The Higgs is what supposedly gives mass to fundamental particles, such as quarks and leptons, which in turn constitute neutrons, protons and electrons, which in turn make up atoms and molecules and eventually this page, you and the entire universe. The hadron of the Large Hadron Collider is the classification for neutrons and protons, from the Greek ‘hadros’ for strong, because they are held together in the nucleus of an atom by the strong nuclear force.

Experiments at the collider are also intended to provide the ultimate test of Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2; to yield a long shot at identifying the mysterious dark matter that supposedly permeates the cosmos; to take a stab at recreating the quark-gluon goo or gas that existed for an instant at the Big Bang; and to roll the dice for a peek into extra dimensions of space-time.

Not to mention the real possibility of confirming supersymmetry. Also known as SUSY, supersymmetry is an arcane concept of paired elementary particles that lies at the heart of the theory that all the forces of nature are interconnected – the ‘theory of everything’ pursued by Albert Einstein for the latter third of his life.

“Simply to be a visitor here is tremendously exciting,” says Stuart Tovey, a pioneer in high-energy physics in Australia.

The 66-year-old Tovey is much more than an ordinary visitor at CERN, the campus-like setting close to the France-Switzerland border. Now formally called the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN is better known by the acronym for its former French name of Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire and operated collectively by 20 European countries.

Some know of CERN’s existence either because this is where the World Wide Web was born (so researchers could exchange data quickly) or because The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown fancifully invoked an anti-matter experiment that threatened world peace here in his earlier book, Angels and Demons.

Readers' comments

DARK MATTER

Big Bang Discovery: Cold Dark Matter May Not Exist, But Einstein-Based Hot Dark Matter Should

LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif., March 14 (AScribe Newswire) -- A four-page article in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, March 11, focused on the extreme pessimism that prevails today among the many dark matter physicists who have been searching for the mysterious Cold Dark Matter of the universe for as long as 15 years, without success.

The article did not mention Silicon Valley's inventor/scientist, Jerome Drexler, who entered the race to identify dark matter in 2002, based upon Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. He has authored books published in 2006 and 2003 and two scientific papers on his Einstein-based "hot" dark matter theory. As encouragingly described in his 2006 book, the theory appears to be compatible with 15 to 25 assorted cosmic phenomena.

This May 2006 book is available now at libraries of 22 prominent universities and astronomical institutes including: Harvard, Harvard-Smithsonian, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Vassar, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh , University of Helsinki, Kyoto University, Universidad de Chile, University of Hamburg, University of Bologna, University of Goettingen, Canterbury University, Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysik, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Astronomical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, University of Groningen, Universidad de Guadalajara, and the Czech Republic's Academy of Sciences.

Drexler's recent discovery of a strong linkage between the dark matter of the universe and the nature of the Big Bang, indicates that both the Big Bang and the dark matter it created must have satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but Cold Dark Matter could not have done so.

An understanding of this phenomenon is helped by an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's tutorial on the subjects of disorder, entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the arrow of time: "It is a matter of common experience, that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation can be elevated to the status of a law, the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe, always increases with time."

Astro-cosmology researcher/author Jerome Drexler says, "Since the Big Bang created only 17 percent ordinary matter compared to 83 percent dark matter, the nature of dark matter and the nature of the Big Bang must be strongly linked."

"In dispersing enormous amounts of energy, protons, and helium nuclei (in a ratio of 12 to 1) throughout the universe, at the beginning of time, the Big Bang had to be orderly (having low entropy) in order to satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

"The Big Bang was able to accomplish this task by dispersing dark matter in the form of ultra-high-energy relativistic protons, which have the very low disorder (low entropy) required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the beginning of time."

"The principal competing dark matter theory is known as the Cold Dark Matter(CDM) theory of slowly moving, uncharged, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Such slowly moving particles would have low kinetic energy and a large percentage of disorder through random motion and therefore a high entropy. Thus, the type of Big Bang that might have created these high entropy WIMPs probably would have exhibited a high entropy itself, making this type of Big Bang unlikely since it could not satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the beginning of time."

Drexler's new five-page scientific paper, published and available on the Internet, posits that the Big Bang was not a fiery, chaotic, disordered explosion but an orderly ultra-high velocity dispersion of relativistic protons and helium nuclei in a ratio of 12 to 1.

The paper explains that the dispersed relativistic protons and helium nuclei became the mysterious dark matter that now represents about 83 percent of the mass of the universe.

The paper also explains that a relativistic-proton Big Bang would be a very efficient way of creating a universe and conserving its energy because the fewest number of particles having the least amount of unusable energy would be created and dispersed On the other hand, a Big Bang creating Cold Dark Matter WIMPs, representing 83 percent of the mass of the universe, would be producing matter having low kinetic energy and high entropy, which would represent a very inefficient Big Bang design concept and a low- energy future for the universe.

The above scientific paper, posted on the Cornell University Library arXiv.org physics website, is entitled, "A Relativistic-Proton Dark Matter Would Be Evidence the Big Bang Probably Satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics." It is dated Feb.15 and is available to the public free of charge at: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0702132 .

Drexler has developed analytical methods to maximize the amount of knowledge derivable from astronomical data. In his 2006 book, he used a substantial amount of astronomical data, his dark matter cosmology, and his new analytical methods to derive plausible explanations for at least 15 and up to as many as 25 mysteries of the cosmos.

The title of Drexler's 2003 book is, "How Dark Matter Created Dark Energy and the Sun: An Astrophysics Detective story. " His 2006 book is, "Comprehending and Decoding the Cosmos: Discovering Solutions to Over a Dozen Cosmic Mysteries by Utilizing Dark Matter Relationism, Cosmology, and Astrophysics". His two scientific papers on dark matter can be found on the physics arXiv as physics/0702132 and astro-ph/0504512.

Jerome Drexler is a former NJIT Research Professor in physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology, founder, former Chairman and chief scientist of LaserCard Corp. (Nasdaq: LCRD), and former Member of the Technical Staff of Bell Laboratories. He has been granted 76 U.S. patents, honorary Doctor of Science degrees from NJIT and Upsala (Uppsala) College, a degree of Honorary Fellow of the Technion, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship at Stanford University, a three year Bell Labs graduate study fellowship, and the "Inventor of the Year Award" in 1990 for Silicon Valley.

God particle

Isn't that in the Bible!

The Apocolyptic issues!

Due to these issues the project should have been dumped, it could have lead us to our own ending and new beginning of being a different particle ourselves!

The Apocolyptic issues!

In our search for How God created the universe, why not just ask him!

Ha!

Ha!

hunt for the god particle by Peter Calamai

If the LHC discovers nothing, not even the Higgs particle,
please look at Physics Letters B 636(2006), 56-59; B638(2006) 234-238,
and build the ILC.
sincerely, J.J. van der Bij

ATOM-SMASHER?

7 weeks from now we will all see what this thing can do
we have like 8 billionth of a chance of the world ending
for all we kno it culd be doomsday for earth in just 7 WEEKS!!
i dont disagree with these scientists but i really think its not worth risking over 4.5 billions lifes if a dark hole does appear during this process im sure these smart scientists will figure something out
to save our world and yes it is pretty stupid making this machine to
risk EVERYTHING im just verry worried about this experiment seeing as all
i hear is that the world is going to end and the world is all over
so i just have to say
CERN dont &^%$ up!!!! ur risking the world. This world is everything

playing God

When are these bastard scientists going to leave well enough alone,so many learned fools out there who proclaim to be a genius just because of thier own warped egos,like einstien,the mongrel that gave us the atomic age,far as I am concerned all those involved in this project of making the big bang should be put up against the wall and shot,no trial,no judge,personally I hope you all blow yourself to kingdom come.

Let's propose something new...

The God Theory
Introduction
Initially, there are common misconceptions that the theory of God and that of the Big Bang are mutually exclusive. This is not necessarily the case. This theory goes some way in proposing the existence of both.
One of the most peculiar omissions from any scientific theory is on how the mind developed. The mind is not something made of matter or energy, or otherwise we could produce it at will. No matter how much we develop artificial intelligence it would never measure up to the complexity of the mind. Its obvious that the imaginary creatures we see in the subconscious, that we imagine and dream, do not exist here, but they must exist somewhere. The mind is somewhat of an eyeglass into other worlds. It cannot be defined by mere physics.
But then where does it come from? We may never be able to determine this, but we can make presumptions that can be fairly accurate, like those below.

The Existence of God or Intelligent Design
The existence of intelligent design, whilst justified by minimal evidence, is supported by the mathematics of limiting factors. Let me at first explain the theory of limiting factors concisely.
As one changes from a regular triangle to a square through to a regular pentagon, it is evident that each time a side is added, the new polygon is closer in shape to a circle. The circle is therefore known as the limiting factor of the polygonal sequence because no matter how many sides the polygon has it will get closer but never fully become a circle. A circle has infinite sides therefore, bot one at the same time. It has infinite sides, but can still logically exist as a singular object limited by one side.
The universe can be represented by the relationship between space and time and a relationship always has to have some sort of limiting factor. The limiting factor therefore must be one entity, a being from which the whole Universe is contained and limited by. This must be God. He is of infinite proportions, but still just one.
Other ‘scientists’ say that everything came from matter and anti-matter, but these, although vast in number, are still finite and therefore cannot be limiting factors of the universe because the finite can be exceeded and therefore preceded by another factor which is thus not limited and hence a contradiction occurs. Furthermore there cannot be two limiting factors e.g. both. Anti-matter and matter since one would not limit the other therefore and hence a contradiction occurs again. Matter and Anti-matter, may have existed, but something must have preceded them both, or else there would be a violation of essential mathematical principles

The Nature of the Universe
The existence of dark matter and dark energy is a fact. This theory is based on the assumption that since light energy, dark energy and dark matter are fundamental aspects of the Universe, that it logically follows that there is such thing as light matter.
Dark matter functions somewhat as if it was the scaffolding of the universe, wherever it conglomerates there are planets and stars. What also must be noticed is that wherever dark matter is, such as the afore-mentioned stars and planets, there is a concentration of light energy. This definitely cannot be coincidental.
It can be presumed that light energy bends towards dark matter. If this is the case, there is a probable likelihood that dark energy bends towards light matter.
Dark energy is currently accelerating outwards towards the rim of the Universe. Many scientists believe that the Universe is expanding. This is not necessarily the case. There seems to be a blatant ignorance of the possibility that the Universe itself is not expanding outwards, but everything within it is.
An analogy for this is to dip an Oreo into a mug of milk. The specks of Oreo inside float towards the rim of the mug and if one could minimise oneself and stand inside the milk, there would be a perception that the whole universe was expanding. In fact, everything inside the mug (the specks stands for galaxies) are actually accelerating outwards inside the medium of milk (in the example this is space) and then clashing with the rim of the mug (the rim of the Universe.)
If Dark energy is heading towards the rim of the Universe (which is already scientifically proven), it follows that the rim of the Universe must be the location of the light matter which dark energy bends towards.

The Composition of Light Matter
Light matter is around the rim of the Universe and therefore functions as the skin which holds the Universe inside it. Since it must withstand the force of the dark energy within, it must be extremely malleable, elastic, strong and dense to the extent that it is impervious to all universal forces. It cannot be gaseous for it must maintain a set position and therefore it cannot be a liquid either. Perhaps then it is a solid? Yet how does it withstand the heat of all the accelerating matter within the Universe colliding against it? How does become so malleable and how can it move so freely in adjusting itself to the forces hitting it? Furthermore, how does it preserve its shape? These baffling questions lead us to a startling answer that light matter takes the characteristics of all states of matter.

The Beginning of the Universe
Since light matter contains the entire Universe, it must have been there first. It follows that before the Universe was created per se, there must merely been a mass of light matter at the start. This light matter did not live in the medium of space which did not exist at the time, but rather in a void governed simply by time and space.
Now somehow, at an indiscriminate time, this mass of light matter began to develop a Mind. This is the concept of God and is linked with the Islamic interpretation that God (or Allah) is the ‘ocean of light’.
The Mind was initially entirely positive. It contained goodwill, kindness and happiness. To release these emotions, the Mind expanded the light matter rapidly in a Big Bang to create the Universe. Because of this enormous force, dark energy, dark matter and light energy were created as well as the rudimentary components of the early Universe. With something to stimulate its emotions the Mind could now release its full prowess. The Mind would also be able to utilise Light Matter throughout the Universe in whichever states it wishes.
During the expansion of the Universe, some traces of the Mind were sparsely spread throughout the Universe and these traces took refuge on several elements and substances. These substances developed into living organisms and their initial mental capacity was determined by how much trace of the Mind they had. Eventually, they bred and the conscience and ability to think were passed on through the generations because the traces of the Mind were hereditary.

The Concept of the Devil
Now as the Mind developed and saw the creatures it created, it developed more complex emotions. To communicate with the beings in the Universe it sent offshoots of the light matter into the Universe to communicate with life (for the offshoots were part of the light matter and hence were directly linked with the mind and its emotions). These offshoots are now more commonly known as Angels.
Some of the complex emotions developed negatively into anger, sadness and greed amongst others. The Mind wished to rid itself of these emotions and therefore released an offshoot of light matter containing these emotions. This offshoot was in essence an Angel with negative emotions and hence became a Devil. This is linked with the Biblical story that Lucifer was once an Angel but then became the Devil afterwards.

The Whereabouts of Heaven and Hell
It can therefore be assumed that the fiery Rim of the Universe where dark energy, dark matter, light energy and light matter collide is Hell. First and foremost, it is palpably fiery and has enormous heat (because all galaxies and forces are meeting on the rim as they accelerate towards the light matter. This would mean it would be the perfect place to banish the root of the Negative Mind (the Devil) after he spread negativity throughout the Universe. In addition, excessive negativity in certain organisms means that ‘evil’ beings that possess more negative emotions such as excessive anger and greed are drawn to their roots in the negative Mind which dwells in Hell. There, their bodies will be obliterated, but their negative emotions which are not made of any matter would therefore be indestructible and would still exist, thus suffering ‘eternal torment’ as they are consumed in their own negativity.
Heaven however, is the dwelling of the positive part of the greater Mind that dwells in the light matter. This mind is what we perceive as God. As it is in power of the light matter in which it exists, it can mould this light matter into any desirable shape for the positive beings (those who have mainly positive emotions such as happiness, tranquillity and mercy) that are attracted to the root of positivity, which is the Mind (God). It would therefore reflect all the qualities of positivity and would therefore be utopian and since as aforementioned, the individual mind and emotions of a being cannot be destroyed, those in ‘Heaven’ would live in ‘eternal bliss’.

Some Interesting Facts
• Many religions claim that God is everywhere. The theory above supports this because the Light Matter encompasses the Universe and is therefore ‘all around’ us.
• Secondly, it is claimed that God is inside all of us. The above theory states that since everyone has a part of the original Mind of the Light Matter that a part of God (the Light Matter with the Mind) is actually inside every living thing?
• Also ‘good’ people have more positive emotions and would hence go to The Light matter because of the positivity attracting them. The contrary applies for those with negative emotions.
• Light matter is also a limiting factor because it began the Universe and contains the Universe with nothing exceeding or going beyond it. In addition, light matter is continuously regenerated by the Mind to cater with the inner pressure of the contents of the Universe expanding and is hence also of infinite proportions.
• Finally, Islam states that our deeds will not impact on the powers of God anyway. Since God is Light Matter, matter could not be destroyed completely and the Mind which has no actual physical form, is also indestructible, meaning God (again, do not forget this is the conscious Light Matter) is in essence immortal.

Invisible Energy

It's refreshing to know that there are others out there who are of a similar mindset. Your words help to put my thoughts into perspective. As Einstein said, "there are no original ideas." I borrowed from already existing knowledge, and the collective subconscious, but here's what I think: http://mmelody2007.googlepages.com/home