Paul Davis, physicist, cosmologist and writer at Arizona State University.
TWO-AND-A-HALF millennia ago, a group of Greek philosophers conjectured that beneath the stunning complexity of the physical world lay an elegant simplicity. The entire universe, they said, was comprised of nothing but particles moving in a void. They called the particles ‘atoms’. What we today call atoms are composite bodies with bits inside them. But the notion that on a small enough scale of size there are fundamental, indecomposable building blocks of the physical world remains a focus for research.
In July 2012, physicists announced a major step forward with the discovery of a particle created in the enormous Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory in Switzerland. Widely tipped to be the long-sought Higgs boson, the particle seems to be the last piece in the jigsaw of the Standard Model of particle physics, a set of equations that describes much of what is known about the fundamental structure of matter.
But, impressive though this achievement may be, it represents only a partial completion of the project begun in ancient Greece. A glaring omission is the so-called dark matter that makes up the lion’s share of matter in the universe. Astronomers can see the effect of dark matter as it tugs on stars and galaxies, but physicists have no idea what it is. The best guess is that dark matter consists of particles coughed out of the Big Bang that interact with normal matter so feebly that they mostly go right through us unnoticed. Searches for dark matter particles coming from space have so far yielded nothing definite.
MODERN PHYSICS aims not merely to draw up an inventory of particles such as electrons, neutrinos and quarks (the components of protons and neutrons), but also to explain the four forces that act between them: electromagnetism, gravitation and two nuclear forces known as weak and strong. Quantum mechanics permits a description of forces in terms of the exchange of yet more particles – photons in the case of electromagnetism and a variety of less familiar particles for the other forces. The Standard Model involves a partial unification of the forces, by joining electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force in a common scheme. The strong force is successfully described in terms of the exchange of a set of particles known as gluons, but this system is not yet mathematically integrated with the electromagnetic and weak forces. Gravitation, meanwhile, lies outside the scheme altogether.
So, theoretical physicists are yearning for additional unification and simplification. One idea, around since the 1970s, is called supersymmetry. It provides a common mathematical description of particles of matter and the particles that convey the forces. If nature is supersymmetric, there ought to be a whole zoo of additional particles, as each species of known particle should have a supersymmetric partner. The hope is that some of these hypothetical particles might explain the dark matter puzzle. Yet, against expectations, the LHC – by far the best bet for discovering this bizarre particle zoo – has so far shown no sign of any.
Another hope is that the strong force should be fully unified with the electromagnetic and weak forces, but experimental evidence for this is slim. The dream of total unification, in which gravitation is also brought into the scheme, has captivated a generation of theorists, including Einstein, and produced – among other proposals – string theory. This postulates that all particles and forces are manifestations of tiny loops of ‘string’ vibrating in different patterns.
SO HAS THE HIGGS discovery pushed any of these theories further forward? Tantalisingly, it seems the boson lies at the crossroads of supporting the Standard Model, and hinting at exotic new physics that may move us into even stranger realms of theory.
The job of the Higgs boson is to bestow mass on other particles such as electrons and quarks. Left out of the scheme, however, are neutrinos, ghostly particles that have no charge and pass through solid matter almost as if it didn’t exist. Neutrinos make up a very small fraction of dark matter. They have a tiny mass, less than a millionth of that of the electron, the next-lightest known particle. But physicists do not understand how this mass arises.
Even more enigmatic is the so-called dark energy that dominates the universe, making up nearly three quarters of its mass. The best way of describing it is the energy of empty space itself, a weird concept that makes sense only in quantum physics. But theorists are at a loss to explain its observed value, and disagree about whether it will stay constant over time as the universe expands.
All these puzzles point to important physics beyond the Standard Model. Hopes are pinned on more discoveries at the LHC, and perhaps elsewhere, such as dark matter experiments buried far underground. But the completion of the ancient Greeks’ elegant concept will depend more than ever on physicists’ ingenuity. At eight billion euros, the LHC is the costliest particle accelerator ever built. If we want to go beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, we may need to go beyond the standard model of funding too.
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The grand frontier of Physics is Nature’s Absolute Logic, eternal (‘indecomposable’) oneness of pairness (equator of self-contradiction), the self-creator and singularity of the pairness (Nature’s Relative Logic) of All in all (Spacetime-Continuum).
Thus, (2A + B) + (2B + A) … = 3(A + B).
Where A and B, can be any integer or value, but never both zero.
As in the numerical relation: 345 + 543 = 888.
-Aiya-Oba, Philosopher and discoverer of Nature’s Absolute Lgic.
The necessity of introducing half-integral spin goes back experimentally to the results of the Stern–Gerlach experiment.
It is dark matter or anti matter, the mathematics involved to connect them with intuition is tricky and historical.
E = ± √p²c² + m² c^4 :
In 1928, Paul Dirac solved the problem: he wrote down an equation, which combined quantum theory and special relativity, to describe the behaviour of the electron. Dirac’s equation won him a Nobel Prize in 1933, but also posed another problem: just as the equation x2=4 can have two possible solutions (x=2 OR x=-2), so Dirac’s equation could have two solutions, one for an electron with positive energy, and one for an electron with negative energy. But in classical physics (and common sense!), the energy of a particle must always be a positive number!
The equation also implied the existence of a new form of matter, antimatter, hitherto unsuspected and unobserved, and actually predated its experimental discovery. It also provided a theoretical justification for the introduction of several-component wave functions in Pauli’s phenomenological theory of spin. Although Dirac did not at first fully appreciate what his own equation was telling him, …
“his resolute faith in the logic of mathematics as a means to physical reasoning”,
….. his explanation of spin as a consequence of the union of quantum mechanics and relativity, and the eventual discovery of the positron, represents one of the great triumphs of theoretical physics, fully on a par with the work of Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein before him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yidNdyECy_k
I don’t think the qualities required for The Higgs particle to explain the standard model is there, and I don’t think they will be found.
Neither do I think, that supersymmetry will be recognized in futuristic science.
I know I am a pain in the butt, but I believe in a complete different approach to high energy physics in the future. My vision is that future science will engulf consciousness. The mind and the spirit will be explainable through physics.
I have been a fan of Sir Roger Penrose for many years. He was the first scientist to say that consciousness should be found in the quantum field rather than in the brain. I am so much a fan, that I made my own theory out of the idea that consciousness might be explained through a better understanding of antimatter and multiverse dimensions.
My idea is that antimatter is the mirror of this universe, and that antimatter might be where memory is located.
I think that the subconscious mind and consciousness are located in multiverse dimensions in the form of antimatter.
The original standard model predicted no mass at all. That made no sence to scientists, so Peter Higgs predicted The Higgs Boson, purely from mathematics. I think the original standard model was right, particles does not exist. The physical universe is a flow of energy from minus infinite energy to plus infinite energy.
If you would like to know more, then you can watch a full videopresentation of my theory on my blog:
http://www.crestroy.com
Simple Higgs mass is half of its field, How?.
“Momentum is a vector phenomenon”. If two vectors travel in opposite directions at the speed of light, they create rest mass in a closed system. Outside the closed system, cancels each other and become relatively massless and zero momentum. The Higgs field ripple or “vev” is this jitter momentum of its bundled energies- The non zero equilibrium around Higgs field zero equilibrium is this “point of turn” of its photon’s opposite vectors.
If Higgs particles(field) give “mass” to known particles, it is a start of “identifying” the matter?.It is not,we can convert mass into matter.
/First of all, we convert energy back to mass all the time/– means, mass is identified as energy through Einstein’s equation.
/— that’s how we make Higgs particles (and top quarks and W particles and Z particles) at machines like the Large Hadron Collider!/.
/As for whether “mass is a form of energy” — you can certainly take that point of view, and I personally do. We’ll see better reasons for it soon, when I get to the mass of the proton and the stability of neutrons inside of atomic nuclei. But I don’t see anything in the equations that absolutely requires you to say it that way, and sometimes people object, so I don’t insist on it./- one particle physics Professor.
Inside a closed system, massless photons get rest mass. Photons carry only bundles of energy, did they convert those energies into mass by their momentum?. Why they be massless with that same momentum outside a closed system?. Any unknown binding energy involved in closed system?.
“Any resemblance between the Higgs field and gravity is purely coincidental!”. “If gravity only pulled on mass, then it wouldn’t pull on light, which consists of massless photons!”
During bigbang, the enormous temperature locked Gold stone bosons(h+, h-, h0) inside symmetry breaking(made mass)- but not Higgs boson(h), photons, neutrinos?
Higgs boson is locked, but also outside symmetry breaking for a while or simultaneously- thus behaving like photons awhile?- so it does affected by spacetime metric(or gravity)?
So the freedom of movement allowed or polarization of spin”1″ force carriers(bosons) and spin “1/2″ matter particles(fermions) is(was) made by symmetry breaking or Higgs vev- thus making the mass. It may not by same Higgs field. The Higgs(h) associated with goldstone bosons are weak enough to be separated or intereacting with spacetime metric- not the energy in Higgs ripple which maintain electron-positron parity in creating electron mass.
So separating Higgs(h) from atoms will not affect its mass- but only the gravity.
— Veeramohan.
Two completely different particles (the electron and the anti-positron) are swapping back and forth(create mass). What does this mean? The physical thing which is propagating through space is a mixture of the two particles. When you observe the particle at one point, it may be an electron, but if you observe it a moment later, the very same particle might manifest itself as an anti-positron! This should sound very familiar, it’s the exact same story as neutrino mixing (or, similarly, meson mixing)- but with very low frequency?
The Higgs “vev”(spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking – occupying lower potential energy)- is same as back and forth movementum of photons inside a closed system(black holes). It is not creating any “rest mass”- it is because, “it cannot escape spacetime metric”- we call as gravitational mass.
Gravitation cannot contain “speed of the light”. In Black holes, the spacetime dimension is ruptured – the light had free fall into that rupture.
Higgs(h) get the “mass” because it cannot escape closed system created by Big bang temperature(after cooling).
Photons were massless because it already escaped closed system- but cannot escape the Roller coaster of spacetime metric.
Inside closed system mass is conserved. But Higgs(h) mass is not conserved only for a while(abruptly zero) – thus react with spactime metric for a while.
Atoms without Higgs(h) is like hydrogen filled balloon. Atom with Higgs(h) is like atmosphere gas filled balloon.
– veeramohan
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