Thursday, September 11, 2008

The makings of the universe



Yesterday CERN, the European Council for Nuclear research, announced the commencement of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. This new testament to the marvels of human engineering will begin  anew on the quest to discover  the elusive Higgs boson  particle, which is though to bestow mass on all other particles. The conditions  created by this newest of atom smashers are suppose to replicate those present just a trillionth of a second after time zero or the Big Bang. Although everyone is all a buzz about the turning on of the Hadron it will still be some time until any analyzable data is generated. Still the hopes are high and many in the field believe that this machine will reveal the answers to fundamental questions about how the universe was formed.

Not to be completely overshadowed, the Fermilab, formerly the title holder of world's largest atom smasher, has recently postulated that there may be a fourth type of neutrino, which travels interdimensionally. String theory has proposed that our reality is a 4-dimensional "brane" inside a 10 dimensional "hulk", and the physicists at Fermilab believe this new category of neutrino is able to travel from the bran through the bulk and back again. This new particle would account for an otherwise odd observation of a high number of neutrinos at lower enegry levels. ( low for physicists being 475 million electron volts).

 NYTimes article about Hadron

1 comment:

Athena said...

finding the particle . maybe the time to gather the dust to find the passage to origin of life and home. the memory to carry through life a light.