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Tag: Big Bang
Higgs boson may be as mythical as all the other gods
Scientists chasing a particle they believe may have played a vital role in creation of the universe indicated…they were coming to accept it might not exist after all. But they stressed that if the so-called Higgs boson turns out to have been a mirage, the way would be open for advances into territory dubbed “new physics” to try to answer one of the great mysteries of the cosmos.
The CERN research center, whose giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been the focus of the search, said it had reported to a conference in Mumbai that possible signs of the Higgs noted last month were now seen as less significant.
A number of scientists from the center went on to make comments that raised the possibility that the mystery particle might not exist…
CERN’s statement said new results, which updated findings that caused excitement at another scientific gathering in Grenoble last month, “show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide…”
Under what is known as the Standard Model of physics, the boson, which was named after British physicist Peter Higgs, is posited as having been the agent that gave mass and energy to matter just after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. As a result, flying debris from that primeval explosion could come together as stars, planets and galaxies…
For some scientists, the Higgs remains the simplest explanation of how matter got mass. It remains unclear what could replace it as an explanation. “We know something is missing, we simply don’t quite know what this new something might be,” wrote CERN blogger Pauline Gagnon. “There are many models out there; we simply need to be nudged in the right direction,” added Gagnon, an experimental physicist.
Slowly, carefully, perceptibly – knowledge advances. Quantitative steps lead to qualitative changes. It’s just that we all want to be in on the discoveries.
In a world first, physicists trap atoms of antimatter
Scientists claimed a breakthrough Thursday in solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, successfully trapping the first “anti-atom” in a quest to understand what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang.
An international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to create an atom of anti-hydrogen and then hold onto it for long enough to demonstrate that it can be studied in the lab.
“For us it’s a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,” the team’s spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press.
“This field is 20 years old and has been making incremental progress toward exactly this all along the way,” he added. “We really think that this was the most difficult step…”
Theory posits that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. But while matter — defined as having mass and taking up space — went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has all but disappeared except in the lab…
Scientists have long been able to create individual particles of antimatter such as anti-protons, anti-neutrons and positrons — the opposite of electrons. Since 2002, they have also managed to lump these particles together to form anti-atoms, but until recently none could be trapped for long enough to study them, because atoms made of antimatter and matter annihilate each other in a burst of energy upon contact.
“It doesn’t help if they disappear immediately upon their creation,” said Hangst. “So the big goal has been to hold onto them…”
“We have a chance to make a really precise comparison between a matter system and an antimatter system,” he said, “That’s unique, that’s never been done. That’s where we’re headed now.”
Bravo!
Eideard 