The Higgs Boson: Large Hadron Collider Memo Sparks Rumors
Written on April 26, 2011 by Jordan Ballard
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Geneva
For days, now, the Web has been sizzling with news that the long-sought Higgs boson the particle that theorists think gives other particles their mass might have been discovered at last. The Higgs, also known as the God particle, was evidently hiding in a bunch of subatomic debris, like a robbery suspect crouching in a Dumpster, at the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. Such astonishing news hasn’t been heard in the physics community since … last year, actually. That’s the most recent time the Higgs might have been discovered (but wasn’t) in that case, at the Tevatron accelerator near Chicago. A month or so ago, an entirely different but equally amazing particle that could have rewritten the laws of physics might have been discovered at Tevatron (but, as far as we know, wasn’t).
If there seems to be a theme here, there is and it’s not that particle physicists love to make dramatic claims for which there’s no actual evidence. The truth is that making discoveries at the very edge of physics is really hard. (If it were easy, after all, we’d already have made them.) That’s why you need multibillion-dollar accelerators that whip particles nearly to the speed of light or giant telescopes stationed in space. And even then, the observations are so difficult to make that it’s not always clear what you’re looking at. Is that teeny blip of light the most distant galaxy ever seen or is it a glitch in the electronics?
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