“Little Neutrino of the World
With the speed of light you’re hurled.
No charge, no mass no space dimension?
Shame! You do defy convention.”
- Leon Lederman, pg 344
This is one of the many anecdotes that are sprinkled into this chapter about what is known about the Higgs (The God Particle). Unification is an ongoing theme in this book, and according to the science history summarized by Lederman, a very popular goal in scientific fields for the last couple thousand years. The God Particle would indeed give every thing that simplistic, basic common element. But why do physicists think it even exists? The problem in the going theory at the moment (QED) is that when energies get really high, t stops working, the probabilities of certain particles being created during collisions exceed 100 % which is impossible. These screwy numbers show that there is something missing, that would be affecting every particle and force that when taken into account would correct the current shortcomings and errors. One of the problems with Quantum theory is gravity. No one has been able to get gravity to conform to the theory, so far scientists are not quite sure where or how it fits in.
The God Particle is also called interchangeably the Higgs Particle and the Higgs field, and so far physicists have pinned down what it does is it is responsible for mass. Yes that’s right, mass is not an arbitrary constant of a certain particle, like its spin or charge. Instead the Higgs field permeates everything, even the vacuum, influencing every particles interaction. The Higgs particle has essentially changed what I considered something that was constant. Mass is a property dependent on the particles interactions with other particles and its environment. The Higgs also has no direction, is a scalar quantity, this is why it still has an effect in “the void”. Another piece of the puzzle that is complicating the process of pinning down this particle is that the Higgs is destroyed by high energy. This means that during the Big Bang it wasn’t how it is now, but after a little bit of time and cooling, the Higgs kicked into gear and proliferated. The quest for the God Particle has changed physics and Lederman sums this up “before Higgs, symmetry and boredom, after Higgs, complexity and boredom.” (page 347).
The more energy that a given particle has, the faster it decays, this is because it has more options to decay into, that is more particles have less mass then them so in certain conditions they can decay into any of them. This prompt a change in the attitude towards accelerators in the late 80’s, they became particle factories, doing as many collisions as possible to create as many of these different “options”. The goal was to have a large number of each type of product to study, and make any correlations between certain particles and forces playing roles at certain energy levels etc… The reason why not all of the resources were poured into one collider to find the elusive God Particle is because at the time of the Big Bang, all of the various elementary particles were all of equal amount and of very high energy, so by seeing what the ratio of particles are now and their energies, it can give us very useful information about the cooling process the universe is going through.
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