IF ITexists, and it now seems more likely, it does so for barely a “yoctosecond”, one septillionth (1 x 10-24) of a second. A blink of an eye. But that fleeting instant, in the wake of the subatomic collision that gave it birth, should be enough to leave the mark of the Higgs boson as a tiny blip on a screen detectable amidst trillions of other events by the most powerful of computers. Crucial testimony to its very existence, and that is what scientists in Geneva say they may have seen. Expectations of definitive proof have soared.
Also nicknamed “God’s particle”, because it is posited to be fundamental to the creation of mass or weight in all of matter, the Higgs boson shares with the Almighty a mighty epistemological challenge. Until now a key element in the theoretical underpinning of what is known as the Standard Theory, the now-widely agreed model of the universe and of everything large and small, scientists have only been able to postulate its existence. Like God, they will only be able to prove it through evidence of its effects on others. If they fail, and the Higgs does not exist, there’s a gaping hole in physicists’ explanation of nature’s deepest structure.
Its discovery, scientists have been arguing since the 1960s, would crucially prove the existence of an invisible “Higgs field” permeating the vacuum of space. The field’s emergence, they say, in the yoctoseconds after the Big Bang, created a drag on particles whizzing round the infant universe, giving them mass and turning them into the building blocks of atoms as we know them. Other particles, such as photons, or light, are unaffected by the drag and so remain mass-less.
Two teams of scientists have been sifting data from high-energy proton collisions in the the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. On Tuesday they reported that “tantalising hints have been seen but these are not strong enough to claim a discovery”. Scientists say, however, that the encouraging results suggest they should be able to be definitive by next year.
This is hugely important work, justifying the staggering Cern investment. As cosmologist at Arizona State University Lawrence Krauss puts it: “If the Higgs is discovered, it will represent perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect in recent memory, vindicating 50 years of the building of one of the greatest theoretical edifices in all of science, and requiring the building of the most complicated machine that has ever been built.” Truly a glimpse into the mind of God.