Is that a Large Hadron Collider in your pocket?
September 9th, 2008 | Published in Blog, Sci-tech
The first high energy beam (7 TeV!!) of protons will zip between France and Switzerland at nearly the speed of light tomorrow!
OK, maybe the new iPods coming out today will get more attention, but we as a species are about to peel back another layer of reality and see how things work. This is a big deal.
One of the goals of the LHC is to gain a better understanding of the Higgs Boson. This little field/particle is what many believe is where mass comes from. The theory is something like this:
All of space is filled with the Higgs field, which all particles move through. Most particles kind-of “bump into” this Higgs field as they move, and because it’s pretty uniform, we measure it as mass. Some particles don’t interact with the Higgs field, and therefore have no mass (photons and neutrinos for example). Heavier materials (Pb, Au, Rn) interact with the field more strongly than light materials (H, He, Li) because they consist of more Higgs-affected particles (protons, electrons, neutrons).
Our model of reality has holes in it, just like the periodic table had holes before we discovered the elements that fit there. Our models tell us what we should expect to find in the holes by looking at what’s around them. This is why we expect to find the predicted Higgs, it fits pretty perfectly in the the hole of our observed knowledge.
Now few people know that every microchip on the planet wouldn’t exist without high energy physics. Big brains needed to understand how the electron field worked before they could invent the transistor. That knowledge came from high energy physics research.
No one knows what “practical” result may come from the LHC, but imagine if we could learn enough about the Higgs field to find a way to shield matter from it’s effects? That would be astonishing; we might then be able to build mass canceling devices. Even construct interstellar space probes that can reach relativistic speeds without the impossible amount of energy needed given our current understanding.
