CERN Claims they Found the God Particle

Where did everything come from? This is perhaps the biggest mystery that science has been striving to answer for decades, if not centuries - how the universe came to be. Mankind’s most curious minds have been yearning to figure out what it is exactly that keeps the universe going as it does now and what is behind the creation of potentially millions of planets and clusters of stars residing within many galaxies.

Over the years, various theories have been presented by men and women of science that seek to explain what it is that governs all forms of matter and energy and why these things behave the way they do. With so many of these postulations, it has become a major objective of the scientific field of physics to perhaps combine all existing theories and laws about the universe and unify them into a single and cohesive “theory of everything.”

The Standard Model

For around the latter half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the new millennium, particle physics is largely governed by what is referred to as the “Standard Model” of Physics. The Standard Model in particle physics is, for the moment, the most widely-accepted theory that provides a decent explanation concerning the behavior of all forms of matter and energy in the universe - particularly, the interaction of fundamental particles with elementary forces that exist in nature.

According to the Standard Model, there are two types of fundamental particles: fermions, which are what matter is composed of; and bosons, which carry forces. These particles are identified and ordered in terms of several properties, specifically mass. The mystery surrounding these particles is that while their mass can be measured, scientists could not say for certain where exactly their mass originated from and why they have such masses in the first place.

The Higgs Field

So, what explains the fact these elementary particles have mass? Well, that’s where the Higgs Field comes in. In terms of the Standard Model, the Higgs Field is known as a hypothetical force field which cannot be seen but is said to exist in every area of the entire universe. It is also this field that gives mass to various elementary particles like quarks and electrons.

A particle’s interaction with the Higgs Field when passing through it is theorized to be the one that gives the particle its mass. And the more that particle interacts with the invisible field, the more mass it contains. And so, according to this theory, without the Higgs Field, nothing would exist in the way that they do now - not humans, not Earth, not the stars, and not the many galaxies in the universe.

But how do we know the Higgs Field actually exists? Many particle physicists believe that among the final missing pieces that could complete the puzzle, the “god particle” - one of the universe’s “force particles” - will be the one to prove the field’s existence and consequently provide a better understanding of the current Standard Model.

The "God Particle" or the Higgs Boson

The term “God particle” was coined around the 1990s by Leon Lederman, a physicist and Nobel laureate who published a book about particle physics and discussed science’s pursuit to discover a specific elementary particle referred to as the Higgs boson. Many scientists dislike the moniker “god particle” and would prefer to use the official term “Higgs boson,” but what is it exactly? And why is it so important in proving the existence of Higgs Field and evaluating the Standard Model?

The god particle or the Higgs boson was proposed by Peter Higgs around the 1960s as a necessary element to support the possibility of an invisible field permeating the universe. And to many particle physicists that agree with Higgs, the hypothetical existence of the Higgs Field requires science to also recognize the presence of the Higgs boson.

As a basic example, picture a ball floating in a swimming pool. The ball is a particle while the pool is the Higgs field. The water of the pool is the one that gives the ball its mass. And if you excite the water by dropping a ball in the pool, it would cause a splash. According to quantum mechanics, this splash is the Higgs boson. And essentially, this “god particle” is an excitation of the invisible Higgs Field. This means the key to validating the existence of the Higgs Field lies in finding the Higgs boson, which some physicists believe could somehow be detected through the use of highly sophisticated scientific equipment.

CERN's Search for the Higgs Boson Using the Large Hadron Collider

Theoretically, particle physicists had predicted that recording the existence of the Higgs boson cannot be accomplished by man-made instruments as the particle is too fleeting. And so, one option they came up with that could confirm the creation of a god particle is by identifying and studying the particles it decays into.

This next-to-impossible search for the Higgs boson became among the main motivations in the 10-billion-dollar construction of the Large Hadron Collider by the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN.

The Large Hadron Collider or LHC is essentially an oval tunnel that stretches 17 miles under the border of Switzerland and France. It’s basically like a racetrack for when particles of matter are smashed together. This is made possible by the fact that surrounding its tunnel is around 9,000 superconducting magnets. These magnets accelerate the abundant stream of photons which travel inside the LHC in both directions almost to the speed of light. At this speed, the protons travel through the tunnel around 11,000 times per second, and with the use of the superconducting magnets, these photons can be directed to collide with each other for millions of times in only a blink of an eye. Sparks of particles are produced by these collisions as a result, and the debris of these particles are the ones captured, recorded and analyzed by the scientists’ high-powered computers.

Among these particles, scientists hoped to detect even the most minuscule droplet of the Higgs boson particle. But because the particle is anticipated to be unstable, they estimated that it would only take a fraction of a second before the god particle disintegrated into other particles. It is in these other particles that scientists hoped to find a pattern of decay that could potentially be the fingerprint of the Higgs boson.

The Tentative Discovery of the Higgs Boson Particle

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Collecting data using the Large Hadron Collider officially begun in early 2010, with ATLAS and CMS - two of the main teams in particle detection at LHC - tasked to pinpoint with accuracy and precision the mass range where the Higgs boson could exist. The two teams worked independently from the other, refraining from discussing their work outside of their respective groups. It was only around the end of 2011 that the two team leaders met with the director general of CERN. It was then revealed that each team held suspicions that they may have finally found the Higgs boson, having narrowed down its mass at around 125 GeV.

By July 2012, CERN announced that the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider resulted to the discovery of a new boson particle with the mass range of 125 and 126 GeV. Both independent experiments reached a local significance of 5 sigma - the conventional standard observed in particle physics before a discovery is officially declared. This meant that there was only one chance out of 3.5 million that each of the discoveries of the ATLAS and CMS teams was nothing more than a random fluctuation.

It would take months of further studies before CERN would confirm with some degree of confidence that the new particle they discovered could potentially be the Higgs boson, which they did so in March 2013. By October of that same year, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for coming up with the theory that led to the discovery of a new fundamental particle and for furthering the current understanding of subatomic particles and their mass.  

Considering the amazing scientific breakthrough achieved by scientists using the LHC, can we now say with absolute certainty that discovery made at CERN was actually the Higgs Boson?

Well, at this point, men and women of science are refraining from positively saying so. The truth of the matter is our ability to understand the universe is still very much limited, and the most intelligent minds of mankind know better than to automatically jump to conclusions. What can be definitively said for the time being is that even after several tests following its discovery, the boson particle detected using the LHC remains until now consistent with the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics. But whether it is actually the much sought-after god particle, more data is required to conclude as such.

In a field where advancement is determined by the improvement or replacement of theoretical models, it can be said that our determination to find the Higgs boson particle is a step in the right direction for scientific exploration. And to many physicists, the discovery of this so-called “God particle” will only just be the beginning of mankind’s passionate pursuit of understanding the origin of everything.

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Sources:

https://home.cern/about/updates/2013/05/basics-higgs-boson

https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-basics-of-boson-dave-barney-and-steve-goldfarb#review

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120704-god-particle-higgs-boson-new-cern-science/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-higgs-boson-was-found-4723520/?all

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/06/30/why-the-new-particles-discovered-at-the-large-hadron-collider-change-everything-nothing/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Confirmation_of_existence_and_current_status

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

Supercomputer Simulation Says We're Supernova Stardust

Based on supercomputer simulations by astrophysicists at Northwestern University, which took the equivalent of "several million hours of continuous computing," scientists say our original matter came from exploding supernovas that sailed to our solar system on "powerful galactic winds."

The leader of the study, Daniel Angles-Alcazar, said "We ran highly sophisticated simulations, looking at the formation of galaxies from shortly after the Big Bang and traced their development to today. We found that when we completed these simulations that we could say ... that the atoms which formed the solar system and so which form us, may have existed in other galaxies." 

They found a new phenomenon of "intergalactic transfer" due to fast moving gases flying to separate neighboring galaxies. Before such simulations, scientists thought galaxies formed by absorbing remaining substances from the big bang. 

"We knew about galactic winds from previous models but this transfer of mass that we've identified is a fresh result for us," Angles-Alcazar said.

Another astronomer on this team, Claude Faucher-Giguere, said the simulation implies "up to one half of the atoms around us" came from galaxies "up to one million light years away." 

So it seems we all fundamentally came from stars of the universe and it is a miracle that we manifest in this super sophisticated human form. 

Six Mind Blowing Theories About Our Reality

Understanding reality is never as easy and as simple as we would like it to be. To question everything, especially our existence, has always been an integral part of our human nature. As children, our innate and endless curiosity constantly led us to wonder why things are how they are. When we got older, we still possess the same curious minds that we had in our youth, only the questions we ask ourselves, and other people have gotten a lot more complicated since then. For most people, the ultimate question that drives our existence is the search for the meaning of life. But beyond this question lies a vast subset of ones possibly even more difficult to answer.

Is our reality even real? Are we real? Are we alone in the universe? How did all this come to be? How will all of this end? For now, though we do not have definite answers to these questions, scientists and philosophers have formulated complex theories about reality as we know it as well as our existence. Some of them operate on the basic principles of common sense, but there those that have gone far and beyond what most people can grasp and even more so, willing to accept. The evidence and arguments presented for such theories are quite compelling, and efforts to fully understand them could lead to enormous ramifications that could break one’s sanity.

And so, here are six of the most mind-blowing theories about our reality that will make you question your entire existence and what the rest of the universe holds!

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1. Big Freeze / Great Glaciation Theory

Also referred to by some as “The Great Glaciation” or “Heat Death,” the “Big Freeze” is a plausible scientific theory on the possible end of the universe. This ending is theorized to be the direct consequence of an ever-expanding universe, which is proven by indications of an increasing rate of expansion in the regions farthest from Earth. Because of this, it is also a widely-accepted model about the ultimate fate of our universe.

According to this theory, the universe will slowly cool as it expands until it is no longer capable of sustaining life. The process itself is a lot more capable than that as this theory is founded on the idea that entropy – a principle of thermodynamics that measures the shift of all energy in the universe from a state of order to disorder – will eventually reach its “maximum value.” And should that happen, the heat in the universe will be distributed evenly to the point that there would be no usable energy or heat left, which means the mechanical motion within the universe will cease to exist. And because of this “heat death,” time becomes an endless void in which nothing ever happens.

2. Solipsism / “Nothing Exists Except Your Mind”

The philosophical theory of Solipsism states that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. Some may argue that this argument was specially made for narcissists for being ego-centric, but once you get past the notion that your mind is the center of the universe, this philosophical believe is actually pretty simple.

Solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside a person’s own mind is unsure, and so, the external worlds as well as other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. For the solipsist, it is not merely that he believes his thoughts, experiences, and emotions are the only thoughts, experiences, and emotions there are, but rather, he attaches no meaning that there could be other thoughts, experiences, and emotions than his own.

For example, a true solipsist understands the word “pain” to mean his own pain. Therefore, he cannot conceive how the word is applied in any sense other than his exclusively egocentric understanding of it.

3. Presentism / “The Now and Nothing Else”

Philosophical presentism is the view that neither the future nor the past exists. The only events and objects which exist are those that exist in the present. So, the only things which exist now – right now – are actually real. According to Saint Augustine, the future and the past does not exist, as time cannot be both behind and ahead. Fyodor Shcherbatskoy, leading modern era scholar on Buddhist philosophy, wrote extensively on Buddhist presentism, saying: "Everything past is unreal, everything future is unreal, everything imagined, absent, mental... is unreal. Ultimately, real is only the present moment of physical efficiency.”

4. Eternalism / “Everything at Once”

Taking the opposite approach to presentism is eternalism. According to this theory, the past, present, future, the simple past, and continuous future are all happening right now. All points in time are equally real. This philosophical theory postulates that time actually has many layers which exist simultaneously. However, the layer seen by a particular observer depends on where he is standing.

This means, the dinosaurs, the World Wars, and Lady Gaga performing at the Super Bowl all exist at the same time but can only be seen from a certain point. And so, based on this theory, the future is not only deterministic, but free will is also merely an illusion.

5. Multiverse Theory & Fictional Realism

From science fiction to science fact, there is a proposal suggesting that there could be other universes aside from our own, where all the choices that a person makes are played out in alternate realities. These parallel worlds are said to be very similar to ours, but with only a few minor or major differences, and the number of these universes are infinite. One possible implication of parallel universes is the idea that there are infinite copies of us in infinite universes carrying out every possible version of existence.

One type of theory about parallel universes envisions countless bubble universes arising and disappearing. This means the beginning of our universe, the Big Bang, could just be the creation of one bubble in a sea of inflating universes, each eventually “popping” when unstable. A second theory is the Brane Multiverse, which is based on String Theory, and proposes our entire universe exists on a membrane floating in a higher dimension or “bulk”. In this bulk, are other membranes with their own universes. These universes interact with one another and, when they collide, the violence and energy produced are more than enough to produce a “big bang.” The membranes float near each other in bulk and, every few trillion years, attracted by some gravitational force, smash into each other. This repeated contact allegedly creates multiple or “cyclic” big bangs.

6. Simulation Theory / “The Matrix” Theory

The simulation hypothesis proposes that reality is, in fact, a simulation, and even most likely, a computer simulation. This theory postulates that due to the overwhelming likelihood of technological singularities occurring in the universe, it also likely that advanced civilizations – either aliens from a distant galaxy or humanity later on in the future – have created or will create simulations. And because the number of these simulations would be infinite, philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that it is very likely that we, right now, are actually living in a computer simulation.

The simulation theory bears similarity with the “Brain in the Vat” thought experiment, which is also just a modern and updated version of Rene Descartes’ Evil Demon thought experiment originated by Gilbert Harman. Common to many science fiction stories, a mad scientist or AI robot puts someone's brain in a jar and connects it to a supercomputer simulating a physical reality.

According to this thought experiment, the computer simulates reality, and the "disembodied" brain continues normal conscious experiences and feeling like in the real world. If this sounds eerily similar to “The Matrix” movies starring Keanu Reeves, that’s because the Matrix was based on this particular scenario.

We may never really know for certain if any of these theories provide the right explanation about our universe, our reality, and our existence. Nevertheless, these speculations and theories are telling of how intelligent and determined we are in finding the key that will unlock all the mysteries that plague our consciousness.

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Sources:

• http://listverse.com/2013/04/15/10-mind-blowing-theories-about-the-universe-and-reality/
• https://omni.media/creepy-mind-blowing-theories-about-the-universe
• http://elitedaily.com/envision/5-philosophical-theories-mind-blowing/1473123/
• http://www.oddee.com/item_98991.aspx

Big Freeze / Heat Death Theory

• https://www.universetoday.com/36917/big-freeze/
• https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_fate.html
• http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-will-universe-end
• http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_bigcrunch.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

Solipsism

• http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/solipsism
• https://www.britannica.com/topic/solipsism
• http://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

Presentism & Eternalism

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#PreEteGroUniThe
• https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/presentism_(philosophy_of_time).htm
• http://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/05/presentism-and-eternalism-two.html

Multiverse Theory & Fictional Realism

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
• http://www.space.com/32728-parallel-universes.html
• http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-physicists-ever-prove-multiverse-real-180958813/
• https://societyofmodernastronomy.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/the-brane-multiverse/

Simulation Theory / “The Matrix” Theory / “Brain in the Jar”

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis