The Large Hadron Collider, the $10 billion machine and the world's largest particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, resumed operation last night in search of the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that is regarded as the universal origin of mass. That name of Higgs boson is branded in modern culture as the God particle - the fundamental building blocks of all things.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) operates the up to circulate a high-energy proton beam around the collider's 17-mile tunnel backed by some 26-nations with the goal simple and grandiose: It was created to discover new particles.
One of the most sought of these is the Higgs boson, also known as the God particle because, according to current theory, it endowed all other particles with mass. Or perhaps the LHC will find “supersymmetric” particles, exotic partners to known particles like electrons and quarks.
Such a discovery would be a big step toward developing a unified description of the four fundamental forces—the “theory of everything” [TOE] that would explain all the basic interactions in the universe. As a bonus, some of those supersymmetric particles might turn out to be dark matter, the unseen stuff that seems to hold galaxies together.
A unique video report from CNN on the collider and how the future may now play a role. Known as one of the father's of string theory, Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen has gained attention with a radical thoeory suggesting that the Higgs boson particle might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could create one, in a fashion similar to the time travel Grandfather paradox. The theory is explained in a New York Times essay.
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