The God Particle

Jack Dikian

October 2011

The Higgs boson is sometimes referred to as "the God particle" after the title of Leon Lederman's book, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles. The Standard Model gives us a framework for our understanding of the fundamental particles and forces of nature.

A theory to answer why particles have the masses they do or why they have any mass at all, however, isn’t so straightforward. Back in the early 60’s Peter Higgs proposed, the idea that space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. The Higgs boson is thought to give all matter mass.

This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. The larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. Thus the existence of this field is essential in Higg's hypothesis for the production of the mass of particles. As well as possibly explaining how particles receive their mass, some think it could also explain how the universe got its shape.

A theory put forward by researchers at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne argue that the Higgs boson might allow us to account for inflation, the otherwise unexplained process in which the early universe grew by a factor of at least 10^26 in an instant.

The Higgs boson is, however, the only elementary particle in the Standard Model that has not yet been observed in particle physics experiments.

Einstein's Biggest Blunder

Jack Dikian

May 2011

A team of planetary scientists using the Anglo-Australian Telescope contributed to the mapping of galaxies over a volume of the Universe and has shown that dark energy responsible for expanding the universe is real and not a mistake by Einstein viz a viz the cosmological constant.

When George Gamow was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he (Einstein) had remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder of his life.

Einstein introduced his cosmological constant it into his general theory of relativity almost as a last resort wanting to force his theory to yield a static universe as he had thought the universe to be.

We know now the universe is not static and is expanding at an accelerating rate, just as his original field equations were predicting. Einstein was never comfortable with the [constant] and a clue is in his 1917 paper which ends with

“It is to be emphasized, however, that a positive curvature of space is given by our results, even if the supplementary term [cosmological constant] is not introduced. That term is necessary only for the purpose of making possible a quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the small velocities of the stars”.

The survey of 200,000 galaxies by an international team, led by Chris Blake of Swinburne University, took four years to complete, aimed to measure the properties of "dark energy" — the concept of which was revived in the late 1990s when astronomers began to realize the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate.

The acceleration was a shocking discovery, indicating the universe is filled with a new kind of energy that is causing it to expand at an increasing speed.