The Search for the God particle in Europe

Jack Dikian

December 2011

The Higgs Boson, nicknamed the God particle is the quantum of the theoretical Higgs field expected to have a non-zero vacuum expectation value thus, as the theory goes giving mass to every elementary particle that couples with the Higgs field, including the Higgs boson itself.

Experiments attempting to find the particle are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Now, CERN may have confirmed this theory. Scientists hunting for Higgs boson say they've found "intriguing hints" but not definitive proof that it exists, narrowing down the search and hope to reach a conclusion on whether the particle exists by next year. So if it does exist, it can help explain why there is mass in the universe.

It seems the data indicates the particle itself may have a mass of between roughly 114 and 130 billion electron volts. One billion electron volts is roughly the mass of a proton. The most likely mass of the Higgs boson is around 124 to 126 billion electron volts.

This Innocuous 1923 Photographic Plate made our Milky Way far less special

Jack Dikian

December 2011

One of the framed pictures I have hanging in my study is the 1923 photographic plate made with the Mt. Wilson Observatory's 100 inch telescope. Edwin Hubble was examining photographic plates of the Andromeda Nebula M31, looking for a novae.

On the night of October 5-6, 1923, Hubble located three novae, each marked with an "N” on this plate. Later he discovered that one was actually a Cepheid star - crossing out the "N" he wrote "Var!" (see upper right of the plate).

Harvard astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (who because of her gender was not allowed to actually use the telescope) provided one of the most important keys in astronomy discovering that Cepheids, regularly varying, pulsating stars, could be used as "standard candle" distance indicators, or in other words an objective gauge to measure distance.

So Hubble, by identifying such a star realized that Andromeda wasn’t a small cluster of stars and gas within our own galaxy, but a large galaxy in its own right at a substantial distance from the Milky Way. Right there and then, in that instant, mankind understood that the galaxy our star is in is just one galaxy in a universe filled with galaxies.