In a world that is coming to an end (though it might not be,
but certainly feels that way; and in fact, upon close examination, and
depending on one’s definition of “world”, many worlds are indeed coming to
their ends) my husband (the Ranting Economist who no longer rants, since what’s
the point) and I watched a new NOVA episode yesterday on the CERN Large Hadron
Collider; or what I learned everyone calls the LHC (hmmm). We watched as the program described the
experimental data and teams that “confirmed” the existence of the Higgs Boson.
We then we watched the LHC close down for improvements that
will eventually allow protons to be accelerated to four times the speed used to
tease out the Higgs from the particle soup that emerges momentarily when
protons are collided at the speeds possible when the event was filmed (in 2012). The "new and improved” collider will reopen in
2015 (this year); and apparently “we” will now be looking for particles that might
prove something called Supersymmetry, which might explain (or illuminate if you will) the invisible “dark
matter” (tuhn tuhn tuhn!) in the visible universe; which to this artist made sense only when I thought
of it as some kind of parallel universe we can’t see, but hey, I’m just an
artist, and these days most everything sounds like some kind of parallel universe I can’t see....
Anyway, it was interesting to see how NOVA used cute little
graphics to take us through a process we could not see and most mortals do not
understand. And it was nice to see a
bunch of physicists get really excited; and to empathize with Higgs, as tears
came to his eyes when the existence of a particle proving his theory of a mass
field necessary for the formation of the universe was announced at CERN, where,
ironically, his first paper about all this was rejected. Irony I understand.
At the end of the show, when the LHC was being closed down
for improvements, The Ranting Economist mused, “That’s it (?) They spend all that money, find the Higgs and
now they shut down....” The Ranting
Economist feeling deflated after a program about physics was surprising to me, since
at heart he is a physicist (and a photographer and a guitar player). His comment prompted me to do a cursory
search on the cost of the LHC and I found out that it cost 13.5 billion dollars (or $13.500,000,000) to “find the Higgs” (though if Higgs is correct, and current experiments seem to confirm that he is, the Higgs was always here “in plain sight” in the form of the
visible universe...).
Well, in the Middle Ages we built cathedrals; now we build
particle accelerators. People just seem
to have to believe in something....
