Mass Murmur

Despite all pessimism, the Large Hadron Collider is back on track.

Despite all pessimism, the Large Hadron Collider is back on track.

Forget extra dimensions, string theory and all the esoteric end-of-the-world theories that the Large Hadron Collider has inspired. The biggest enigma of all is the one it is actually meant to probe. The enigma of mass. If you want to embarrass a physicist, all you have to do is insistently ask: do you really know what ‘mass’ is? The truth is that physicists don’t. Nobody does. Look it up. ‘Mass: the quantity of matter that a body contains’ says the Oxford Dictionary. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? But actually not. There’s some loopy talk here: if you look up ‘matter’, the answer you get is that it is something that has mass. It is in order to save themselves the embarrassment of shrugging off the most basic question there is, that physicists have come up with a $10-billion dream toy, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is a 17-mile tunnel in which protons are accelerated in opposite directions by super-cooled magnets at speeds close to the speed of light, until they collide at four points inside the tunnel. High-energy collisions could even produce a new particle. What the LHC is looking for, specifically, goes by the name of the Higgs boson, a theoretical construct. If found, it would join 16 other proven particles in the Standard Model, which depicts the smallest of the small.

The Higgs boson, tagged as the ‘God particle’, would be quite a find because it could finally explain why some particles have mass and why others don’t. After a year full of all sorts of fanciful theories of why it would never work, it is functioning as it was designed to and that in itself is an achievement. There is, of course, no guarantee that the LHC will find what it’s looking for. But if it doesn’t, that is also reason enough for physicists to start asking new questions.

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