The World's Longest Game of Hide and Seek

The scientific community – and other interested people besides – received some good news this week, when it was revealed that, after years of crashing particles together and trying to make it look like work, scientists working for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) revealed that they may have found the elusive Higgs-Boson Particle. The so called God Particle.

Scientists at CERN were quick to point out that they are not yet 100% sure they have actually found it. They have found something that very much resembles the elusive particle, but as of yet they can’t be sure and still have some more work to do. But for most people that is enough. And enough to get scientists very excited indeed.

The Higgs-Boson has been the Holy Grail of Particle Physics for several decades, ever since Peter Higgs proposed its possible existence back in 1964. The search for the Higgs-Boson was one of the major reasons behind the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, that thing which a lot of people were convinced would destroy the world.  The Higgs-Boson is important because it explains why other major particles in the so called ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics, - such as photons and quarks – have mass. It is the particle behind the particles. It is the particle that explains other particles. That is why it has been given the nickname the ‘God Particle.’

Despite not being a scientist I was excited by this news as well. Not only because I think the concept of the Higgs-Boson and being able to explain why the physical universe works the way it does is interesting, but because of what the search for the Higgs-Boson represented.

Firstly, in a multiply divided world the creation of the Large Hadron Collider was a collaborative effort. Just building it involved over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries working together for over a decade. Then once it was completed the scientists who manned it came from all over Europe. No one nation- save perhaps Switzerland which it sits under – can claim superiority where the Large Hadron Collider is concerned. It doesn’t belong to anyone. It is a place for people to come together and work together. It is where the best of the best from the scientific community come to work.

Secondly, people wanted to find the ‘God Particle’ simply because they wanted to know if it was there. All that comes from finding it is recognition. It doesn’t have a material use; it can’t be used to make money or turned into a weapon. All it does is explain why our world works the way it does.

In a world, and at a time, when it can increasingly feel like all people care about is making money, and the economic or industrial use of a new invention or discovery, when the news is filled with death, dishonesty and unhappiness, the concept of people coming together to search for something, simply for the sake of knowledge, so they can once and for all “yes this thing exists” is a little….comforting.

As I said above, they still have to do some work to prove that what they have found is definitely the Higgs-Boson, but for the moment they think they have found it. For the moment, that’s good enough for me.