On the morning of a press conference some said could herald the scientific discovery of the century, Rob McPherson and his wife were debating who would take their son to early hockey practice.
McPherson, an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria and his wife, Isabel Trigger, are both particle physicists involved in research thatB次元官网网址檚 trying to further our understanding of how everything as we know it came to be.
Serving as a spokesperson for Atlas-Canada, McPherson ended up staying home to watch the announcement by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN.
B次元官网网址淚tB次元官网网址檚 fantastically exciting,B次元官网网址� McPherson said about the news, which he spent the day explaining to media outlets across the country.
McPherson and Trigger are among 3,000 physicists working with the Atlas team at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Switzerland. Atlas and a competing team known as CMS both released results on Tuesday offering a tantalizing glimpse into the behaviour of the elusive Higgs boson particle.
The Higgs boson has so far only existed as a theory, though one necessary for the Standard Model of physics to work.
B次元官网网址淗iggs, by itself, canB次元官网网址檛 be the whole story,B次元官网网址� McPherson said. B次元官网网址淭here has to be something else to keep it stable.B次元官网网址�
Which is why McPherson thinks that while calling Higgs boson B次元官网网址渢he God particleB次元官网网址� is a great way to capture the publicB次元官网网址檚 imagination, there are many more questions that need answering.
If scientists succeed in definitively discovering the Higgs bosun particle B次元官网网址� expected to happen next year B次元官网网址� the next step will be to find what else is hiding. Theories about mysteries such as dark matter, thought to make up most of the matter in the universe, and even extra dimensions in spacetime could be opened up for closer study.
UVic has played a key role in the development of Atlas, which searched for the Higgs boson by using the massive particle accelerator at CERN. Particles are torn apart at tremendous force and slammed into layers of lead and liquid argon. Scientists measure how the energy produced by the collision relates to theories about what we already know about subatomic particles. What scientists with both Atlas and CMS found was evidence of activity on a scale that fits into where theories suggest the Higgs boson should be.
Finding this elusive particle is a big deal because it would help with our understanding of what happened in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. ThatB次元官网网址檚 how long it took, theories suggest, before B次元官网网址渟tuffB次元官网网址� began to stick together in our universe.
Or, as McPherson explained to his nine-year-old hockey playing son, weB次元官网网址檙e a little closer to understanding how to build planets, stars and even ourselves.
editor@saanichnews.com
