Adventures in Particle Physics

I've been following the news from the thing that was supposed to generate black holes over in Europe with much anticipation. Sadly, there's been no black holes, and no evidence that there will be black holes.
But still, there's been all this talk of the Higgs Boson. Some people call it the God Particle. If they find it, the Standard Model of particle physics continues to find support. If they can't find it, then all the other theories of particle physics are still in the ring. They don't know exactly what they're looking for, so it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, when no one's ever seen a needle, they just "know" it's not as big as a tree or squirmy like a snake. So all these scientist people are very excited because there's  a little blip in the data coming out of the black hole generator that suggests that maybe there is such a thing as the Higgs Boson. It might be just a blip though, because it's statistical significance isn't significant. Cool, yeah?

If it doesn't make sense, there's this cool little tutorial on particle physics  that I found. It has quizzes and pictures and everything. Be sure and click on the "unsolved mysteries" link. That's where all the fun stuff is.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, that if they find the Higgs the physicists will be excited, but it will be kind of a letdown, after all the fun of hunting for it--smashing atoms and all. If they don't find it, the exciting hunt will continue, but apparently without black holes.

Also, there's a lot the Standard Model doesn't explain, even with the Higgs boson. Like gravity. Or why there is so much matter and not so much antimatter, as far as we can tell, when they're supposed to be equal (?). Or anything about dark matter. Basically, the Standard Model accounts for the behavior of about 4% of the universe. So the Higgs Boson, if they find it, will make them more sure than they were before of approximately 4% of the way things work.

According to BBC, "the discovery or non-discovery of the Higgs boson will mark the end of only the beginning of a new chapter in physics." (I want a job where I get paid to write sentences like that.)

I think the Higgs boson is kind of a disappointment, as a god particle anyway. Black holes popping up in France and Switzerland would be so much more dramatic.

No photos today. I've been trying and trying to get a photo of the Higgs boson, but no luck so far. I'm not entirely sure what it would look like anyway.

But there's a camera that takes photos really fast. Those are cool pictures, if you'd like to look at pictures. And little videos.