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Journalism of Courage
It isnt every day that physicists care to invoke God. When they do,it often curiously points to a vast field or a subatomic speck that still stubbornly remains beyond their reach and gives pop cache to the most esoteric terms of physics. That was what happened in early 1990s,when Leon Lederman,a Nobel Prize-winning physicist,brought out a book called The God Particle on the missing link in the theory of how the universe works,on the elusive subatomic particle that could explain how everything gains mass. Most scientists squirm at the term and call it the Higgs boson,after the English physicist who first suggested a bosons invisible force field where most other particles drag,like feet on sludge,imparting them mass. Quibbling over the name apart,it has been a decades-long hunt for the Higgs boson and perhaps the wide-eyed scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN have finally seen it.
In the subatomic wreckage that followed the head-on collisions of trillions of protons in the Large Hadron Collider that winds on the French-Swiss border,scientists claim they have found some specks and bumps that could be the much-sought-after boson. In the sigma scale of certainty,its rated low,but even this perhaps-moment has eluded physicists until now so much so that even Lederman almost called it the Goddamn particle. What has physicists chilling the champagne is the fact that two teams have detected the bumps. It may be white noise also,and Higgs boson,which exists for one-septillionth of a second before decaying,may not have fallen in our net yet.
If it does,and we seem closer to it than we have ever been,that will be the OMG particle moment,a glimpse of both past and future. If it doesnt,that will still be exciting as it leads to newer research.
