so today, the scientists at CERN started up humankind's largest, most expensive, arguably most ambitious science experiment ever - the large hadron collider. almost two decades from conception to completion, and costing around $6 billion,

a friend of mine asked me today why this was such a big deal, and i guess it's not apparent to everyone what the enormity of this experiment is. theoretical physics, the science that brought us nuclear energy, the atom bomb, and a plethora of other more benign technologies like nuclear magnetic resonance imaging critical to the advancement of life sciences, has reached something of a plateau.

theoretical models exist to explain why some big sub-atomic particles like protons and neutrons have atomic mass and other particles, like electrons and photons are relatively mass-free. it has to do with particles as they interact with a theoretical construct referred to as Higgs fields and how interaction with these fields affect their kinetic and vibrational energies. i have to admit that the mathematics to understand these theories is completely outside of my capacity for understanding, but i love to take in the coles notes versions of these theories and add them to my superficial understanding of all of the different levels of existence.

the higgs field and its constituent "particles", possibly the Higgs Boson, have never been observed in prior atomic colliders, even though it was postulated last decade that they might be detectable in the Fermilab collider in Chicago. simply put, that collider could not accelerate protons to sufficient states to make these particles detectable.

the large hadron collider in switzerland is an order of magnitude more powerful and promises to provide definitive and exquisitely abundant experimental data that might possibly confirm the existence of this particle or these particles. so what is the higgs boson? well, it just might be the thing that explains how energy and mass relate to one another in a very meaningful way. it might also help us to bridge the gap in understanding between quantum mechanics and newtonian/einsteinan physics work - something that no theory has yet been able to explain. we have heard for almost a hundred years that the energy of something is equal to the mass of that thing times the square of the speed of light, but until now, we've never been able to tell the story of "why".

and that is the reason that the LHC is such a big deal. man has always been able to observe and make up a story as to "how" something happens... it's sunny because apollo is riding his chariot across the sky, water spins down a drain in a certain direction because of this or that rotation of the earth, people get cancer because of erroneous DNA replication that can be caused by ultraviolet radiation. but it's a much more difficult (and costly, apparently) question to ask "why". asking "why" something happens is a reach towards divine comprehension, and man is about to embark on a huge leap forward in that kind of comprehension.

i don't know how the modern world is equipped to deal with this. some people will ask, "how can we monetize this discovery?" will we be able to learn to build cheap and poweful death-ray weapons? will we learn how to travel faster-than-light? will we be able to replicate chocolate sundays? is the world today capable of sustaining discovery for discovery's sake anymore? i am doubtful, but excited that the prospect that this one endeavour demonstrating our race's collective will to ask fundamental questions of "why".

- g