An Interview with a Guy at CERN about Seriously, What’s the Deal with the Higgs Boson

CERN in Geneva published the latest Large Hadron Collider (LHC) research results the other day regarding the elusive Higgs boson, a tiny building block particle that’s never been witnessed but its existence is crucial to quantum theory. It’s so crucial and elusive that some people even call it the “God Particle,” though that term pisses off a lot of the scientific community because it’s a bit grandiose. Lots of scientists had wet dreams about its discovery, and they didn’t get to hear the news they were all waiting for: That it was definitively spotted and tagged, like some animal in the wild. Since many people don’t seem to grasp what the excitement is all about, I asked Tom Whyntie, technical assistant at the LHC, to explain.

What’s happened since you started the LHC for the first time?

Tom Whytnie: Well, to make it short, in October we stopped conducting our experiments that have been going on all year. The machine functioned extraordinarily well and we could sample of a lot of exciting data. We want to find Higgs boson, the particle that gives mass to all particles. During our research this year we found multiple pointers that allow for certain speculations, but we don’t have enough data to confirm anything. Basically this publication of research results is a big cliffhanger before we can present any definite answers next year.

But people said you are a 95 percent sure what mass the Higgs boson has if it exists…

The point is, we don’t know enough about the Higgs to say what it looks like or what we’re looking for in order to find it. But we’re definitely cornering it. So we managed to exclude many improbabilities regarding its mass, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for it to hide from us. But there is still the possibility that it’s all a coincidence.

What would that mean?

Without the Higgs boson we’d need to start over from the beginning. At the moment we assume that the whole universe, really all of it, consists of twelve elementary particles and the Higgs boson is part of a mathematic trick that we play on these elementary particles, so they display the mass that we know they have. Either way, the Higgs only exists because of this mathematic trick and besides that we don’t have any proof for its existence.

How would you move on if it didn’t exist?

It was mentioned for the first time in the 60s, so that would mean more than 40 years of scientific research would be rendered obsolete. On the other hand we’d know for sure that the “God Particle” doesn’t exist, and that we would need to come up with alternative explanations for why particles have mass. That wouldn’t be too bad though … science always depends on evidence and data.

The LHC is going into hibernation now. What’s going to happen next year?

We’ll see a lot more research results and data. We’re at a point in time where we know that we will definitely be able to say whether or not Higgs boson exists within the next year. Today was like a Facebook status update for us and our relationship status with the God Particle and it’s still “complicated.” But we have enough reasons to continue our research.

By the way – now that we’ve seen that the world still exists – what happened to the whole black hole thing that was going to swallow our planet?

We’ve always known that wasn’t going to happen. What we’re doing here happens in the upper atmosphere of earth constantly and with much higher levels of energy, too. But people love that apocalyptic shit. -by Felix Nicklas

Originally published on our parental unit website, VICE.com.

Connections:

• What Finding The Higgs Boson Would Actually Mean
• Do I Detect a Hint of Higgs Boson in This Universe?
• Motherboard TV: Big Bangs and Black Holes
• Peter Higgs Is Going to Explain His God Particle To You Now