Physicists Discover: The Universe Isn’t Real
By James Donahue
That
team of top world physicists toying with the world’s largest atom smasher in Geneva, Switzerland, appears to have discovered
what it was looking for; the so-called God Particle, formally known as the Higgs Boson.
But to their shock,
the discovery made during the effective simulation of The Big Bang, was that the universe as we know it should not exist.
To
simulate the Big Bang, the researchers sent tiny particles of matter called hadrons in opposite directions through a giant
circular tube and had them collide while traveling at nearly the speed of light. At the moment of impact, the researchers
were there to study what happened.
There has been a long debated theory that the universe was the product of just
such a collision of a few existing free quarks that crashed into each other, combined into hadrons. The forces then separated,
atoms formed as matter, and matter condensed into stars and eventually galaxies were formed.
According to what quantum
physicists now call the Standard Model, the quarks, hadrons, and other tiny particles called leptons and bosons are all found
to exist within the core of atoms. But atoms are found to contain very little actual matter, but are mostly space. Consequently researchers have been puzzled about how a collection
of atoms can form mass, thus making planets, rocks and our own bodies possible. They reasoned that a “God Particle” had to exist to make up some kind of magnetic glue to hold
these particles together and thus turn matter into mass. It was named the Higgs Bosom after physicist Peter Higgs, a scientist
at the University of Edinburgh who theorized its existence.
To find out if Higgs was correct,
and learn anything else that could be gained by simulating a collision of small particles, world scientists spent 15 years
and an estimated $9 billion building the massive 17-mile-long underground machine known as the Large Hadron Collider near
Geneva, Switzerland. It took them another two years to get it running successfully.
Sometime in 2012 they
got a glimpse of what they believe to be a Higgs Bosom. It came into view for a particle of a second during the explosive
force of the particle collision. But what they also found was that whatever might have been created in the midst of the Big
Bang, also would have collapsed within another fraction of a second. This is now dubbed "The Big Crunch."
Thus
the researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research project, or CERN, have found themselves right back where
they started. They still don’t know how the universe began, or why atoms magically clump together to form mass.
Perhaps
in the end, we will all have to return to the thinking of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher who suggested
that reality is in the mind. Kant believed reality is the phenomenon of our personal experience. All that exists is what we
personally see, smell, touch and feel. Reality then is uniquely different for each individual.
But even Kant fails
to answer the nagging question of how it all began.
