The rumors are flying after a blog post suggested the Tevatron at Fermilab may have found the elusive Higgs boson.
I'm a bit out of my element when it comes to particle physics, but the Higgs boson is kind of a big deal. According to the standard model of particle physics, the Higgs boson would be the elementary particle that imbues other particles with mass, but so far no one has been able to detect it. It has been hoped that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN would be able to produce the Higgs... but maybe Fermilab has beaten them to the punch!
Check out this funny and somewhat trippy little New York Times article from a while back, in which a couple of scientists suggest that the Higgs boson "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather." Woah.
Stay tuned for developments.
Now that would be a trip.
ReplyDeleteBut why would the Higgs boson stop there and not slide all the way back and put a kabosh on the whole BIG BANG theory?