The wires are a-buzz with the announcement of the discovery of
the Higgs Boson….or something. Scientists at CERN, working with
the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle smasher in
Switzerland, announced today that they have confirmed the
discovery of a particle within the Giga-electron Volt range
(GeV) predicted by theoretical models of the Higgs particle, but
are not in a position to yet say that what they found is
actually the Higgs. I thought this would be a good opportunity
to give my readers a brief overview of what’s going on and why
it’s important. One of the greatest mysteries still confronting
physics is how such an incredibly ordered universe emerged from
the chaos of the Big Bang. Imagine a sealed box filled with air.
The highly active nature of atoms in a gaseous state causes them
to move around vigorously and continuously collide with each
other, breaking up any kind of structure as it begins to form.
This is what’s known as a highly disordered state, and is
actually the most probable state o