Discovery Of The God Particle: A Good Bang For Your Buck? Copyright © 2013 by S. A. Jabeen All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written per- missions of the publisher is prohibited. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916416 ISBN-10: 1541295994 ISBN-13: 978-1541295995 Printed in the United States of America CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, North Charleston, SC To my parents I am nothing but what they made me. CONTENTS Preface (2017) 3 Preface (2013) 5 Part I: The Myth Time-Traveling Higgs Destroys The LHC 9 Part II: The Truth Summer 2012—Physicist’s Stone Is Found 17 What Is All The Fuss About? 21 Little Bit Of History 31 The Quantum Leap 35 Baby You Are Not Gonna Get It Tonight 57 Theory Of Everything 77 Part III: The Bang Our Latest Time Machine 97 Higgs Discovery—Doom Or Dawn? 109 Part IV: The Buck Good Bang For Your Buck? 119 How I Met My Soul Mate? You’ve Got Mail 133 Revolution vs Reform 145 Part V: The Crux The Human Gene 157 References 169 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? 2 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? Preface (2017) I wrote these pages in 2013, after the Higgs discovery was announced in 2012. All of us working on the Large Hadron Collider, or affiliated with the particle physics in general, were intensely emotional. It was easy to put those thoughts on the paper then. In the Fall of 2013, I started teaching physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and these pages stayed in a forgotten folder on my laptop. The 2016 U.S. election was an eye opener. The political news today shows signs of a tectonic shift in the U.S. pol- icy and the public opinion on some very important issues. The departments of science, energy, and environment are already feeling the tremors. In the last few years, the higher education and the de- mand for a rational argument have somehow become synonymous with elitism. Given the state of affairs, one has to worry about the response of the incoming repre- sentatives towards science in general, and towards the fundamental, basic science in particular. So, here I am—adding my voice to my vote, however feeble it may be. 3 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? 4 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? Preface (2013) In July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle, the Higgs-like boson. This is the la- boratory at the border of Switzerland and France, and houses the current largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, A few months later I gave a presentation at the Fermi National Laboratory, near Chi- cago, intended for the general audience, answering three questions: • Why this discovery is important? • Is it justified spending billions of dollars of tax- payer’s money on such endeavors? • What comes next? Is this the end of a science, or the beginning of a new era? Answers to these questions involve exploring ideas in sci- ence that changed our outlook towards our universe and its physical appearance. These are the ideas that challenged our understanding of the nature of nature itself. Ideas that prompted Einstein to say, God does not play dice. It is impossible to convey the full beauty and the mystery of these concepts, and these pages by no means explore a 5 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? full account of the relevant details. I have only followed a couple of threads in the complex and fascinating tapestry of the history of science, and even that very briefly. Above all, what you will find in these pages is my own feeling of awe at the realization of how wonderfully mysterious and magnificent this universe and our own existence is. Answers to these questions also involve exploring selfish- ness of scientists. Do they really just want to do what they like to do, and not what really matters for the society? Worse, have taxpayers pay for this indulgence? What is wrong with them? This is a question I have been asking myself for a while now. Why I feel so strongly about the way I do about this sort of research? And why I am affected the way I have been by these ideas? How can a dry graph of numbers can make people cry and weep with joy? What is it that makes some of us spend nights testing boring code? Or fixing experimental appa- ratus? All in the hope of a tiny glimpse into nature? I am not the only one who feels this way. Do the scientists want to explore nature for the sake of exploration, learning, and personal satisfaction? Aren’t they interested in finding solutions to the huge problems humanity is facing today? Are we really that selfish? This has now become one of those deep questions about the nature of nature that I would like to know the answer to. S. A. Jabeen April 2013 6 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? Part I The Myth 7 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? 8 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? Time-Traveling Higgs Destroys The LHC The date is 19 September 2008, and the place is the border of Switzerland and France. The weather is a bit chilly. Mont Blanc is visible and beautiful, as it is on most clear days. Just 9 days ago, the world’s largest, the most complex scientific experiment started its operation. For the inauguration ceremony, the French Prime Minister François Fillon and the Swiss President Pascal Couchepin were among the dignitaries. More than 60 countries have collaborated and contributed to the making of this extraordinary machine at CERN (the European Or- ganization for Nuclear Research). This instrument is called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, for short. During the historic ceremony CERN Director General Robert Aymar declared: Today is a day for CERN to thank its Member States for their continued support for basic 9 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? science, and for providing the stable frame- work that makes science of this kind possible, It is also a day for CERN and the global particle physics community to take a sense of pride in the achievement of bringing this unique facility from dream to reality, a pro- cess that has taken over two decades of careful planning, prototyping and construc- tion, culminating with the successful circulation of the machine’s first protons in front of a global audience on 10 September this year. The LHC is, as the LHC Project Leader Lyndon Evans put it, the largest and the most sophisticated scientific instru- ment ever built: We can now look forward to a new era of un- derstanding about the origins and evolution of the universe. Our latest time machine was ready to take us on a journey to discover things no one has seen since the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. A miracle of technology, more than 30 years in the making, and costing more than 4 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money from America to Europe to Asia. On September 10, the very first beam of sub-atomic parti- cles, protons, was successfully directed around the 27- kilometer tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider. That was just 9 days ago. At midday, September 19, during the testing of the ma- chine, an electrical failure caused a serious accident inside the underground tunnel, delaying the LHC operation by almost a year. While this horrible incident was shocking and disap- pointing for most in the scientific community, to some this 10 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? destruction was prophesied. In the years leading up to the start of the LHC operation in 2008, for many the LHC and destruction were becoming synonymous. Some people were worried about the radiation from the proton beams and the collisions. But an even bigger fear was that LHC will produce black holes big enough to engulf the whole world. Or that it might produce some strange new particles that might render the earth lifeless. Or that it could produce objects that could destroy matter, essentially destroying the world we know. The LHC is perhaps the first scientific experiment that faced a lawsuit even before it started operating. In 2008, before the LHC turned on, Walter Wagner, a retired nu- clear safety officer, along with a Spanish journalist, Luis Sancho, filed the lawsuit to stop the LHC. The lawsuit was dismissed due to a failure to show a credible threat of harm, by the judge. Later, there were also claims that severe flooding in 2009 was also a direct effect of the LHC operation. But perhaps the most interesting claim of destruction came from couple of physicists. The story starts in July 2007, with a paper written by two physicists, Holger B. Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya. The paper was titled, Search for Effect of Influence from Fu- ture in Large Hadron Collider.[1] In this paper they suggested, We propose an experiment which consists of 11 Discovery Of The God Particle—A Good Bang For Your Buck? drawing a card and using it to decide re- strictions on the running of Large Hadron Collider (LHC for short) at CERN, such as luminosity, and beam energy.