(E) From the early days, philosophers have been philosophizing about human civilizations sculptured with two antagonists forces: love and hate, and four elements – the earth, water, air, and fire. Physicists have been theorizing about our Universe with many atomic and subatomic particles, and four fundamental forces: the gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces, that have started to take shape during, and after the Big Bang.
Through his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein explained to us that the gravitational force is a deformation of space and time, and other physicists through the Inflation Theory based on the Relativity explained to us that our Universe is expanding under the effect of dark energy.
Through the Standard Model, physicists have been explaining to us the dynamics of subatomic particles resulting from the interactions of the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces.
Finally through the M-Theory, physicists have been explaining to us that particles are one dimensional string like the notes that a musician can play on her violin, and have attempted to unify the Theory of Relativity that explains our Universe or the very big with Quantum Physics that explains the behaviors of photons, electrons, and other particles or the very small.
One of the most daunting concepts of the M-Theory is that it attempts to provide an explanation of what happened before the Big Bang, proposing that our Universe is of one of many Parallel Universes.
Within the Standard Model, almost 50 years ago, many physicists predicted the presence of the Higgs boson, which is thought to be the reason for the existence of the mass in other particles, and perhaps to reveal the characteristics of dark matter, for which we have no understanding what so ever but is considered as giving most of the mass to our visible cosmos. The Big Bang generated particles that do not have mass but acquired it through the Higgs field, giving birth to the story of our universe and the story of life on our blue planet.
And, for the last few years, one of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator of the CERN, near Geneva, was to finally detect the presence of the Higgs boson at the origin of the Higgs field.
Finally, the CERN today presented and celebrated their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson, and provided strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson.
Are we getting close to understanding our universe? Maybe! But history has shown us that the more we try to understand our universe, the more it challenges our man-made theories.
References
Note: The picture above is from the CERN – other pictures are from Wikipedia.
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