The world's biggest physics experiment using CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) aims to answer one very simple question: What is mass? Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass. In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle. Through the proton collisions in the LHC, scientists hope to find fairly quickly the Higgs Boson, named after Higgs. According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs. The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive. Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe could never have taken shape in the aeons after the Big Bang, and life could never have begun – on Earth or, if it exists as many cosmologists believe, on other worlds either. The latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter – such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets – makes up just 4% of the Universe. The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious “stuff.” But Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College, London, told BBC News: “Nature can surprise us... we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us.” Hawking's bet While questioning the likelihood of finding Higgs Boson, renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said the LHC experiment could discover superpartners, particles that would be “supersymmetric partners” to particles already known about. “Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together,” he told the BBC. “Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe,” he added. Hawking has bet $100 (SR375) that the experiment will not find the Higgs.
