Lost and Found

  
Lost, near Verona Beach; 1 slightly used Higgs boson. When last seen it was accompanied by dark matter. If found, please call 417-299-xxxx for return and a possible reward. (*)

Actually, over $6 billion have been spent in the search for this critter (?) without any measurable success. It remains a goal for over 10,000 scientists, in dozens of countries with the aid of universities world wide. Opinions vary on the desirability of actually finding it. The search triggered the construction of the Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border. This device, with a 17 mile circumference, is abetted by magnets of immense power to enable the acceleration of a variety of particles. These particles make the circuit at very nearly, 99.9999991%, the speed of light, just short of 671 million miles per hour.

If your primary interest in life is particle physics, this is pretty heady stuff. Some of these experiments, already complete include: ATLAS—a Toroidal LHC Apparatus, CMS—Compact Muon Solenoid, TOTEM—Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation, p and Pb—Linear accelerators for protons, and SPS—Super Proton Synchrotron to name a few. The Fermilab has been very busy.

All of this is allegedly aimed at establishing further knowledge of the creation of the universe. It keeps a lot of folks busy and out of the taverns or away from other undesirable activities. I find this expenditure of effort very interesting since it was pretty much settled for me in Gen. 1:1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. There are many good reasons for advanced scientific research but belief in the prior scripture does free one up for other areas of endeavor which are also productive.

On the latest test, things got a little embarrassing. It seems during the course of the operation a bird flew by and dropped a small piece of bread into the collider. The damage was extensive and the delays in testing will be even worse as a result. $6,000,000,000 just doesn’t buy what it used to.


In His abiding love,

Cecil Moon

(*) The Higgs boson is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. At present there are no known fundamental scalar particles in nature.