Filling In The Blanks

The European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, will soon be conducting the most ambitious, and perhaps most important physics experiments of our age.   Certainly, at a cost of $8 billion, the Atlas Particle Detector will be the most costly.   Since the 1970’s when something called the Standard Model was developed, it seemed good enough for a very long time.   It simply worked, with a few significant contradictions and ambiguities.   It usually explained the behavior of the smallest and most basic of particles, thereby explaining the processes of energy, chemistry, and biology.   One might almost believe it explains everything, but it does not.

There are forces we do not understand.   Mass is not well understood, nor is the structure that holds it together.   A huge particle accelerator is being built which will stretch from Switzerland to France, three hundred feet underground, smashing particles together and examining what emerges from the detritus.   Some problems with the Standard Model could well be solved, as well as providing the information needed to produce a Unified Field Theory, the Holy Grail of physicists.

Albert Einstein, in his lifelong career, had no higher aim than to produce a Unified Theory, a theoretical framework that would explain, in essence, everything.   Many of his peers believed that he was wasting his time, that anything that worked fairly reliably was good enough.   In their opinions, such a goal was impossible, in his opinion it was essential.   The last 20 years of his life was devoted to this goal.   Perhaps, by finding the very building blocks of the universe, and observing how they work, today’s physicists will fill in the blanks.

Lisa Miller