Scientist at CERNs, the fine people who brought us the W and Z bosons, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn sites web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter, which could bring us closer to understanding how the Universe works.

Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the “force.” The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics–but no one’s ever found it.

In theory, when the 17-mile-long ring and tons of machinery that form the Akira-like LHC begin operations in 2008, the physicist at CERN will be able to produce the Higgs boson. Observing it could confirm many physicist predictions and “missing links” in the Standard Model, which is a physics theory that aims to describe how elementary particles interact with each other.

The existence of the Higgs particle, also called the God Particle, has only been predicted so far. It was first proposed by University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs in 1965, after coming from a walk on the mountains, and if confirmed by the LHC, it could bring scientists closer to the Grand Unified Theory, “which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces,” and also explain why the fourth, gravity, is weak compared to the other three: electromagnetism, strong force, and weak force. Yes, I don’t understand it either, so I’m just going to list other of the cool stuff that the LHC will produce: strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.

I don’t know about you, but although I’m sure I’m all full of Higgs particles, the other things I can see in the mirror are my micro black holes. [Wikipedia, National Geographic via The Force.net — photos from CERN Document Database, Flickr and ST Microelectronics]

[From Scientist Looking for the Force Finally Put CERN's Large Hadron Collider to Good USe [Darth Higgs]]