Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics.  This is issue 005.

The significance of the $9 billion dollar particle …

In an earlier article, I talked about the Other Worldly difference between the near certainty, relatively speaking, of Newtonian physics and the chaotic, probability realm of quantum mechanics – how you can predict the path of a normal baseball being thrown against a wall bouncing back to you while a quantum baseball would just as likely go through the wall and come out the other side as it would return to you.

The fact that the Newtonian world we live in each day, looking so relatively stable, is actually resting on a world teeming with chaos and uncertainty – well, that makes this place we live in as much like Alice going down the rabbit hole as anything else.

Artist rendering of the Higgs Boson particle

It also leads us to the quest for the $9-billion particle, otherwise known as Higgs Boson.  The $9-billion cost is the budget used to create the Large Hadron Collider that will be used to attempt to find this little beastie.

Finding the Higgs Boson particle would, once and for all, unite the four forces that seemingly make up our world and usher in a New World Order with all sorts of possibilities for our understanding of the Universe, unifying the worlds of Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics.  The failure to find the particle wouldn’t make the Large Hadron Collider inert, but it would prove, once again, that speculation built on a hypothesis can easily lead the scientific community astray.

More to come on this one…

Watch for Issue #6 of Thomas’ “Quantum Leap”, here on A Sky Full of Stars, on January 15, 2010.

You can access all previous issues of “Quantum Leap”, here.