THE GOD PARTICLE?

On 31December2011 I made the following predictions:

August       Mars Science Laboratory to land on Mars

                  Could this be the month that:

                      -  CERN confirms the "God Particle"?

                      -  LLNR attains net positive on laser fusion?

Well, I was off by a month, as CERN today announced that they discovered a subatomic particle that "could" be the Higgs boson, or "God Particle."    That's Peter Higgs to the left.  The Mars Science Lab is still scheduled to land on August 6, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has nearly two months left to reach net positive at their National Ignition Facility.  I spent some time at LLNR on the staff (somewhere down the chain) of John Nuckolls and Edward Teller in the early to mid '70's, but abandoned laser fusion because I thought the laser to actually accomplish this task was nowhere close to being invented.  I was right, for just about forty years later, they still have not yet even attained net positive.  However, they are getting close.  I now, though, doubt very much that they will accomplish this break-even point by next month.  Of all the possible names, a small company in New Jersey, called Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, also reported intriguing results earlier this Spring.

Why God Particle?  It is omnipresent and hard to find.  A more likely reason is that Nobel laureate and former director of Fermilab, Leon Lederman (right), wanted to call his 2006 book the "Goddamn Particle," but he was overruled by the editor, and the title became "The God Particle:  If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?"

 Click here to hear Michio Kaku talk about the God Particle.  I could, further simplify, but let me call on Archana Sharma.  Oh, by the way, that drawing above is supposedly a proton-proton collision creating the Higgs boson.  Here is another:

We all know Peter Higgs now, but what about Satyendra Nath Bose (left), from where comes the name of this sub-atomic particle?  He co-authored a paper with Einstein to explain Planck's Law, but passed away in 1974.  India thinks that the name  should not be Higgs boson, but Higgs Boson, or, maybe, even, Higgs Bose.  According to Rabindranath Tagore, first non-European to win a Nobel prize in literature:

What's remarkable about Bose is that he was a self-taught scholar with a wide range of interests--physics, mathematics, chemistry biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature and music.  

Interestingly enough, all the high energy physics stars not at CERN happen to be in Australia, where I am, perhaps 800 of them.  They expected a thousand, but some stayed back at the Swiss-French border and the economy was also a problem.   Then, too, Lady Gaga is on the continent, with one of my predictions, the Beach Boys, coming next month, in six cities.  I thought they were both incapacitated, but Kenny Rogers and Glen Campbell will, together, have a Sydney concert, also next month.  Prices?  $100 to $300.  How did I get from The God Particle to....

So is is this the end of physics?  Hardly, for what about dark matter and energy, gravitational waves, faster than light travel (which has been observed) and the ultimate theory of everything.  In fact, the latest reports indicate that the Large Hadron Collider  at CERN will undergo a $2.3 billion upgrade (already a sum of $10 billion has been spent) to find dark matter.  They might close down this facility for more than two years to increase the power by another magnitude (10).

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