Tom Avitabile
The God Particle
Dedication
To all the scientists who have delivered us from the dark ages, and to the men and women of conscience who have prevented them from returning us there.
And to the submariners of America’s Silent Service — past, present and those still on eternal patrol. If I write a thousand books, I will never come close to honoring their courage, sacrifice and grit.
Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning in Geneva,CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson, aka the God particle — or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be.
The long-sought particle may complete the standard model of physics by explaining why objects in our universe have mass — and in so doing, why galaxies, planets, and even humans have any right to exist.
With the discovery of the Higgs boson or something very like it under its belt, the world’s most powerful particle collider is ready to take a well-earned rest. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will shut down on 11 February ahead of around two years of upgrade work.
The break, known as LS1 for ‘long stop one’, is needed to correct several flaws in the original design of the collider, which is located underground at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. The fixes will allow the collider to almost double the energy at which it smashes protons together.
Epigraph
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
So a Higgs Boson goes into church. The priest says, “What are you doing here?” The Higgs Boson says, “You can’t have mass without me.”
Preface
Once upon a time… that is a refrain one might recall when first seeing the shores of Lake Geneva, dotted with fairytale castles, chateaus, small villages and picture-perfect walks. The calm, croissant-shaped ‘lake’ is actually a wide, flat portion of the river Rhone. On the French end of the crescent the gentle waves are refocused into a flowing river of crisp Alpine water that resumes its seventeen-year journey to empty into the Mediterranean Sea.
The storybook setting makes this idyllic place a most unlikely point of origin for the smallest particle of God to be used to ignite the ultimate cataclysm: the end of Earth, the solar system, the infinite universes beyond, indeed of all existence — gone in a flash — a flash to be seen only once, upon the death of time itself.
I. RUDE AWAKENING
Twang… Speeong… Pop… Grundle… she couldn’t make out the noises through her cottony ears. As on an early school morning with her mother calling up to her room, Brooke… you’ll be late for the bus, she didn’t have the energy to open her eyes. Ten more minutes, Mom. She just wanted to lie there and catch a few more minutes of…
A distant cough rose from within her, and upon inhaling, a knife-like slice of acrid air made her choke again. Her right cheek was stinging. Kaarrack… the intensity of that next percussive punch popped her eyes open. They immediately started to burn. She focused on the world, the world around her: sideways, and on fire!
Before her mind could fathom the reality of the situation in which she had awakened, her instinct kicked in and she reared up, her palms scraping against the same sandpaper-rough surface that must have chewed into her cheek. Still disoriented, she sensed a blanket of intense heat enveloping her. As she tried to stand, her head spun and she fell back onto the skillet-hot metal floor. No, not a floor… a deck! Fear welled up inside her, forcing her brain to focus on the present. Without consciously deciding to do so, she was up and fighting a shifting equilibrium. That’s right, I am on a boat! There was an explosion. She grabbed at the pain at the back of her head.
Then a tongue of flame lashed out. The scorching tip caused her to recoil and topple over the side railing that she had fallen near when the blast knocked her down. She fell a few feet and smacked into the salty cold of the sea. The shock of the immersion, the sudden muting of all sound into a watery gauze, and the radiating pain from the salt water digging into her bloodied cheek and hands snapped her into survival mode. She frog-kicked back up to the surface. Gasping for breath, she broke the surface of the ink-black water, which was streaked with orangey glints reflecting off the wave tops. Using her arms proved painful, but she managed to turn herself in the water, toward the heat, and saw she was yards from a burning ship. Around her was fiery flotsam and debris. The main part of the vessel was gone, seemingly bitten off by a huge sea monster that had taken out the wheelhouse and most of the superstructure with one bite. The ship was rolling over away from her. The bomb must have been on the far side, she thought. She spotted a chair cushion floating a few feet from her, and holding it beneath her chest and chin she kicked her feet, creating more distance between herself and the still-exploding vessel. Another concussive thud was immediately followed by a flaming piece of wreckage that landed with a splash just ahead of her. She made her way around it.
Her head was sideways on the soggy but buoyant cushion. She had never been so exhausted, even on the survival course at Quantico, where pushing agents to their physical limits for three days was the whole idea. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something rip through the wave tops. She propelled herself upward to see if she could spot it again. There were four of them. Four fins slicing through the water… Sharks. She turned; there were more of them, circling her and the wreckage. About ten yards ahead of her one breached the surface, with its powerful jaws locked around the torso of a man. He screamed a blood-curdling scream. The shark’s white underbelly flashed in the light of the flames as the creature smacked back down onto the surf, bringing its prey beneath the waves. She heard the man’s final scream, then he gurgled as he was dragged below. Suddenly she was aware that the fins were closing in on her. She let the cushion go and kept turning in the water, trying to see which one would close for an attack. A fin heading straight for her was hard to see, as it was just a thin line above the dawn’s dim-lit water. She braced herself. As the animal approached she punched down with all her might. She made contact with the nose of the killing machine and it flicked its tail and shimmied off, away from her. The punch cost her dearly. The pain in her arms almost knocked her out. There was another fin about twenty yards out coming around and in. She wouldn’t be able to muster that kind of punch again. She tried to position herself in the water to kick this one. Intellectually she knew this was a fight of attrition — she would not stop bleeding and they would not stop coming. She would be shark food as soon as her strength gave out or one blindsided her from the back or beneath. Then she looked to her right and thirty feet off was a capsized Zodiac. She started to swim toward it, but her arms were like lead and the best she could do was thrash around. The shark was coming right at her now. In a panic she looked to her left and saw the cushion bobbing only a few feet away. She screamed with every stroke from the searing pain that shot throughout her body as she swam to it. Brooke placed it under her chest again and kicked like the devil to make it to the upside-down rubber craft before the shark intercepted her. From the corner of her eye she saw the fin approaching as she was just feet from the boat and safety. The shark was closing too fast. She abandoned the cushion and started long strokes; it felt as if her arms were ripping out of their sockets. She was ready to give up and give in to the pain, which was so intense she started to hallucinate. She heard her brother, Harley’s, voice, “Don’t give up, Brooke. You can do it. Push harder! Come on, Brooke, work through the pain.” She yelled out of excruciating pain, “I can’t Harley, it hurts so much!”