Hawking got the craziest bet in the history of physics?

A few years ago the world's media have published a provocative news is that the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking publicly bet $ 100 that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but other accelerators will never be able to find Higgs boson, which is regarded as the bearer of the majority of particle mass.

As Hawking insulted Higgs and his boson?

His statement caused a real alarm in the scientific community, a Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, after whom the boson was named (Research Higgs and his colleagues in the 1960s hit the foundations of the idea of ​​a mysterious particles) provocation he experienced as a personal insult. Higgs then complained that the answer to the challenge Hawking was like "criticism of Princess Diana", but he finally responded, however, the 2008th year after Hawking joked in an interview saying that would actually be more interesting if LHC does not find the boson.

On that occasion, Higgs said that Hawking's calculations on which rested his claims are incorrect and that the idea which is not a good run because he "attempted to combine theories of particle physics and gravity ... the way to any theoretical physicist would not be considered correct ".

No sign of "God particle"

Unofficial opinion polls in the last decade physicists have shown that the vast majority of them believe that there is a mysterious boson and that's just a matter of time before the LHC to discover it. Everybody seemed to be mainly Hawking, known for controversial statements, only flaunts his ideas and authority.

But even though the launch of the LHC on 31 March 2010. to date collected and analyzed data on petabits unprecedented energies of seven trillion electron, Higgs boson still no sign. Discouraged and disappointed with the results, scientists have finally passed Monday, 22 August, at the "Biennial International Symposium on Lepton-Photon Interactions" in Mumbai reported that the 95-odstotnom safe to say that the Higgs is not found in the area where the demand - from 145 to 466 billion electron.

Physicists at CERN are not giving up the search

However, physicists at CERN (which manages the LHC included) are not yet completely given up. Namely, there exists the possibility that Higgs at lower energies, in the zone between 114 and 145 billion electron (in which it asked the experts LHC's predecessor, LEP and still searching for the Fermilab Tevatron) and five-percentage ability to hide somewhere in the band, which has already been examined at CERN. So, the LHC operation will continue, boson will continue to look for, but every day there is less hope that it will be found, all more likely to get Hawking bet against all physicists of the world.

If still no bosons, of which the universe came into being?

However, the key question now is starting to worry scientists did not want to lose the bet, but where the mass in the universe if Higgs boson does not exist? It is possible that our response to this question will require theories that go beyond the existing ones.

According to the standard model of elementary particles at high temperatures above 10 to 15 Kelvin, what would be ruled after the Big Bang (where Electroweak symmetry has been broken and Electroweak forces are not yet split into electromagnetic and weak), did not have mass. A little later, back on this critical temperature the symmetry is spontaneously disintegrated and the W and Z bosons get mass.

One of the few existing alternative is the so-called standard model. theory "TEHNIKOL" physicist Stephen Venberg according to which the original symmetry in space and could interfere with other mechanisms, not only acting Higgs boson. But you will need to prove her so much energy that even the LHC is not up, and piles of money for expensive astronomical equipment.

It should be noted that if the LHC fails to find Higgs boson, with rare Hawking and his like-minded people, gloat even though one group did not participate in the bet. Specifically, the hand can be satisfied with rubbing and U.S. congressmen who 1993rd The U.S. voted against the construction of the Great Hadron Collider versions in the United States.