I recently saw Saturn through a telescope for the first time. To see a faint object in the sky transformed into a small sphere with rings around it was, for me, an astonishing experience, and something that I would recommend to everyone.
Mankind has surely marvelled at the heavens and pondered the enormity of the universe since the dawn of human civilisation, but we have also wondered about the smallest things, the fundamental building blocks of the universe, for a significant period of time.
Nearly 2500 years ago, Greek philosophers proposed that everything was made of tiny indivisible particles, far too small to see, and the word "atom" in fact derives from the Greek word "atomos" meaning "not cut".
Scientific evidence for the existence of atoms was only obtained in the 19th century and by the early 1930s, we knew that atoms were made up of three subatomic (smaller than an atom) components; protons, neutrons and electrons.
Around this time, these subatomic particles were thought to be indivisible, and therefore the fundamental constituents of the universe.
And then in 1937 the discovery of a pesky little particle, the muon, put paid to such comfy certainties and all heck broke loose. It was eventually shown the proton and neutron were not fundamental particles, but composed of still smaller particles, quarks.
By the 1960s, many particles comprised solely of quarks had been discovered - these were given the collective name hadrons - but the question of which, if any, of these particles were elementary remained.
Eventually, some sort of order was brought to this plethora of particles in the form of a theory called The Standard Model, which divided subatomic particles into two groups called Fermions and Bosons.
The Standard Model made testable predictions, such as the existence of the Higgs Boson, which gives rise to mass. It is the search for this which has in part inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an awful lot of expensive hardware situated underground on the border of France and Switzerland.
The LHC has been designed to accelerate beams of protons travelling in opposite directions to essentially the speed of light, and then to smash them into each other. Such collisions involve energies that are truly mind-boggling, leading to the destruction of the protons and the production of a myriad of subatomic particles.
Scientists around the globe are hoping that among these will be the hitherto unobserved Higgs Boson. Should this actually be discovered, then the Standard Model's prediction of 12 fundamental Fermions and a number of fundamental Bosons would place the theory on solid experimental ground, and it might well be that we have in fact reached the limits of smallness and divisibility.
Unfortunately, the LHC was shut down less than two weeks after it was fired up last September, but experiments are on track to resume later this year.
The total cost of the LHC is in the order of 7 billion, ridiculously expensive, some might say, for what could well be a fruitless search. Given that the US Government recently bailed out their economy to the tune of $700 billion, it seems like small change - and money well spent.
- Dr Blackman is an associate professor in the chemistry department at the University of Otago
