So, what exactly are these scientists trying to do with this thing?
Can anyone help me understand the purpose of the Hadron machine?
It will provide a critical milestone in our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe as well as a confirmation of our understanding of subatomic structure for a couple of reasons:
1) It will confirm what we think we know about the nature of mass and where it comes from.
2) If found it will confirm the standard model of particle physics. So far, the standard model is extremely successful in describing the subatomic world and three of the four fundamental forces that underlie our universe. As it developed, various forces and particles were predicted and in every case, those particles and forces were eventually discovered as particle accelerators grew more powerful and detectors and analytical techniques grew more effective.
The only particle which has a fundamental place in the Standard Model and has so far not been detected is the Higgs Boson; it's the Standard Model's last big test and is a chance to confirm how well we really understand the fundamental structure of matter and the three fundamental forces covered by the Standard Model.
3) If they don't find it, it will be just as exciting from a physics perspective. It may require an extensive modification to parts of the standard model and what we think we know, and will provide some interesting new theoretical and research questions. For example, it may imply there are other fundamental particles we don't know about. At the very least, if it turns out that the Higgs Boson is only detectable at higher energies than CERN can turn out, it will require a some theoretical changes.
4) If they find it, it will be more evidence that gravity will probably never be reconciled with the Standard Model. The hypothesized graviton particle isn't part of the Standard Model and because it is massless, tiny, and incredibly weak in its interactions, there's no way it could ever be realistically detected. But gravitons are required in most versions of string theory, so it would make an interesting research area.
But it's a weakly interacting and heavy particle that decays incredibly quickly, so it requires a lot of energy to make enough powerful collisions to detect them in a statistically relevant way.
5) It might create mini black holes. Dude. Black holes are awesome.
stripe said:
That'd be an indivisible piece of matter, would it?
An "atom", as the term was originally intended.
As far as we know, that is.
Particle physics has a way of making the indivisible, divisible. Also, if these elemental particles are truly point particles, then gravity is not going be reconcilable with the Standard Model, even though a number of different theories separately predict or imply the existence of a graviton particle.
It's one of the questions that String Theory (if it turns out to be true) would tackle, based on the mathematical model that all of the current fundamental particles known or predicted by the standard model are made up of these hypothetical strings.
It's an interesting idea and would explain some of the more counter-intuitive ideas in particle physics (i.e. it makes sense that a particle can have mass but it doesn't really make sense that a particle imparts mass to everything else).
