Looking for God particle with science and 14 trillion volts

Reports from July 26, 2010 indicate that a powerful new atom smasher in Europe is producing results in record time, and is already operating at over three times the energy level of any other particle accelerator in existence.  The $5 billion device called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had been plagued by delays for over a year, but has been operating smoothly since March, and has already replicated work said to have taken decades on less powerful machines, such as the US Tevatron particle accelerator. 

The LHC accelerates highly energetic streams of particles to nearly the speed of light along a 27 kilometer loop, buried under the Swiss and French border near Geneva.  It has already produced beams with energy levels of 9 Trillion electron volts (9 TeV), and aims to produce beams with energy levels in the 14 TeV range by next year. 

At these energy levels it is hoped that the particle accelerator will either confirm or disprove key predictions of the current reigning theory, the so-called Standard Model in physics, which would have enormous implications for the future direction of science.  In particular scientists are keen to finally track down a particle predicted by the Standard Model which, as yet, has never been seen, the Higgs Boson, also know as the God Particle. 

If the particle cannot be observed using the LHC then scientists are already proposing that larger, more powerful devices will be needed, which would be even more expensive and take decades longer to construct.  However, it is hoped that scientists will learn a great deal using the LHC, and perhaps will get lucky in finding their elusive quarry, the Higgs Boson, plus maybe a few unexpected results along the way. 

Nuclear science and particle physics are relatively new fields which only began in earnest in the early part of the Twentieth Century.  Since that time, we have seen atomics bombs developed and tested right here in New Mexico, coming out of the work of Los Alamos National Labs (LANL), Sandia National Labs (SNL) in Albuquerque, et al. 

In the intervening decades, however, a great deal of work has also been done overseas.  The LHC is an outgrowth of its predecessor CERN, a European nuclear research organization, which also, coincidentally, brought us the World Wide Web. 

It is hard to predict what future discoveries will be made in this field, but it is likely that they will be every bit as amazing and brilliant as the atomic blasts they unleashed last century.