It is like a microscope when you shine a light on an object only the light in this case is two

“It is like a microscope when you shine a light on an object, only the light in this case is two proton beams,” Dr Virdee said. “The second thing you need with a microscope is an object to look at. Here what we’re trying to do is look inside the proton and to hit the quarks head on.”The search for the Higgs, Dr Virdee said, was part of a wider quest to find a single, unified explanation for all the forces of nature, whether they operated at the level of the atomic nucleus, or at the level of stars, planets and galaxies.”This quest to get to an understanding of the unified theory is the underpinning of most of science, if not all of science,” he added. “Our notions of space and time will change, our notions of fundamental forces will change, just like the revolution that took place at the beginning of the last century [with Einstein].”So the scientific stakes of this experiment are very high. This is why when we start collecting data, two thirds of the world’s high-energy physics community will be working on these experiments.”For years physicists have worked with what is called the “standard model”, which accurately explains the world around us and is supported by experimental evidence. But that model of the Universe broke down at low energies, Dr Virdee said.”Most of us believe the Higgs boson will regulate this problem,” he said. But although most theorists predict the existence of the God particle, not least Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University who came up with the idea 40 years ago, it is no foregone conclusion.Dr Virdee said: “Nature may be smarter than us, and it’s possible that there is some alternative mechanism that will be even more exciting from an experimenter’s point of view, because we don’t always like the theorists to tell us what we’re going to find.

We’d like to find things that nobody predicts.”Although the LHC can be compared to a microscope, it is also a time machine that can recreate the events immediately after the Big Bang, the cataclysmic event that created time and matter.Roger Cashmore, Cern’s director of research, said if the Higgs boson existed, it must have existed at the beginning of time, long before the creation of atoms and molecules on which life depended. “They would have been around and therefore you can work out how the universe would have evolved if you know what the ingredients were at that stage,” Dr Cashmore added.”The astronomers are rather limited; they can only go back about 300,000 years after the big bang. It is only at that point that electromagnetic waves, and lightwaves propagate. We can go back further.”Although Dr Cashmore and his colleagues cringe when they hear anyone talk of the God particle, they are effusive on its possible discovery.”What the Higgs does is give you a mechanism for generating a mass It would be spectacularly good to find the Higgs,” he said. “To get the mechanism or the underlying theory how this will work would be an enormous step forward But let’s leave God out of it.”. There was a time when advertising campaigns for alcoholic drinks were based on the thirst-slaking qualities or even the nutritional value of the beverages they championed. The veracity of such claims might have been open to question, but the boasts now seem charmingly coy.That was then.

Now, like a group of loudmouth lads at the bar, 55 minutes into happy hour, alcopop television adverts have burst on to the market, with an outpouring of sexual braggadocio. But the Government believes the drinks industry has gone too far. The ads, it says, encourage antisocial behaviour and unsafe sex.In a clampdown, ministers are considering new laws to ban alcohol commercials on television before the 9pm watershed and to end self-regulation of the advertising industry.Take, for example, one new advertisement, which features a young woman having an orgasm in a coffee shop at the mere thought of her Bacardi Breezer-swigging boyfriend. Another ad from the same campaign is set in a church but themed: “She Bangs!”Leading figures in the advertising industry are also concerned. The former head of a well-known agency said that drinks adverts were “stepping over the boundaries of taste and decency”. Hugh Burkitt, a former member of the Advertising Standards Authority and until last year the chairman of the advertising agency BDB, accused advertisers of breaking self-regulatory codes ­ and said the industry watchdogs were being too lenient.He warned that abuse of the rules by advertisers and manufacturers could lead to much tighter regulation of the industry. Adverts for drinks from alcopops to the more traditional gin and bitter are all overstepping the marks of taste and decency, according to campaigners.