Science our each day
Sunday, 18 September, 2016
ALFREDO ARANDA FERNÁNDEZ*
What are we looking for?
THE pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the nature represent some of the intrinsic characteristics of the human being. Search and explore is part of the nature that, through us, that is to say, through itself, is autoexplora and investigates. And since we do science, those searches almost always result in ideas and knowledge that can be applied in other areas, many in issues of practicality. Examples of this, related to accelerators, colliders, and detectors, are: the internet –invented at CERN– the treatment of cancer with accelerator-collider, to the development of 3D imaging techniques for exploring the human body, and a long etc.
Something very important to the way in which this works is that the initial phases of development and planning of projects of this kind do not contemplate the resolution of the practical problems that eventually end up solving. When they were planning the construction of the LHC, for example, I didn’t think about how to design it to solve the problem of kill cancerous tumors inside the human brain. It turns out that the technology developed to carry out the program of scientific exploration of the LHC can be used and applied to other things that, as time progresses, they develop, this is wonderful! And if that was not what was sought, then, what you were looking for? How little we built only to find the Higgs?
No. The Higgs was one of the many reasons. We’re looking for other things that give clues to a deep aspect of nature. For example, we know that there are 12 particles that make up matter present in everything visible in the universe. One of them, perhaps the most familiar is the electron. Another, the last to be discovered (1994) is a particle with the name top quark. To discover the Higgs we have understood how it is that particles acquire their mass, however, the mass of the electron is one-millionth the size of the mass of the top, and we have no idea why (well, yes we have ideas, but we don’t know yet, we need more information).
Another problem is the problem of dark matter: there Exists matter in the universe that does not interact with the light and that, therefore, we can not see. The lyrical ability of the physical causes we call dark matter, which interacts gravitationally and, it is likely, although we still do not know, you interact through the weak nuclear force. We don’t know what it’s made of. We know that it is not made of the 12 known particles, but that is all. Any Ideas? A lot, but we still don’t know which one is correct. Another problem cotorrón: the Big Bang is the theory that describes the origin and evolution of the universe. One of the discoveries the most shocking fact for humans makes already about a century, is that the universe is expanding: every time it is more –or, if you prefer– it was increasingly small, so much so, that there was a time in which the energy density and the temperature were immensely high, with values that we have never experienced on Earth (until now with the LHC). When you have not experimented with these values, we cannot be sure that our theory is valid at that stage of evolution.
One of the latest ideas –which is related to the problem of understanding at the microscopic level, gravity– contemplates the possibility that there are more than the four dimensions that we have verified. And if there is a theory or model that suggests the existence of more than four dimensions, the questions are: How do I check? How can I see them? How are you?
The LHC has the potential to explore and discover aspects of nature that might give clues and/or confirmation on the ideas that we have generated, to try to solve this type of problems. By doing so, not only will it help you to know more, will also help the other areas of knowledge with techniques and technology that would not have existed otherwise.
*General Coordinator of Scientific Research of the University of Colima
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