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| Image: CERN |
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 10^26. That's what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, could shed light on this mysterious growth, called inflation, by catching a glimpse of the particle behind it. It could be that the main target of the collider's current experiments, the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow all matter with mass, could also be this inflationary agent.
However...
TECHIE BUZZ:
The Higgs announcement
The announcement is expected to a big one – especially with the predicted discovery of the Higgs by the end of the year. The status of the Higgs will not be changed to ‘discovered’, but we will get to know how far we have actually reached.
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