Particular Matters

Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York who hosts television and radio programs explaining scientific matters, muses a little at BigThink on what comes after the recent discovery of the Higgs boson.

Dr. Kaku points out that the Higgs confirmation helps explain about four percent of what we see in the universe. But "dark matter" and "dark energy," two substances/forces/whatsits that are theorized to explain some inconsistencies between what we see when we look at the universe and what we're supposed to see according to what we know about it, make up a much vaster portion of that universe. And now it's time to go after them.

Some of the possibilities are grouped under a heading called "string theory," which is complicated beyond belief and involves thinking of a universe that has not three dimensions or even four if you count time, but of as many as eleven dimensions. Different string theories suppose different structures for this fundamental building block of what is, and for all I can understand about them they assign the number of dimensions to it that equals the number of Ibuprofen you have to take after having it explained to you.

The Large Hadron Collider, in between the times when it's building the black hole that will swallow the planet, could create some Dark Matter, which would be invisible but could be deduced by its effects on regular matter. It would offer some confirmation of string theory as well as the idea that the four major forces in the universe -- gravity, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetism -- were once one "superforce" in whatever state of existence the universe may have had prior to the Big Bang. This superforce seems unrelated to the syndicated 1990s television show Super Force about an astronaut who becomes a police detective to solve his dead brother's murder and who fights crime wearing a prototype suit of space armor while riding a weaponized super motorcycle.

Dr. Kaku says the LHC expermients could provide proof of Dark Matter if it finds something he calls a super-particle or "sparticle."

The problem of course, is that every time an experiment begins to seek out evidence of the sparticle, all of the other particles start chiming in "I'm Sparticle! I'm Sparticle!" and the real sparticle can't be determined.

The search may be a long one.