The Standard Model of the universe

Sometime in 1970s, scientists came up with the standard model of the universe, the universe is filled with particles and forces zipping around at the speed of light and colluding together to create a magical universe. We needed a model to explain the working of the universe to make sense of all these forces and particles and laws. For example, imagine a library strewn with reams of pages and to bring order to the library we will collect these pages and make them into books, next we will categorize these books by authors and genre now we have some semblance of order. Similarly, scientists came up with the standard model of the universe which is defined at a high level with about a dozen particles and less than half a dozen forces. We know that the universe works and hence assumptions were made in designing the model. Feed data into the model and you will get the same output behavior as in the universe and everyone was happy. However, the standard model does not consider gravity, dark matter and energy and subatomic particles and with the discovery of new particle and forces, the model is refined to make it more realistic, and the hope is that we would eventually have a model which replicates the reality of the universe. In the early days of particle physics, discovering new particles was relatively easy because the universe was uncharted territory. But as our understanding deepened, discoveries became more elusive. The last major breakthrough was the Higgs boson, detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) nearly a decade ago. The LHC is located near the France, Switzerland border and the particle accelerator tunnel runs 127 kilometers long and 100 meters underground. The LHC is designed to replicate the big bang event, at which time, subatomic particles colluded to form bigger particles. The hope is that by smashing together particles, we would be able to produce all the particles that were there during the big bang. Hydrogen atoms are first striped of electrons and the remaining protons are fired at each other. The superconducting magnets accelerate these protons to near the speed of light. Any particle which has mass cannot reach the speed of light, the greater the particle speed, the greater will its mass become and at the speed of light its mass will be infinite which would make it impossible to move it, with the exception of photons or light particles which travel at 186282 m/sec and this is because photons have no mass. When protons collide at close to the speed of light, they will decay and from this decay can be seen other subatomic particles. The work at CERN’s LHC is done and there are no more findings, it’s time to move on and the next big collider which is expected in China and hopefully we will find more particles. But why spend billions of dollars building colliders in the hope of finding these fundamental particles? Why are they important to us? To answer these questions, we go back in time to understand the many discoveries, the great scientists, the role of the medieval church and many such thing, to weave a story which is more fascinating than any science fiction movie you would have ever seen.