Your Guide to the Year in Science: 2008

Jellyfish invasions, Internet auctions, god particles: Read about the year's biggest science stories before they happen. Bonus: How to decipher geeky jargon and when to buy a DeLorean

Posted 12.27.2007 at 2:00 am 1 Comment

Gambling on a God Particle

What will the world's largest collider really reveal? Physicists lay out the odds on their most likely-and unlikely-theories

When it comes to the Large Hadron Collider, the accelerator scheduled to start smashing protons this May, theorists agree on one thing: It will most likely produce the Higgs boson, the elusive "god particle" theorized to give everything in the universe mass. Beyond that, they're taking bets. Fermilab collaborator Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua in Italy has bet $1,000 that we'll find nothing beyond the Higgs, but he hopes he'll lose. We asked him and other physicists to give us the odds on their favorites.

Courtesy: CERN

Higgs Boson: 9 in 10

Its existence would explain the origin of mass. Higgs bosons create a field through which all other particles must move. The Higgs field's resistance to this motion gives particles their mass.

Dark Matter: 3 in 5

Scientists know it's there; they just don't know what it is, and finding out is a task for the LHC. The substance makes up 80 percent of the matter in the universe but doesn't emit any light, so it's totally invisible.

Supersymmetry: 3 in 7

Some physicists suspect that all particles in the universe come in matched pairs. Half are familiar-electrons, quarks and neutrinos-but their theoretical counterparts, called superpartners, are still undiscovered.

Extra Dimensions: 1 in 25

Spatial dimensions beyond the known three of up-down, backward-forward and side-to-side could be diluting the force of gravity in our universe.

Mini Black Holes: 1 in 1,000

LHC collisions might produce harmless black holes, each a billion billionth the mass of a grain of salt, that evaporate almost instantaneously-too fast to consume any matter.

Parallel Universes: 1 in 10 million

Some theorists speculate that many universes exist side by side with our own on a cosmic landscape, each with its own laws of physics and constants of nature.

Cosmic Implosion: 1 in a googol*

If the fundamental vacuum state of the universe is not perfectly stable, the LHC could make it decay, taking everything in the cosmos with it.-Rena Marie Pacella

Turn the page to learn about the newest digs for biodefense researchers.

*One googol = 10¹⁰⁰ = 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000