Physics face-off: Hadron Collider vs. Tevatron

By Sheila Lennon    Email this author

Fermilab
The Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill.

Race for 'God particle' heats up: The contenders: The Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland, and the Tevatron at FermiLab in Batavia, Ill., 40 miles west of Chicago.

BBC:

Europe's particle physics lab, Cern, is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle", its US rival claims.

The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass.

Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best.

Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris.

The LHC has been out of action since last September when an accident damaged some of the magnets that make up its giant colliding ring.

CERN
The damaged magnets of the Large Hadron Collider.

Project leader Lyn Evans conceded the enforced downtime might cost the European lab one of the biggest prizes in physics.

Cern and Fermilab officials squared up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago.

NYT: Officials Set Timetable for Getting Particle Collider Back on Track.

Sidebar: Alien life 'may exist among us': BBC.

Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.

Our planet may harbour forms of "weird life" unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.

This "shadow life" may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.

He has called on scientists to launch a "mission to Earth" by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.

Weird life could even be living among us, in forms which we don't yet recognise, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago.

"We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life.

"It could be right in front of our noses - or even in our noses," said the physicist...

Life could be far more common, varied and invisible to us that we've assumed.