I am interested as much by the money spent on the Hadron Collider as the physics behind the exploration of trying to find something so small that it passes through matter. It actually sounds vaguely ridiculous because that makes it to all intents and purposes invisible. Like particles that have no mass and the idea of the neutrinos which pass right through the planet.
I know scientists say that the universe they create on paper has to reflect the universe in which the planet Earth could be created – a way of saying that we embody the secrets we are trying to unlock. But I wonder sometimes if the mathematics becomes so arcane that very few people actually understand it and those who do are just trying to feel their way forward. A little like the various string theories that were confusing everyone until one physicist came along and proved they were all the same string theory.
It would be fascinating to live in a universe where there were invisible particles (and we mean invisible to other particles because they don’t inter-react) but is that significant? Why should there only be one such particle? And why does mass matter at the level of particles? And maybe invisible particles exist but are trapped inside other particles?
I hope they find it but right now it all sounds a little bit like magic…