THE Higgs boson has been very much in the news mostly in advanced countries over the past week or so. Named after British physicist Peter Higgs who first theorised on the idea in 1964, a particle was presumed to be the giver or donor of mass to any object in the universe and would also explain why some objects are massless. According to a National Geographic story (http://is.gd/ecevoq), signs of a Higgs-boson-like particle were collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) from about 500 trillion proton-proton collisions in 2011 and from 1,500 trillion collisions in 2012 – or about two and a half times more data than were available at the time of the particle's discovery announcement last July 4. Though much more time may be needed to identify the precise properties of the particle and whether it fully matched the Higgs boson model, the results achieved so far point to the marvels of science research once driven by theory, sound techniques and, above all, imagination which is, in the words of Albert Einstein, is more important than knowledge. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world," so said Einstein. The Higgs boson story does have much to say about the works, undertakings and capabilities of the human intellect as so evidenced by the research carried out in collider utilities and test labs as well as in libraries and on computer screens by physicists and experts from related fields of science and knowledge. Theories are experimented with and mathematical formulae are constantly put to test. But underlying the theories and formulae there is a wide space of imagination. In the case of science, so the history of human thought has it, knowledge, curiosity and innovativeness represent a very intricate web of boosters. There is definitely no fixed or known law to regulate this magical combination, but it has worked, and keeps working. For many people here and there, the story could go as so do the dozens of news stories with which media outlets bombard their folks every day. In a deeper insight, the discovery, especially when ultimately confirmed and fully proven, would upgrade and could even dramatically change our knowledge of how the universe, at least this universe of which our planet is part, works and what patterns shape its motion. Without the presumed particle, so said a Bloomberg Business-week Technology section writer (http://is.gd/wubiso), “we're all just massless, meaningless subatomic specks of dust floating in space (kidding)". Is it not worth researching, funding and also following up?
