The Oh My God Particle

This post is a bit of a present to myself seeing that it is Christmas and all.

It is about a little fella known as the “Oh My God” particle. The name, for those interested, is a bit of a dig at those who call the Higgs Boson the God particle.

The “Oh My God” particle is actually no more than a humble proton. While the proton is covered in detail elsewhere, this post is about a proton first seen on the 15th October 1991.

Over at the university of Utah they have a cosmic ray detector called the Fly’s Eye II located about an hours drive from Salt Lake city. The Fly’s Eye is an array of telescopes that stare up into the night sky.

Why do they do this? Well, they are watching for blue flashes that occur when very high cosmic rays come crashing into the atmosphere. Given the height and intensity of the flash it is actually possible to work out the type of the particle and just how much energy it has, how fast it is going in other words.

Now on the 15 Oct 1991 these telescopes spotted a proton that really was something a bit special. I'll be honest, this one does blow my mind. Why you might ask? well I’ll tell you why without further ado. This thing was moving fast, real fast.

For those who don’t know, CERN is the high energy physics lab located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. At CERN they spend a fair amount of time accelerating protons to tremendous speeds before smashing them together to see what happens. The protons at CERN motor, there is no doubt that they are moving at a pace.

The proton spotted on 15th Oct had a million times more energy than the protons at CERN. A million! It was moving so fast that it makes the really fast protons produced by the guys at CERN look like a tortoise on a really lazy day. Those guys would love to be able to produce protons with this much clout.

This single proton, a single hydrogen nucleus, had enough energy to light a 40 Watt bulb for just over 1 second. It had the same amount of energy has a baseball travelling at 55 miles per hour. A single proton!

This dude was travelling at almost the speed of light, v = 0.9999999999999999999999951 c . If you set this thing off along side a photon of light, which does travel at the speed of light, then after a million years it would only be trailing the photon by 4.6 cm, less than two inches! After 1 million years.

So how did it get so much energy? The answer is that we really don’t know. Cool eh? We have no cosmic theories to predict particles with that much juice. The best guess is that the are energised by a black holes accretion disk. The only problem I have with this is that black holes don’t exist. Which sort of ruins that idea a bit.

Where did it come from? If we work on the bases that something moving at this speed does not get deflected by much then following its impact track gives us some clue as to its origin, though when the astronomers take a look in the direction there does not appear to be anything out of the ordinary.

There is an idea that the particle could not travel very far without bashing into, and reacting with, the background cosmic radiation that has been with us since the Big Bang. I say not very far, the theory says that it probably can’t be more than 163 million light years! This is a mind staggering distance of course. It is so huge that it is a length of time and distance that is incomprehensible to the human mind.

Lets say that the particle travelled that maximum distance, 163 million light years. If that were the case then the particle that arrived on the 15th Oct 1991 would have started its journey at about the start of the Jurassic period here on earth. In other words there were dinosaurs stomping round!

What is really odd is that from the theory of special relativity we know that when things move really fast time slows down. If we were travelling along side that particle, and say it really did travel 163 million light years, then from our point of view and the particles point of view, it would have seemed like we had only been travelling about 6 hours before we reached earth.

A 163 million years compressed into 6 hours! How cool is that?

In this universe there are many many protons, but some are definitely more special than others, and there are a few that really do make you stop in wonder and say ... "Oh my God!"