Finding God or destroying the Universe..................................... The Large Hardon Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (46°14′N, 6°03′E). Currently under construction, the LHC is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008.[1] The LHC is expected to become the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories. When activated, it is hoped that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson particle — often dubbed the God Particle — the observation of which could confirm the predictions and 'missing links' in the Standard Model of physics, and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory which seeks to unify the four fundamental forces: Electromagnetism, Strong Force, Weak Force, and Gravity. The higgs boson may help to explain why gravity is comparatively weak when contrasted with the other three fundamental forces. The Higgs mechanism, Higgs-Kibble mechanism or Anderson-Higgs mechanism, originally proposed by the British physicist Peter Higgs based on a suggestion by Philip Anderson, is the mechanism that gives mass to all elementary particles in particle physics. It makes the W boson different from the photon, for example. It can be understood as an elementary case of tachyon condensation where the role of the tachyon is played by a scalar field called the Higgs field. The massive quantum excitation of the Higgs field is also called the Higgs boson. Actually, this mechanism was anticipated by Ernst Stückelberg in 1957 before Higgs. See the Stückelberg action for more details. The breakthrough of Higgs, which was independently discovered by Robert Brout and Francois Englert at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and by G. S. Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom W. B. Kibble [1] at Imperial College London, was to give mass to a vector boson (alternatively termed gauge boson), by coupling it to a scalar field. This was done in the context of a spontaneous symmetry breaking model, of the type constructed by Yoichiro Nambu and others in an attempt to explain the strong interactions. (These sorts of models were also inspired by work in condensed matter theory, notably by Lev Landau and Vitaly Ginzburg). Potential energy is energy stored within a Physical system. Informally, it exists when there is a force which tends to pull an object back towards some original position when it is moved. For example, a spring can be stretched and held, or a weight can be lifted against gravity and suspended. Both of these actions require energy to perform. The principle of conservation of energy says that energy can neither be created or destroyed, so this energy does not disappear. Instead it is stored as potential energy. If the spring is released or the weight is dropped, this stored energy will reappear as kinetic energy as the restoring force -- elasticity in the case of the spring and gravity in the case of the weight -- accelerates the object back towards its original position. There are a number of different types of potential energy, each associated with a particular kind of force. Technically, any conservative force gives rise to potential energy. For example, the work of elastic force is called elastic potential energy; work of gravitational force is called gravitational potential energy, work of the Coulomb force is called electric potential energy; work of strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force acting on the baryon charge is called nuclear potential energy; work of intermolecular forces is called intermolecular potential energy. Chemical potential energy, such as the energy stored in fossil fuels, is the work of Coulomb force during rearrangement of mutual positions of electrons and nuclei in atoms and molecules. Thermal energy usually has two components: the kinetic energy of random motion of particles and potential energy of their mutual positions.