Higgs Boson Blues:How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch.

"People they come together. People they fall apart. No-one can stop us now 'cos we are all made of stars" - We Are All Made Of Stars, Moby

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" - Carl Sagan

A cursory read of these two statements would have you suspecting that Moby is more of a scientist than Carl Sagan ever was but Sagan's quote, from his pioneering 1980s television series Cosmos, is more than just a mere throwaway comment. Imagine you didn't know what an apple pie was. Imagine you didn't know what an apple was? Imagine you didn't know what butter, salt, flour, sugar, and milk are.

Imagine somebody trying to explain those things to you and trying to take it right back to each of their individual conceptions. All the way back to the beginning of the universe, the B of the Big Bang, where it is believed all matter was formed. If the universe hadn't been formed the ingredients for an apple pie would not exist and neither would we to either eat that pie or question the possibility of its existence.

Dr Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge who works as part of a team at CERN in Geneva (and has both hosted TED talks and curated exhibitions at the Science Museum just in case you were worried about how much you've achieved in your life), was speaking, via Gerard Sorko in Cologne, for Skeptics in the Pub - Online about how he regretted that Sagan never came good on that promise to make an apple pie from scratch and in his talk, the self-explanatory (you'd think) How to make an apple pie from scratch, planned to do just that.

By the end of it my apple pie making skills had not improved one iota but I was certainly far more knowledgeable about the Big Bang, about quarks, about the work carried out at CERN, and about life, the universe, and the meaning of everything than I had been before it started. That's not to say I understood everything Dr Cliff said.

I didn't. I'm no scientist. I'm a keen hobbyist at best. But I am an enthusiastic student with an often insatiable desire to learn and that's why, I think, I find these Skeptics events both enthralling and life affirming. The quest for knowledge, for me, is not so much about finding answers but about the journey towards those hopeful answers. Each answer revealed is not so much a dead end as a key to a door that reveals multiple new pathways for me to follow.

A restless search for knowledge and while I would never claim to share the knowledge of Dr Cliff or, indeed, Carl Sagan I hopefully do share their curiosity. Sagan's apple pie remark, really, asks of us the seemingly simple, but actually incredibly complex, question of where does matter, stuff, come from?

From the seventeenth century to today's work at CERN, experiments have been carried out to try to answer this. People breaking down things into ever smaller units to try to discover what it is they're made of on one side and on the other people looking into the endless expanse of space, the stars, and the wider universe, to try to make sense of where we, and everything else, come from.

We look at the very smallest things and we look at the very biggest things. Dr Harry Cliff chose to look at an apple pie. He took a sample of one individual pie, heated it up until it disintegrated and ended up with what's best described as charred remnants. Charred remnants, mostly, of carbon and water.

Carbon is an element, C, on the periodic table (it's number six) and water, you might already know this, is H2O - two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. By the late nineteenth century there were about ninety elements, or atoms, on the periodic table but where did they come from? Isaac Newton was not alone at the time in thinking they came from God.

Creationism may have been disproved by scientific advances but God was still in the equation. He, or she, had made all these atoms at the very beginning of time and then, it seems, simply left them, or us, to it. The picture got clearer, or muddier depending on your perspective, in the early 20th century when scientists, many of them in Cambridge and Manchester, worked towards splitting the atom.

A feat finally achieved by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, and not MC Tunes no matter what he's told you, in 1932. Revealing a nucleus surrounded by electrons. A nucleus that was, a few decades later, discovered to consist of protons and neutrons. The most basic atom, hydrogen, consisted of a single proton and a single electron. Helium, the next most simple, had one proton surrounded by two neutrons and two electrons and the chemical make up of each element got more complicated the further you ventured into the periodic table, more or less.

At this time there was a huge scientific effort towards finding out how these elements came to be. Protons naturally reject each other and to bring them together as close as they are in some elements and then forge them together would have required both huge speed and very great heat.

The nearest place you'd find heat hot enough, fifteen million degrees centigrade, is the centre of our sun but the sun is, of course, not the only star in the universe and when stars die they blast elements out into space. All the elements. Even gold and platinum which are only formed in neutron star collisions. The first of which was only observed as recently as 2017 and is believed to have produced thirty Earth sized balls of gold.

Most of the helium that exists today was made right at the beginning of the universe but how did the protons and neutrons form to create that helium? A series of experiments in the nineteen-sixties found that protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles but that they are held together by quarks and gluons.

This is where it starts to get even more complicated and even more mind bending. A millionth of a second after the Big Bang the temperature of the universe was so hot, trillions of degrees, that almost everything melted resulting in these quarks and gluons. Not everything, perhaps very little, is known about them but it is known that for each quark there is a 'heavier' version (for up quarks - strange quarks, for down quarks - charm quarks etc;) and even a 'heaviest' version.

For all matter there are mirrored particles, besides that there is anti-matter, and another particle, the ghostly neutrino - which has almost no mass, passes through our bodies trillions of times every single second of our life - and death. There are electrons and muons, electron neutrinos and muon nuetrinos and my head, by this point, was struggling to comprehend both the enormity of it and the infinitesimal size of it.

Luckily for me (and I hope others), Dr Cliff wore his knowledge lightly and kept things on layman's terms - at least when possible. He may have quoted some very long figures but he admitted how much is still not known and he told us how he and his colleagues are working towards discovering more. Making more sense of it all.

About ten years ago, at CERN, they discovered the Higgs boson. An elementary particle that was formed one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and something whose very existence should have made the universe completely uninhabitable rendering this blog, yesterday evening's talk, all science ever, and all human or animal existence ever moot.

It could have saved us all a lot of time. Not that there would have been such a thing as time. The discovery of the Higgs boson (people had known it was there for decades before it was actually found, the Higgs boson is nothing if not a hide and seek champion) taught us about the Higgs field which the exitsence of the Higgs boson 'switched' on.

The Higgs field gave mass to all fundamental particles (or at least all of those that have mass) and it is, of course, invisible. But if you hit it hard enough, very hard, it ripples. Studies of the Higgs field have shown that it should have a GEV (a kinetic energy value) of either zero or of many many trillions. Nothing in the middle would really make sense but, confounding expectations, it was found to have a GEV of 246.

A rather precise Goldilocks figure that was neither so high nor so low that matter did not survive the Big Bang. It goes a small way towards answering the big question of how stars, and life, became possible but I'm nowhere near clever enough to understand how exactly. Or, to be honest, fully comprehend much of what I've just written.

I am, as I wrote earlier, on a learning curve and if you're looking for a science lesson you're probably at the wrong place here because this is not a science lesson. This is my account of attending a science lesson and that science lesson is, of course, necessarily, ongoing.

Even for the likes of Dr Harry Cliff. A few weeks ago at CERN there was a new discovery regarding bottom (or beauty) quarks. Heavy quarks produced in their billions by collisions both natural and reproduced in the Large Hadron Collider. When these beauty quarks decay they decay in two different ways. Sometimes into electrons, sometimes into muons.

Prevalent theory would have it that the split would be roughly even but observation and study has proved quite the opposite and it is still unsure why this is. Possibly Dr Cliff and his colleagues have misunderstood some fundamental knowledge about what they already know or, more interestingly still, there is an as yet undiscovered, unknown, force working on these quarks.

The discovery of which would be a scientific bombshell and one so great it seems rather odd that I'd hear about it at an admittedly wonderful, but free and fairly niche, Skeptics event. Just a week ago, studies in Fermilab, America's particle physics and accelerator laboratory in Illinois, have been released that appear to back up CERN's discovery.

It seems we could be on the brink of a major scientific breakthrough and if, as is so often the case, I can only just about grasp the concept and can barely understand or even imagine the more fundamental detail, that's not really a problem. I bow to those with greater knowledge than I and trust in their endeavour to advance science and, ultimately, humanity.

At a time when much in the world, politics, rational debate, the use of language, has been debased to the degree that it can feel like we're going backwards, science marches, it seems - and the rapid development of Covid vaccines would be a fine example, forwards. Not always directly. Not always without stumbling. But rarely does it retreat.

For this we should thank people like Dr Harry Cliff and we should also thank groups like Skeptics in the Pub - Online for bringing it to the attention of us, the great unwashed. A Q&A took in Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, Roland Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and a question of what happened before the Big Bang, at Time Zero? That moment before the universe expanded from the size of a pinhead to the size of a grapefruit.

It also touched on future developments at CERN which may, from 2035 onwards, involve building a Future Circular Collider three times as big, 100km in total, as the Large Hadron Collider, to try to understand just this question. In the future we may understand the past better but it is worth remembering that, despite all  the great advances that may have been made in recent years, decades, and centuries, we are, still, in the comparative foothills of our scientific research regarding the origin of the universe and out there on the horizon there are daunting peaks as yet unscaled and from atop those peaks we may, of course, be presented with a view of ever higher peaks. Every journey begins with a single footstep. Even this far on in the journey we have no idea where, or what, our destination will look like or if we'll ever reach it.