Particles Tell Stories

The discovery of new particles helps us to understand how the universe works. It is the dream of every high energy physicist, part of our raison d'être. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction in Geneva Switzerland should be good at this. The Tevatron, currently in operation in Batavia Illinois, has a shot as well. We have reason to expect that the experiments at the LHC will discover a host of new particles. We've given the possibilities seemingly whimsical names: Higgs, squarks, gluinos, Z-primes, Kaluza-Klein gravitons, WIMPS, axi-gluons, etc., but each one serves a purpose in our candidate theories about nature. However, merely producing new particles and cataloging them gives only part of the understanding. Rather, particles are messengers, telling a profound story about the nature of the universe, or what we like to refer to as the nature of matter, energy, space, and time. Learning about the new particles, ...