
Halon451
Audioholic Samurai
Excellent explanation Astrodon, and thank you for the input. I cannot profess to know near as much on actual particle physics, but having been educated in Nuclear Engineering, do have a good fundamental grasp on the elementary forces, obviously in particular electromagnetic and the strong and weak nuclear forces, as this was a critical part of my education. However, being educated in the field of nuclear engineering and particularly reactor physics, only goes so deep into the even more fundamental natures of these forces, especially on the sub-atomic level, from there I am left with only my own personal curiosity to explore further into it. Reactor physics teaches you enough to understand particle interraction as a function of both various electromagnetic forces, and of course e=mc2, being one of the key components of the fission process.Here I am. As the video link posted by Gene (http://gmy.news.yahoo.com/v/8573163) clearly explains, cosmic rays with much higher energies have hit the Earth and all the objects in the solar system an enormous number of times since the Solar System formed about 4.5 billion years ago. The Earth and its biosphere have survived these events without any difficulty. The majority of these ultra-high energy cosmic rays were (and are) produced in supernova explosions.
The Higgs Boson that Halon451 mentions is thought to be the particle that gives matter mass. In particle physics, there are 2 main types of fundamental particles: those with mass called "elementary" particles; and those that are massless called "field" particles -- the 4 known natural forces in the Universe are transmitted via these field particles according to particle physics (i.e., gluons for the strong [nuclear] force, photons for the electromagnetic force, intermediate vector bosons [also called "weakons"] for the weak [nuclear] force, and the yet to be discovered gravitons for gravity). In addition to these classifications, subatomic particles have an intrinsic spin associated with them, and these spins come in two types: 1/2 integer spins (i.e., 1/2, 3/2, etc.) particles are called "fermions" and particles with integer spins (i.e., 0, 1, 2, etc.) are called bosons. Electrons (and other "leptons" [= low mass elementary particles]) and all the quarks (6 of them) that make up hadrons (those particles that obey the strong [nuclear] force) are fermions. Baryons [= heavy elementary particles] are particles composed of 3 quarks (i.e., protons and neutrons), hence have spins of either 1/2 or 3/2s and are fermions. The mesons [= middle mass particles] are composed of quark pairs and have spins of either 0 or 1 and hence are bosons. The field particles mentioned above all have integer spins and hence are bosons.
The spin is important in describing the "final" wave function of the particle which is important in figuring out the physics of particle interactions. However, I won't go any deeper than this and sorry for all the text, but I feel that particle physics is a really "cool" field in physics and the Standard Model summarized above explains a lot about the nature of the Universe.
Obviously, there is another universe of knowledge that exists beyond my level of formal education, and represents the very things you speak of, what really makes up the universe as we know it, hence the name "God" particle. My understanding of the LHC and the data that it is anticipated to generate, will take several years before scientists will even be able to disseminate the massive volumes of said data, so the actual firing up of this enormous machine in of itself is likely to be a non-event, correct me if I'm wrong. It is my understanding that we're not going to really open up any real mysteries at first, but will pave the way so to speak.