This is the first part on my take on the WP. If you all like it, I'll post some more.
Part 1:
“Enzo, can you take a look at this?” James motioned with his hand as he continued to keep his eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of him. In the spring of 2013 scientists confirmed that they had discovered the Higgs Boson particle by smashing particles together in the Large Hadron Collider and finally fulfilled forty years’ worth of research and experimentation.
Even after hundreds of executions of accelerating particles into one another, the resulting explosion had always resulted in the Higgs Boson particle being seen for only a nanosecond before it decayed into another quantum particle. This was expected, but what was unexpected is what James Stanton had been staring at for going on two days straight.
Enzo Duval let out a sigh as he made his way over to James’ station. He had worked for CERN for going on fifteen years now and was accustomed to getting questions from the freshmen of the team, but one could set a watch with how frequently James asked a question. “What’s going on?” Enzo asked, attempting to hide his frustration.
“I’m looking at the images of how the particles scatter when they explode, and every time I -”
Enzo cut James off. “I thought you were looking at that yesterday and we both agreed that it wasn’t anything worth continuing because of the fault that was found in the latest version of the imaging software.”
“Right, but I then took a look at -”
Enzo interrupted again slightly raising his voice. “Have you wasted an entire day on this again?”
“No, it’s not wasted.” James said excitedly, completely missing Enzo’s disapproval. “The software was upgraded last week, so I began to look at images of the particle explosions prior to the upgrade and it’s still there!”
“What’s still there?” Enzo responded as he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and tried to calm himself.
“The Higgs Boson!” James exclaimed loud enough to startle his coworker in the station across from his.
Enzo took another deep breath. “What do you mean it is still there? I mean, of course it is there. That is what the image software is for. It is used to take a picture of the explosion, which means it will always have the Higgs in it.”
James had been working at CERN for about a year and started right after the first speculated discovery of the mysterious particle. He was hired for his expertise in understanding and manipulating quantum superpositions, which was believed to help understand how particles can change from one to another. Enzo’s team was supposed to take the data of each particle explosion and try to determine if there were other unknown particles created like the Higgs Boson.
James looked back at Enzo with a giant grin across his face. “The images that I looked at were from a full minute after the explosion.”
“What? That’s impossible. Did you check the time stamps?”
“Yes, I check the time stamps. I checked over two hundred images and they are all from a minute after the explosion and they all still have the Higgs Boson in them!” As James continued to explain what he found, his eyes widened as if they were trying to help his lungs get air so that he could keep talking. “I think we should hook up the computer to Sherlock,” he exclaimed with his last breath.
“I think you’re right!” Enzo said, forgetting that only seconds ago he had been clenching his teeth in irritation.
Sherlock was the world’s first, true quantum computer. It had secretly been built by IBM alongside Watson, which was built for natural language processing. The United States and many European nations had given a substantial amount of money to IBM to focus two area: natural language processing, and quantum computing. The Watson computer was the result of IBM’s work in natural language processing and made the headlines when it won over $1 million on the TV show Jeopardy. All countries agreed that the Sherlock computer had to be kept classified from the public.
Sherlock was the size of a small warehouse but was built two kilometers underground for both secrecy and stability. It could process thousands upon thousands of gigabytes of information in a fraction of a second, making it more powerful than the combined processing power of all computers ever created. If there was truly something happening in the particle explosions to cause the Higgs Boson to remain, Sherlock would find the answer.