What on Earth is Going On?: A Crash Course in Current Affairs - Arthur House

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mysteries as: the origins of mass (why some particles weigh more than others, and why some particles seem to have no mass at all), the nature of antimatter, dark matter, dark energy and the ‘primordial soup’ that the universe consisted of immediately after the Big Bang (quark-gluon plasma, apparently), and whether multiple dimensions exist beyond the four that we currently know about.

      What is the Higgs boson?

      The so-called ‘God particle’ is a force-carrier particle theorised by English physicist Peter Higgs to explain why matter has mass. His theory supposes that all particles had no mass immediately after the Big Bang, but an invisible force field (the ‘Higgs field’) condensed as the universe cooled, and any matter that interacted with it was given a mass via the Higgs boson. This, however, may be completely wrong, and if they can’t find this elusive particle at CERN (or at Fermilab, a rival American particle accelerator trying to beat them to it) the boffins will have to come up with a different theory altogether.

      What is antimatter?

      Antimatter was first proposed by physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. For each particle of matter that exists, there exists a corresponding particle of antimatter, with the same mass but the opposite electric charge. This idea was confirmed in 1932 when positrons (antiparticles to electrons) were found to be naturally occurring in cosmic rays, and since then anti-particles have been produced in labs (including the first anti-atom at CERN in 1995). Because matter and antimatter annihilate when they come together, and the Big Bang produced equal amounts of each, scientists don’t understand why any matter still exists, or, if the antimatter’s somehow disappeared, where it’s all gone.

      What are dark matter and dark energy?

      It turns out that the majority of the universe consists of these invisible and poorly understood substances. According to the latest observations, dark matter accounts for 22% of it, and although it cannot be seen its density can be measured because it has a gravitational field which bends light. Dark energy makes up around 74% of the universe, is evenly distributed through space and time and has a repulsive effect on the universe as a whole, which accelerates its expansion. The remaining 4% of the universe is made of matter—3.6% of which is intergalactic gas, leaving 0.4% for the stars, planets, etc.

      Is the Large Hadron Collider going to destroy the world?

      No. As Brian Cox—formerly the keyboardist with pop band D:Ream and now a professor at the University of Manchester—put it eloquently last year, ‘anyone who thinks the LHC is going to destroy the world is a twat’. Despite this and many other assurances to the contrary from the scientific community, some people still think it might. One group, which included a few scientists (but no particle physicists), lodged a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights in September 2008, claiming that CERN had not properly considered the danger to human life that the experiment posed. They feared that the collisions in the LHC could create a microscopic black hole which would grow uncontrollably and suck the earth inside out within four years. Earlier in the year two Americans pursued a similar claim at a federal court in Hawaii, worrying not only about black holes but also about the possibility of the LHC emitting ‘strangelets’, hypothetical objects made of up, down and strange quarks which might turn the entire planet into a dense lump of homogenous ‘strange matter’. Both of these lawsuits were dismissed.

      A modest proposal

      In 1989, Englishman and CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee drafted a document entitled ‘Information Management: A Proposal’. His supervisor’s response to it was ‘vague, but exciting’, and he gave Berners-Lee the go-ahead to develop his idea. A year later the World Wide Web was born.

       Chechnya

      Where is it?

      Chechnya is a republic in Russia located in the Caucasus, a mountainous region seen as part of a natural border between Europe and Asia. This area is also home to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, as well as other Russian republics including North Ossetia and Ingushetia. The majority of Chechens are Muslim and traditionally owe allegiance to their local clan (teip) or group of clans (tukkhum).

      Struggle for independence

      After long and fierce resistance, Chechnya became part of Russia’s expanding empire in the late 1850s, but periodic fighting persisted. It enjoyed fleeting independence between 1917 and 1922 when Russia was experiencing its own civil strife. But in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR—see Russia) was formed, and within it, the Chechen Autonomous Region. Fourteen years later, when the regions were being re-jigged, it became the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), twinned with what is now Chechnya’s neighbouring Russian republic, Ingushetia. The population of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR were brutally punished by Joseph Stalin for their continued insurgence; in 1944 he deported the entire population to Siberia and Central Asia on the groundless accusation that they had collaborated with the Nazis. They remained there until 1957 when the next Russian president, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered their return. The deportation caused devastating loss of life. The Chechen-Ingush ASSR lasted over thirty more years until the USSR collapsed in 1991.

      What happened after the USSR fell?

      A group of politicians calling themselves the National Congress of the Chechen People, led by Dzhokhar Dudayev, declared independence for Chechnya. Initially Moscow didn’t react, but in 1994, troops were sent in to sort out the defiant region and ensure that other republics in the region didn’t follow Chechnya’s example and break away. After some initial gains, the incompetent Russian federal military were forced to pull out in 1996 after dogged guerrilla resistance by the separatist forces led by Aslan Maskhadov. The First Chechen War claimed the lives of up to 100,000 civilians and roughly 15,000 soldiers as well as injuring hundreds of thousands more. A ceasefire agreement, the Khasav-Yurt Accord, was signed in August 1996, giving Chechnya a significant degree of autonomy but not complete independence. In January 1997 Russia recognised the government led by Aslan Maskhadov, who had won the presidential election.

      And then?

      Over the next few years tensions once again escalated. Maskhadov’s government in the capital Grozny was opposed by extremist Wahhabi Muslim factions who began to take over more and more areas of the country. The introduction of Sharia law (see Islam) in February 1999 did nothing to appease these groups, and in August an extremist rebel army, led by Shamil Basayev and Saudi Arabian mercenary Ibn al-Khattab invaded neighbouring Dagestan in an effort to establish a separate Islamic state, which would cover part of Chechnya and Dagestan. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister at the time, quelled this uprising quickly.

      In September, bombs were set off in different areas of Russia, causing around 300 deaths. While critics, including former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko—who was poisoned in London in November 2006—have accused Russia’s Federal Security Services of co-ordinating the bombings, Russian officials pointed the finger at Chechen rebels. As a result, soldiers were sent in on the pretext of fighting future terrorism and the Second Chechen War got under way, with Putin declaring Maskhadov’s government illegitimate and Russia striving again to claim authority over the restless region. Thousands more military and civilian casualties ensued, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Grozny fell back into Russian hands in February 2000, and three years later was pronounced the ‘most destroyed city on earth’ by the United Nations.

      What happened at Beslan school?

      On 1 September 2004 Chechen separatists took over School No.1 in Beslan, a small city of 40,000 people in North Ossetia, which shares a small part of its border with Chechnya. The group stormed the school, held over 1,000

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