But what gives the HB IT’S mass? Or is there no simpler particle? (that’s what they said about protons and neutrons)
If you want a lot more views, may I suggest this thread title change:
Scientists discover proof of God… Particle
I found myself cursing at the tv, while a scientist was being interviewed on CNN. The interviewer (Ashley Banfield) kept using the term “God particle” . . . and the “scientist” *went along with it.
*
This is answered in Cecil’s article linked above. Basically it isn’t the Higgs particle that imparts mass, it’s the associated Higgs field, to which the particle is just as subject as anything else is.
The real question is, what happens if you put Gods in an accelerator and collide them at high speed?
Besides really annoying them, that is.
So far as anyone knows, the Higgs is a fundamental particle (not made of anything smaller), as are quarks, electrons, neutrinos, etc. But there are also theories where the Higgs is a composite particle.
Where it gets it’s mass might depend on what kind of Higgs it is (Standard Model Higgs or something else), but in general I think you can just include an explicit mass term for the Higgs in the equations. For other particles like electrons and quarks and W bosons and whatnot, you can’t do this (for reasons related to symmetry), so you need the Higgs mechanism to give them mass.
As far as why the mass is 125 GeV/c[sup]2[/sup] and not some other value, the standard model doesn’t tell us. (If it did, finding the Higgs would have been somewhat easier because we’d know exactly where to look. Or more precisely we’d know what to look for, since how the Higgs decays depends on its mass.) It doesn’t tell us why the other particles have the masses they do either; in those cases, we know it’s because of how strongly they couple to the Higgs field, but that doesn’t tell us much since we don’t know why those coupling strengths have the values they do.
I saw the same interview, in which the physicist said we are now able to see the time before the first chapter of Genesis. It was another pathetic performance by the guy I call the “Al Sharpton of Physics.” He’ll say whatever it takes to get his face on TV once again.
Cecil does seem to be saying the field gives mass to the boson. However, as I understand it the Higgs boson would have mass even if the Higgs field vev* were zero, because unlike the other fundamental particles, it’s a scalar (i.e., spinless), so it’s not subject to the same restrictions.
But I think its interactions with the Higgs field do contribute additional mass, so strictly speaking I don’t think what Cecil said was incorrect.
Oh it’s a disturbance in the field, and there may/may not be other types?
I noticed something. People say the HB is the source of mass, but it’s not the only source, and it’s not the most common source, right? It seems to contribute very little to the mass we experience in everyday life.
Here’s an article (written for non-physicists) that talks about what particle physics would be like if the Higgs field (meaning the Higgs field vev) were zero.
Technically when people say the Higgs boson is the source of mass they’re wrong; the Higgs field is. But even in the case of the Higgs field, you’re correct. Most mass of ordinary macroscopic matter is not due to the Higgs. (This was discussed in some of my posts above.)
However the Higgs field is responsible for the mass of the other fundamental particles, and this has some important consequences for the macroscopic world. (For one, if electrons had no mass, atoms wouldn’t be able to hold on to them.)
You can get a Christ and an Antichrist, but only if the total energy of the colliding Gods is equal to at least twice the Christmass.
What I don’t understand is how something can explain mass but not gravity. I thought they were intimately entwined!
Mass is not the fundamental source for gravity, the stress-energy tensor is. The Higgs mechanism explains why some particles have mass; it does not explain why they have energy.
I almost wish there was a series of star trek still going (they did stop doing enterprise, right?).
“All power to the Higgs deflectors”
“But sir that will trigger a tachyonic field surge, leading to a full neutrino harmonic cascade!”
“That’s what I’m counting on…”
a few of the popular press articles on this are saying that it may end up explaining dark matter especially if it turns out to NOT be exactly the Higgs predicted by the standard model.
Is there actually any relation? As I understand it the Higgs is a completely different particle from the WIMPs that are postulated to explain dark matter. would the Higgs having properties not predicted by the standard model have any implications for gravity on the scale of the dark matter problem?
AFAIK, it’s the end of the beginning, is all - we now have the complete Standard Model.
Maybe it’s like someone building the first car on the basis there must be oil somewhere, and then finding oil. That’s great in itself - but the other exciting things are (a) the oil was found quite easily by the new super technology so what else might it find, and (b) lets go on a major road trip in this car thing, what can we do with it …
As has been mentioned, this is major, major league stuff - imagine we’re 5-year olds just starting school, the limits of our world are ridiculously provincial, our abilities extend little further than writing our names and knowing our birthdays; we know we have to get older and wiser, but we don’t really know what that means or entails. That’s pretty much where we are now, about to start school.
So I’ve been aware of magnetic fields and electric field, and gravitational fields (or at least the equations that determine their direction and magnitude. Apparently there’s a Higgs field, which is news to me. What are some other obscure-to-the-layman physical fields that I would benefit from knowing about?
Also, what does this actually mean? Are massive particles massive because they’ve got a Higgs somehow stuck to them? If so, what is the Higgs bound to, and what keeps it there? If I had a big jar of Higgs bosons and I left an empty bottle of Evian next to it, would it suddenly become much more massive than an ingot of gold bullion 10 meters away?
Dumb question, but “where” is the Higgs? Is it part of the proton? Part of the neutron? Part of the electron? All of the above? Or is it just hanging out somewhere else in the atom?
There is no direct relation. They are probably referring to the fact that it is still conceivable this is not a Standard Model Higgs, but a supersymmetric Higgs. Supersymmetry implies a dark matter candidate (a particle totally separate from the Higgs), called the “lightest supersymmetric partner”. But so far there has been no evidence for Supersymmetry at the LHC.