This in only my tiny, incomplete understanding, but:
They’ve taken apart everything they can, and weighed all the pieces, but so far they have not found any particle that actually weighs enough to account for, well, how much everything weighs. In theorizing about what such a thing might look like, and where it might be found, the Higgs Boson seemed like it would fill all the known gaps nicely. So they looked for this particle, but to date have not found it where they expected to, and therefore can’t explain fairly large portions of the tiny, tiny word that is subatomic physics.
In other words, “There’s a hole here, but when we look there, we can’t find anything.”
Double post, but… If you have ever seen the famous drawing of a very completely disassembled Volkswagen Beetle, imagine that the Beetle there depicted is an atom. It would be like weighing the Beetle, then completely disassembling it to the state in that drawing, weighing each piece, and finding that they don’t add up (by a large margin) to the weight of the car; then, you put it all together again and find its weight has magically reappeared.
Thank you for this, it’s really helping. (The other answers have helped too, thank you!)
Also, wow, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that the word “boson” would be pronounced “BOH-sahn” (following the formula of proton, neutron, and electron). I’ve been pronouncing it “BOSS-un.” :smack:
I think so, because which scenario is more exciting:
A particle that might exist if our understanding of physics, and the math we use to predict its existence is finally corroborated by actual evidence for the very first time in history. Meaning the model we’ve created explaining the fundamental properties of matter are correct to that point, and we can move on with confidence knowing this particle is, indeed real.
or
After we’ve looked under every couch cushion, and flipped over every mattress, over and over again, we come to realize (or accept), it’s just not there. Now what? How far back to the drawing board do we have to go when it comes to our understanding of matter? It might mean the universe has even bigger surprises in store for us.
I don’t think any physicists are surprised that the Higgs particle hasn’t been found in the mass range described in the OP’s article. Existing data suggests that the mass of the Higgs particle is not much higher than 114 GeV (actually, the best fit value is even lower than that, but 114 GeV is the lowest it could be without having been discovered by older accelerators). So if the Standard Model is correct, you’d expect a Higgs particle of maybe 120 GeV or so, not too much higher. Maybe at the end of this year, or next year, the research groups at the LHC will announce they’ve gotten a 120 GeV discovery. Stay tuned.
(GeV, or billion electron-volts, is used by high energy theorists as a mass unit, 1 GeV is roughly the amount of mass in a proton.)
It should also be noted that these new exclusion limits ASSUME that the Standard Model is correct. If a Higgs-like particle exists (or more than one exist), but it isn’t the one required by the Standard Model, then it could have a mass of 150 GeV or whatever and not be detected in this most recent data run.
It’s not accurate to say that the Higgs is the cause of mass. It’s more accurate to say that the Higgs boson is an emergent property of the phenomenon which causes some particles to have the amount of mass they do. In fact, most of the mass we’re familiar with doesn’t relate to the Higgs mechanism at all, but rather comes from the binding energy associated with the Strong Nuclear Force.
