I pretend to no knowledge whatsoever about physics, and especially this esoteric field. I only know what I read in newspaper blurbs and what Sheldon Cooper talks about as he writes up formulas on his white boards.
But even I can see that this is big time stuff. The Hadron collider in Switzerland was instrumental in making the find, of course. I’d sure like to see the collider someday; even the pictures of it are damned impressive.
Speaking of Sheldon, wouldn’t it be cool if they wrote an episode around this discovery and Sheldon’s reaction to other professors getting the kudos?
I don’t think Sheldon would care about the “kudos” - the ones getting it are experimental physicists, and he, as a theoretical physicist, is so high up above them he can see them as little ants around his feet.
Interesting. I understood most of the individual words in that article, but put together it means next to nothing to me. It’s the same feeling I get when a car breaks down and I open up the hood for no reason other than to look like I’m looking for something wrong (and have even a vague idea of how to fix it).
Could somebody kindly explain exactly what this means? (the Higgs boson, not the car thing ;))
It’s essentially confirmation (or at least strong support) for the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the model we’ve mostly been using for a while to discuss small bits of stuff. That is, it’s what particle physics uses to describe all the protons, electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, quarks, and so forth. The Higgs Boson is the last big piece of that model to actually be observed. It’s the particle that mediates the Higgs Field, which is thought to be what gives mass to fundamental particles.
You know that particle physicist Leon Lederman (the man who originated that particular moniker) wanted to call it “the Goddamn particle” in a book, but his editor didn’t let him do so, right?
What I find fascinating is that the mass of this Higgs candidate is right around the value that guarantees that, at some point (hopefully in the very distant future), the universe will suddenly cease to exist.
Is this because we are now in a meta-stable energy level and it then it will “shift” to the true lowest energy level for the vacuum? Does the Higg’s Boson energy/mass tell us that, or are you referring to something else?
Basically that, yes. Given the estimated values for the masses of the Higgs boson and the Top quark, they happen to be around the “right” values for the Universe to be a bubble of false vacuum in space that at some point will suddenly “revert” to true vacuum, with the result that all particles will be changed into something else.
I was reading about that but didn’t run across an explanation for why this was going to happen in billions of years, as opposed to any moment now. I also read that this destruction of the universe would come at us “at the speed of light.” Originating where?
A couple of months ago, I met a nice young couple at church: “So, what do you guys do?” “I’m a middle-school English teacher.” she says. He says, kind of embarrassedly, “I… umm, work for CERN.”
So I of course ask him if he’s made any black holes (“Yeah, but we plugged them with chocolate.”), and then he says: “Oh, and the Higgs Boson? We found it… tell him where, hon.” Wife rolls eyes and sighs: “It was in his underwear drawer ALL along…”
My previous post should also say “…in combination with the mass of the Top quark (which is not yet known with enough precision)”