Two separate entities both working at the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva have reported that they've finally recorded the existence of a boson, and that it could be, in all likelihood, the Higgs boson. It's a little comical to read newspaper articles about particle physics, because the authors don't know what the hell's going on, and they know that they don't know, and they also know that the readers won't know either.
So I'll do my best to break it down for my few readers in a way that lets them explain it to others in a laymen terms as possible. We'll start with a quick etymology note. Peter Higgs was a physicist who, while working with a team of guys who's names didn't make it to the labels of things, theorized the existence of another quantum field such that interaction with this field would assign mass to elementary particles.
Sounds weird, right? Mass seems pretty damn straight forward. "Mass" is usually seen as the amount of matter of a thing--a measure of how much stuff is in a thing. When you get really, really small, how you get mass is explained through the interaction of these quantum particles with this field Higgs theorized, now called the Higgs field. This interaction of particles with the field--and thus obtain mass--is called the Higgs mechanics.
In today's world mass and weight are used almost interchangeably. This is not fully accurate. Let's say I weigh 80 kilograms. This is not a fully accurate statement. I actually have a mass of 80 kilograms. My weight has to do with the acceleration due to gravity, and my 80 kilograms translates to 176 pounds on Earth. Of course, standard mass measurements are taken with Earth's gravity as a universal, but with it means is, my 80 kilograms on earth is still 80 kilograms on the moon, while my 176 pounds on Earth is a little more than 29 pounds on the moon.
A little off track there.
In quantum physics, the elementary units are not particles, like you might think. The smallest most elementary units are fields, and oscillations in these fields are what get called particles. An oscillation in the magnetic field is called a "photon", otherwise known as the basic unit of light.
There are three "generations of matter" for these elementary oscillation/particles. Quarks are one category, and there are 6 different states of spin associated with quarks. Gauge bosons are a second category, the most famous of which is the photon. And the third are the leptons, the most famous of which is the electron.
A boson is just a particle with integer spin than has the property that there is no limit to how many can occupy the same quantum state.
I don't fully follow it either, but just know that this Higgs boson is the boson created from an oscillation in the Higgs field. The idea that such a thing existed has been around since '67, when the paper was published, but it was pretty much impossible to test for such a particle. By the '80s they had the idea for how they could test for it, and by then the acceptance of the Higgs mechanism as true--that particles obtained mass from interaction with a specific field, now called the Higgs field--the only thing left to discover was whether or not that mechanism was the result of a boson from the Higgs field. Bosons are force carriers, and the idea is that that's how they may be able to give these bits of matter mass.
So the real thing was how to test for this Higgs boson. Well, they figured out that they could create it by slamming particles into one another, and since, as a particle, it would be very large and decay almost instantly, they would have to have very sensitive data recorders, able to tell from the decay that what they created had been the elusive Higgs boson.
That's exactly what the two separate teams working in Switzerland have claimed to have proof of: a large momentary boson that seems to have all the characteristics of the Higgs boson.
Exactly why this news has scientists weeping into their champagne might be the real question. This would be a landmark discovery, one of those generational moments, and a big push of support for the Standard Model in quantum mechanics.
To recap: the Higgs mechanism states interaction with the Higgs field is how particles gets mass, and they think this interaction happens by way of the Higgs boson, since now they think they've found it.
I heard an interview yesterday about this and the fact that it is also being called the God particle. He is an atheist and actually named the particle the God-Damn particle.... but well that won't fly in this day and age.... thanks for explaining what all the hoopla is about... it's tough sometimes to understand these difficult tiny bits and pieces items. Can't see it can't feel it can't taste it... hard to understand it...
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