Happy day one and all! On July the 4th, 2012, the good folks at CERN officially announced that they found the long sought after Higgs particle! This is, of course, worded they found a new particle with characteristics in line with the theoretical projections of the particle with a 5 sigma confidence. While that all may sound wishy washy, it’s still like saying they’re 99.9999426697% sure it’s the Higgs Boson, which is pretty darn sure. Of course, there will be some time before we will know for sure what’s going on under the hood, but for the most part, this is a huge discovery!
Why? Well, the Higgs Boson was the particle theorized to be associated with mass! (I think I explained this before, but here’s a quick run down) Every one of the 4 forces has an associated particle, so like electromagnetic is the photon, gravity is the graviton, etc. But the more we tried to understand how things worked, there was this little hole where mass should be. We couldn’t figure out why things are heavy. What makes one thing more massive than another? Sure, you can say size, but why would size matter? What mechanical device makes something that is bulkier have more mass? Well, Old Man Higgs came up with a cleaver theory that the universe is saturated in a giant field (Higgs Field) and as we know, every field has its own particle. (field particles are like things that can blip in and out of existence, meaning, we can only know the probability of where they might be, but not where they are at all times… it’s a complicated thing… check the youtubes for some info)
So yeah, the theory said that the universe is filled with this field… and this field is made up of little particles (Higgs Bosons). So think of it like the universe is submerged in a giant ocean. Think of the ocean as the field and the water molecules as the bosons. Now, when a little fish swims around, it can dart through the water with the greatest of ease! Because it’s so small, it can zip through the water molecules because there’s less resistance! We would say that little fish had low mass. A big honkin’ whale has to push much more water around to go the same distance, and thus, goes slower. We’d say this has a lot of mass. Seems easy enough, but we had to build a massively expensive machine to make enough energy to bring this little particle into existence to prove that, well, it existed!
So there you go! Some majorly cool science just happened in your lifetime! It’s like our generation’s discovery of gravity.
Also, I’d really like to stress this now… There is still a LOT of work to do now to figure out what all this means for science AND we might some day find this wasn’t the particles we were looking for. But, that said, it does seem pretty legit and I am absolutely amazed at the ability of the Human collective to construct the most complicated experiment in the history of the world and provide striking evidence for the very thing it sought out to test. Truly amazing work peoples!
So now that we got that crossed off our list, I wonder what the next big thing to discover will be!
So LITERALY the. Building blocks Of everything
well, sort of, yes. Think of the building blocks as 2 parts; the lego shape and the physical plastic it’s made of.
Fermions are the plastic, these are things like Up and Down quarks (which make up your every day protons and neutrons), and electrons… so these 3 things are all you really need to get going with most stuff, but there’s a whole bunch of fermions that do weird things.
Bosons are the shape. These are the fundamental forces… err, the particles associated with the forces. So photon, gluon, strong and weak forces. Your graviton, the one with gravity force, is yet to be discovered, but on paper it would have to be a boson as well.
So ok, fermions are the plastic. These give form to the universe. They make the universe have something solid and tangible. But just being blobs of plastic doesn’t do much good for anyone! That’s why you need to give the plastic some shape! The lego brick shapes are what the bosons are. You could say they have different shapes so they do different things, but they make it so the fermions, the matter, can interact with eachother and other things. Hope all that made sense.
But yeah, all you really need are just those 3 fermions and the bosons (forces) to make em all stick and you’ve got a bare bones functional, yet minimalist, universe! Not much to it! >D
OH cool so thats how it works. I think iunderstood that mister coffin. The universe as lego bricks. I have a pasing interest in quntumn physics but without a grounding in it i kind of pick things up randomly. That description howerver helped. So thats what the higgs-boson is. And Bosons are the named force particles, like photons, gravitons then?
heh, well truth be told it’s kind of how I have to learn it. see, I’m kind of an artsy minded guy so most of my learning is visual. just saying x=y does me no good unless it’s in some sort of example or image. >) so I’m glad this helped!
the problem I have with a lot of physics stuff (well, any science stuff really) is that the vast majority of principles and mechanics are named after the people who discover them, and not what they actually do. this makes the whole process very confusing. like ok, an Einstein-Rosen Bridge is the same as saying a wormhole. it’s stupid!
anyways, yeah, the Higgs is just one of the bosons. bosons being the particle associated with a field. and fields as being associated with the forces. so you are spot on! photons are the easiest for us to work with, and then we got gravitons and the others.
I like to think of forces/fields as a bucket of water. they act like waves when you look at the whole, but if you zoom waaaaaaay down you see it’s a bunch of particles. “sort of” similar in a way. there’s some problems with this model, but just as a visual it works pretty nice.
man… I should be a science teacher for reals, lol! I could talk all day about it! XD
Unless we can sell it or blow something up with it, doesn’t really capture my attention sadly ;)
but but… we did cool science!
well… the thing is, we’re not exactly sure what we’ve got and where we can go! which is pretty exciting in and of itself. the first step is prove it exists, next is to discover what kinds of properties it has, then ???, and profit!
it’s kind of like the discovery of atoms. what the hell could we have done with those buggers when we first discovered them? and look at what we do now! it’ll take a few years to fully flesh out some practical uses, but they are out there. if we can control the effects of these bosons or even the bosons themselves, it’ll be one of the greatest blasts of innovation we’ve ever seen! just gotta get past that step 3 and we’re in the gold. but uh… step 1 down, so it’s a start! >D
We discovered the electon in 1897 and it took till 1945 to blow something up with it. So its possible within 50 years we will have a Boson bomb. At that point I’ll get excited :)
so what you’re saying is that I have 50 years to finish building my bunker?
XD
Either that or have your moon base finished ya.
I.. wow… on second thought, this was an utterly useless comment
lol, or was it?! dun dun duuuuun!
Until they can use it to make a replicator like on star trek I’m not interested.
Besides, personally I see it as a big freaking waste of taxpayer money, sure they can make discoveries such as this with particle accelerators, but most of the time they’re rented out to major corporations so they can do really really stupid stuff with them, like crush a penny with the shield door (yea, I’ve got one in my wallet, it’s kinda neat, but still…).
well.. it’s kind of a step in the right direction. sure, the experiment cost a lot of money, but I wouldn’t consider it a waste. it’s like saying any kind of research is pointless. also, to put it into perspective, the price was spread out between european countries and even america, so the relative cost each put in was fairly low (all things considered… cause we’ve spent more money bailing out fail banks and lining CEO pockets than we have with our science endeavors).
while the benefits might not be obvious or tangible, this is a huge step in the process. this is like one of the gateways we can start getting into some of the other more complex stuff like dark matter, since the Higgs would interact with both. and that will be some, forgive the pun, heavy science going on.
and understanding how these boson deallies work and play can help us learn how to one day interact with these fields. think about it this way… we can only, poorly, control the electromagnetic forces. very poorly. if we can learn to control the other forces, then you have something sellable! imagine what you can do by controlling just the force of gravity! or the weak/strong nuclear forces (that’s the replicators you want). or even tap into all that dark energy all the kids keep raging on about these days. lots of possibilities here.
personally, I’d rather waste taxpayer money on one of the greatest scientific endeavors since the discovery of fire, than on some auto company that will lay off most of its staff anyways. I know it’s a hard thing to rationalize when all you get at the end is a very expensive magnet and a thumbs up from a guy in a labcoat, but this will lead to other things, greater things, and heck, maybe even some cool gadget in our lifetimes. time will tell, and many won’t see much use in all this hub bub, but hopefully I’ve helped to put it all into perspective enough to either get folks excited about science or at least see the value in it.
yeah….this just keeps going into one ear and out another. Every time I look this up I just can’t understand the science with it. Even the ocean explanation confused me.
Still if this brings us closer to hover boards, teleportation, space travel and the internet world of Futurama than WOOHOO!!!
but no flying cars…we have enough accidents with regular cars thank you
lol, yeah the Higgs is one of the more complicated things to understand. even among scientists, there’s a lot of debate and confusion about the exact nature of it.
the basic of it is that they’re little thingies that stick to matter… bigger the matter, the more stick, which makes them have more mass. it’s kind of a bad explanation, but there’s literally dozens an dozens of ways of explaining it… and they’re all different. lol. like I said, it’s confusing and science folks are still debating the finer points.
so lets just put it into the 10th doctor’s words as: “a big ball of wibbly wobbly massy wassy… stuff”
I think it just might! the point of this higgs deal was, more or less, to further prove how fields and their particles work. so the more we understand this relationship, the better we can control them, and thus get cooler stuff… and all those things you listed, pretty much need control of the forces/fields beyond the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, xrays, light, magnets, etc) we use now. Higgs is just the gateway drug.
well, if we have flying cars, we might be able to have force field generators or those “inertial dampeners” that would reduce impact force.
anyways… lots of cool stuff on the horizon! personally, I’d be keeping an eye on the quantum computing thing! it’ll be the next step in speedy computers!
The best layperson example of Hisenberg Uncertainity is that of a photograph. You can take a picture of someone - and you say “they were here” but never where they are now or what they’re doing. If can say what they are doing or how fast they’re going to get there then you can’t take pictures of it all, and you can’t say when it’ll will be 100% until they’ve finished and moved on.
I laugh that the Higgs “field” is totally similar to aetheric fluid, several centuries ago.
My personal theory is matter as we know it, is orbital energy - like crap orbiting a plug hole or the event horizon of a black hole. The path is a twist in space-time, which is around the hole which time passes through our universe - as places without matter of energy do not display time properties. Time being a force along a dimension a right angles to the other 3 (like an old animation notepad). Just as you can trace a line segment in one dimension on a desk, you can trace a square on the same desktop. Time is similar, giving an animation like effect, and a parallel like effect. I sometimes wonder what shape the “desk” really is.
But if we pump up enough energy, we seem to be able to lock it in rotating standing waves (like an orbital space ship). Enough energy in an orbit pattern, you get a boson - lots of energy = “solid” boson. Although if you don’t get the in-out (in the next dimension) flow balanced, and the orbit just right; the system will decay.
that’s a pretty good analogy for uncertainty!
lol, yeah I was thinking that too! and back in the day, when they said the universe was filled with that aether, the scientists were like “noooo, silly cavemen, there’s nothing in space!” now we know every inch of space is frothing with junk of some kind.
not a bad idea! there is certainly a lot of room for exploration in how matter works. and I think it will be the next big thing for us as a generation to break down. with the higgs thing out of the way, we’ve got a lot of work to understand what matter is and made of and why it interacts with eachother. so… still lots to do. >)