![]() This is called symmetry breaking, and it’s often explained by way of analogy with light - all wavelengths of light travel at the same speed in the medium of a vacuum, but in the medium of a prism, each wavelength can be can separated from homogenous white light into bands of different wavelengths. It is, in a sense, the universal medium which separates massless particles into different masses. The Higgs field was thought to be responsible for the fact that some particles that should not have mass, do. The only problem? By the very way they’d defined it, the Higgs field would be virtually impossible to observe. ![]() Shoring up existing theories by inventing new theoretical components to the universe is dangerous, and in the past led physicists to hypothesize a universal aether - but the more math they did, the more they realized that the Higgs field simply had to be real. This field was actually theorized before the Higgs boson itself, as physicists calculated that in order for their theories and observations to jive, it was necessary to imagine a new field that existed everywhere in the universe. The reason comes back to something called the Higgs field. Some have claimed that Homer Simpson predicted the Higgs boson via Matt Groening’s propensity to hide very credible physics in The Simpsons. We tend to think of mass as an intrinsic property of all things, yet physicists believe that without the Higgs boson, mass fundamentally doesn’t exist. Two, the Higgs is the particle which gives other particles their mass, making it both centrally important and seemingly magical. This meant its discovery would validate more than a generation of scientific publication. One, it was the last hold-out particle remaining hidden during the quest to check the accuracy of the Standard Model of Physics. Why has the Higgs been the subject of so much hype, funding, and (mis)information? For two reasons. It’s been called the God Particle, but thanks to the efforts of literally thousands of scientists, we no longer have to take its existence on faith. The Large Hadron Collider hardly needs any introduction, being one of the most famous and successful scientific experiments of all time, but the identity of its primary target particle is still shrouded in mystery for much of the public. It’s a bit of an unfair comparison discovering the electron, for instance, required little more than a vacuum tube and some genuine genius, while finding the Higgs boson required the creation of experimental energies rarely seen before on planet Earth. The Higgs boson is, if nothing else, the most expensive particle of all time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |