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the two guys walk into a bar really?
no, seriously. two guys walk into a bar, icecream bar.
Dave, a physicist working in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
European laboratory for particle physics. and Steve, a bluesing(?)
Dave, how's it going? Steve, good to see you.
two scrips(?) choco almond for me, banilla shake
Hey, I just saw someone a bit like you on TV, you guys found bozo in your detector?
Well, not exactly we found a boson, probably the Higgs boson.
What's that? It's a particle.
then you find particles all the time? Yes, but this one means the Higgs field might
really exists. Field? What Field?
the Higgs Field. It's named after Peter Higgs although many others contributed to the idea.
That isn't a field like for you go corn but hypothetical invisible kind of force field
that pervades the whold universe. mmm, ok.
If it pervades a whold universe, how come I've naver seen it? So.. a bit strange.
Mmm, It's actually not that strange. Think it's air around us.
We can't see it and smell it. Well, perhaps in some places, we can.
but we can detect its presence with sophisticated equipment like our own bodies
so the fact we can't see something just makes it a bit harder to determine whether it's
really there or not. All right. go on.
So we believe that the Higgs field is all around us everywhere in the universe and what
it does is rather special. It gives mass to elementary particles.
What's elementary particle? Elementary particle is what we call particles
that have no structure. It can't be devided. They're the basic building blocks of the
universe. So, that's what with atoms.
Well, atoms are actually made of smaller components, protons, neutrons and electrons.
Well, electrons are fundamental particles, neutrons and protons are not.
They're made of other fundamental particles called quirks.
Sounds like Russian doles. Does it ever end? Actually, we don't really know but our current
undersanding is called the Standard Model. In it, there are two types of fundamental
particles, the fermions that make up matter and the bosons that carry forces.
we often ordered these particles according to their properties such as mass.
we can measure the masses of the particles. but we never really knew where this mass came
from or why they have the masses they do.
so, how does this Higgs field thing explain mass?
Well, when a particle passes through the Higgs field, it interacts and gets mass.
the more interacts, the more mass it has. Ok I kinda get, but is it really that important
knowing? What if there were no Higgs field?
If there's no Higgs field, the world wouldn't exist at all, there would be no stars, no
planets, no air, no anything that. , even that spoon or that icecream you're
eating. How that would be bad? OK, but where the Higgs
boson fit into things? Oh, all right. see the cherry in my shake.
Can I have it? No, not yet. we have to use it as an analogy
first. All right, cherries that is Higgs boson.
No, not quite. the cherry is a particle moving through the Higgs field.
shake, shake gives the cherry its mass. I get it ok. so the molecules at the shake
are the Higgs bosons. well when you get it closer, it takes an excitation
of the Higgs field to produce the Higgs boson. so for example, if I were to added energy
by say, dropping this cherry in the shake. Are then the drops of spill on the bar the
Higgs boson? Almost. the splash itself is the Higgs boson.
You serious? Well, that's what quantum mechanics teaches
us. In fact, all particles are excitations of fields.
Ok, right. well I kinda see why you like particle physics is quite cool strange. that cool.
Yeah, you could call it a bit strange. It's not like everyday life.
The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field.
By finding the Higgs boson we know that the Higgs field exists.
Right and so now you fonnd it we know this exists, you must be done! so anything left
partical physics? Actually, we just begun. It's a bit like you
know when Columbus thought he had found a new route to India.
He did indeed found something new but not quite what he was expecting.
So first we need to make sure that the boson we found is actually the Higgs boson.
It seems to fit but we need to measure its properties to be sure.
How did you do that? Take a lot more data, this new boson lives
for only very short time before it breaks down and decays into lighter, more stable
particles. By measuring these particles, we learn about
the properties of the boson. What exactly are you looking for?
Well, the standard model predicts how often in what ways the Higgs boson would decay to
the various lighter particles. so we want to see if the particle we have
found is the one predicted by the standard model, or it fits into other possible theoretical
models. And if it fits a different model?
That would be even more exciting. In fact, that's how science advances. It will
replace old models with new ones if they better explain our observations.
Right, it seems like finding this Higgs boson gives a direction for exploration, a bit like
columbus guy heading west. Exactly. and this is really just the beginning.