Ha ha!

when do we get this??

So who can explain this Higgs thing in simple non-technical terms?

The Higgs particle is what is responsible for giving mass to energy.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Higgs+boson+dummies/6882872/story.html

Jaz: when you say "what gives mass to energy", you've lost me already...(-:

the glue that holds molecules together

Dirrrrrty!

No. Its what gives mass to particles. Or if you want mass to mass. The question was where does the mass come from? Then there was the idea of the Higgs boson that this is the source.

...gravel fill... thats a win.

That's how they thought it would look like before the guys from CERN brought us back to reality

(having my funny day today)

Ok, I'll give it a shot. In the minimal standard model, something mysterious in space, called the Higgs field, slows known massive particles down from their natural speed, light speed, so they only appear to have mass. Mass is a manifestation of interaction of known particles with this stuff, not some God-given inherent property that can't be further understood. Maybe the Higgs field is a sort superfluid-like condensate of stuff we will someday come to understand. Nobody knows what it is! 

Great explanation Duncan! 

THe only thing you left out was the personal story of Higgs, who yesterday, after 50 years, saw his theory validated.

I was there, not in the main lecture hall but close by. Prof Higgs must be delighted. Indeed a truly historical moment for physics! Yeehaaaa... a nice quote from the day also was, "it's nice to be at a physics seminar and have applause like at a football game".

And nice explaination about the Higgs Duncan. Don't think I could have explained it, to be honest understand it all that much, and I'm a physicist (experimental maybe that's why)! But for those of you who might wish you could and are wondering what this is all about, don't worry... I wise man once said,

"If you think you understand quantum theory, THEN YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND QUANTUM THEORY."

LOL, I am relieved, since I never understood Quantum Physics....

Quantum physics is like women. You dont need to understand, you just need to be able to do it...

Hi Duncan, thanks!

If I understand you right the Higgs particles only develop mass in a certain environment and through the process of the so called Higgs field, which slows down particles penetrating it.

And the Higgs field is like a cosmic crush zone which transform the light speed particles into something physical?

I wouldn't phrase it like that. Think of it as a magnetic field around the earth (or actually the whole universe). Some particles are highly affected by the magnetic field and therefore have a high mass while others are less affected and have less mass. 

The Higgs particle (or boson) is essentially the stuff that the magnetic field is made of. 

I've attached the video 'Higgs Boson for Dummies' for a better explanation (although Duncan did a great job); don't take it personally

Thanks Edward! So the great news is that the existence of the particles of (what you call) the "magnetic field" is nearly proved?

I have a feeling G__'s Chuck Norris thread had something to do with this discovery. 

http://www.glocals.com/forums/general/Chuck-Norris-154097.htm#msg_154492

Here's an oversimplified graphic explanation of Higgs boson...

'Proving' is a very strong word in physics, but they have found very strong support for Higgs' theory. 

With all the discussion about the Higgs boson being responsible for the mass of particles, there is one important point often neglected: Most of the mass of say hydrogen atom is not due to the Higgs mechanism. Taking the atom apart, there is one electron and three quarks, having masses of 0.5 MeV and ~10 MeV, respectively (this mass is due to the Higgs mechanism), yielding a total of about 30 MeV. Now it turns out a hydrogen atom weighs about 1000 MeV. Where does the difference come from? Well actually the three quarks forming a proton interact with each other very strongly and this interaction gives rise to some additional binding energy which is the main source of mass of the proton. So after all, even without Higgs boson, we would loose only 3% of our mass...

Thanks Anrun: The Higgs field concentrates matter by the momentum of moving guests/particles?

Bjorn is right, probably. I say probably because when you pull on a thread in the fabric of universe, the whole thing comes apart. Mess with the quark masses and you mess with the stability of the neutron (it just barely decays to proton plus electron plus neutrino) and with the rate of capture of electrons by protons to form neutrons and hence with the stability of the hydrogen atom itself, and hence with the formation of stars and galaxies so on. But indeed the mass of normal baryonic matter (star stuff) is dominantly gluonic. That fact is underappreciated and a strange story someday possibly related to the Higgs story.

That said, I want to quibble with the "celeb acquiring a following in a crowd" analogy and the cuter "bill acquiring amendments in congress" analogy I just saw in a NYT article in explaining how Higgs particles are associated with mass. Physicists don't do a good job explaining the Higgs picture and people don't understand it well in simple terms because it is complicated  and mysterious not fully understood business. Nature is complicated. In the standard model, naturally massless particles acquire mass due to interaction with a *static* value of the Higgs field, the static water in the "fish discovering water" analogy. That static value has ostensibly nothing to do with the quanta associated with propagating wave excitations of Higgs field, quanta called real Higgs particles. Interestingly, Higgs waves and particles could exist entirely independently of whether there was a static Higgs field value and hence independently of whether other particles acquired much mass by the "Higgs mechanism!" Now sound in water can't exist without water but fundamental field waves like light and radio and even matter waves exist in vacuum with no known underpinning medium.  Light and everything else moves through empty space and there is no static electromagnetic field or electron field in space in their description. It is just amazing really and there is no mechanical analog. Higgs postulated a static value to the Higgs scalar field uniquely and it is THAT which underlies mass associated with other wave fields while Higgs field waves have a mass governed by another Higgs field specific disturbance (speed/mass) parameter. Mass of normal matter free particles including electrons and up and down quark is the energy associated with interaction with this static value. It isn't a crowd of Higgs particles really that "causes mass." It is just this a constant static thing there "in space" that no one can yet explain more deeply.

There is though a teensy crowd of so-called virtual (not real) Higgs particles that does surround a massive particle. These can be regarded as being emitted and absorbed invisibly and are a so-called higher order radiative effect. This crowd slightly alters the mass of the host particle. That alteration depends on the mass of the host itself since a more massive particle radiates and absorbs Higgs field more easily than a light particle does. Significantly, the crowd effect depends too on the mass of the Higgs particle since a heavy virtual Higgs is harder to emit and absorb. The observed crowd induced changes in the top quark, W boson mass, and Higgs mass are correlated and the top quark mass and W mass values are used to place (crappy) constraints on the Higgs mass without even observing real Higgs particles directly.

It is actually compicated in principle to disentable the static so-called vacuum expectation value (critical to the whole idea) from the radiative corrections when calculating the total mass of a matter particle. However, my point is that the crowd analogy misses the essential bit of the Higgs theory, that there is this constant. What is the Higgs field and what determines the constant value and Higgs mass really? Those are big mysteries.

I think this is a nice explanation: http://vimeo.com/41038445

BAZINGA !!!!

Party pooper!

Meanwhile, the Poetry of Particle Physics...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18708741

No. Matter is way too general a term and many conditions apply, like the 'class' of the guest/particle, else exclusion principles come into force.

I guess that's what makes quantum physics what it is; classifications make a huge difference to fundamental characteristics & as one delves deeper, the boundaries grow thinner and opposing concepts start to overlap or even, merge with each other.

The funny part is, that's pretty much how humanity seems to work. 

What do you specialists think about the below article?

http://www.economist.com/node/21558254

Well, when they discuss the implications of basic research, I think they are a bit unfair to physics. While in biology, they mention the discovery of DNA and the positive effects on medicine this has, for physics they tell us it gave rise to nuclear weapons. Probably one could have picked a nicer example like the invention of the transistor that lead to basically all the electronic gadgets we have nowadays.

The Higgs Boson explained, by phd comics. Dates from last year:

http://vimeo.com/41038445

just a question, as I'm a bit lost...    did they find the Higgs boson or a boson that could be the higgs'   ?

I have a dream: could we one day escape from the Higgs Boson, escape from the mass and travel without any limits?

They just discovered a boson that is consistent with a standard model Higgs boson. In principle, this will never change, you can always only show that something behaves as predicted by theory, but in the end it might be something different (you might want to compare this with the situation of the  Majorana fermions that were supossedly found in Delft recently [with much less media hype though]: There the experimental findings are so far consistent with theoretical predictions, but as soon as the experimental work was published, theoreticians started publishing papers that show that the experimentalist might have observed something else as well. However, the theoreticians also suggested further experiments that might distinguish between the two things).

However, for the Higgs boson, there actually are some further theoretical predictions about various decay channels which will be checked in the near future at the LHC, thus either further confirming a standard Higgs boson or hint to something more exotic - some supersymmetric extensions of the Standard model predict actually a whole bunch of Higgs bosons.

I would like to know is how to lose few mass..higgs or not...(sorry leaving ;()

Funding for particle physics is already under scrutiny in North America, where the LHC’s predecessor, the Illinois-based Tevatron run by Fermilab, was closed late last year due to financial constraints.

Fermilab director Pier Oddone said money was a “big, big issue” threatening progress in the United States and he hoped the Higgs discovery would spur greater funding from U.S. agencies and Congress.

“What I would hope is that this excitement, this focus of the world’s attention on this discovery, will actually help a lot in stimulating and reestablishing particle physics in North America,” Oddone said.

De Roeck said there were similar problems in Europe, where physicists will meet in September to discuss research priorities for the next 20 years and whether they need and can afford an accelerator after the LHC.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/05/higgs-boson-find-could-make-light-speed-travel-possible-scientists-hope/

The Economist article got me thinking on the global acceptance of scientific theories. In my opinion, this comes closest:

Theories have four stages of acceptance. 1) This is worthless nonsense; 2) This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; 3) This is true, but quite unimportant; 4) I always said so. - J. B. S. Haldane

Seems like the you tube links here don't work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuczOLB3DKc&feature=youtu.be

So this Dr Victoria Martin next to him was taught particle physics by Peter Higgs. I was taught particle physics by Victoria Martin. Also, I attended Peter's 80s birthday few years ago. His cake was shaped to look like the Higg's field...

Thanks Andrew. I think the problem is due to the &feature=youtu.be extension. I'd be proved right only if the same video shows up on my post. I used just the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuczOLB3DKc part of the link.

I opened a thread on this issue a while ago, but it's yet to come under the admin radar.

http://www.glocals.com/forums/new-site-feedback/Editing-forum-posts---YouTube-Video-issues-152320.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/q-and-a-the-higgs-boson-and-you.html

"Q. Will there be “spinoffs” from the discovery, as there were with the space program?

A. CERN will soon announce a Higgs boson-flavored powdered breakfast drink. But historically, the Food and Drug Administration has been wary of drinks derived from the debris of primordial fireballs left after proton collisions, so don’t expect it at a supermarket near you any time soon...."

"Q. Will the discovery affect everyday life?

A. Well, duhhh.

Q. Hey, I’m not a science-y person, O.K.?

A. Sorry. The answer is absolutely. Sort of. Well, yes and no.

Q. Can you be like a little more specific?

A. For starters, you’re going to be hearing the phrase “Higgs boson” about 800 trillion times. You’ll be at a cocktail party talking about the Kardashians and someone will say, “OMG, Higgs boson!” and you’ll go, “No, no, no — please, no more with the Higgs boson.” So there’s that. Plus this Halloween, every other trick-or-treater is going to be dressed as — guess what? — the Higgs boson. What else? Ten bucks says Al Gore claims he discovered it. Another 10 says Mitt Romney picks it as his running mate. Romney-Higgs boson. Dream ticket. So, yes, it’s going to affect your everyday life. My advice? Deal with it."

http://www.zazzle.fr/higgs+bosom+cadeaux

Good article,

Good to see article like this in Glocal. :)

Commercials about Tang -- the "space drink" from NASA