<p>Can someone spell it out for us? I know little of Higgs boson or God particle, but it sounds so exciting.</p>
<p>The prize-winning description - literally - was imagine a huge room full of political operatives. You can pass through them because you aren’t of interest to them. The Prime Minister walks through and they flock to him. The imagery is that flocking creates something akin to drag, meaning some form of energy, so the Prime Minister then becomes an actual thing we can see in this universe. </p>
<p>To put it another way, the Higgs idea, which is really a group’s idea with his name attached, is that something must translate whatever lies beyond matter into matter and that something is this “field” or room they call the Higgs boson. It’s essentially a gateway into the universe for some basic particles. Not all. They can calculate the energy needed to be this gateway from the energy of the particles that exist.</p>
<p>This research is just a step of figuring out how things become real out of nothing.</p>
<p>From this layman’s understanding it is the force that allows energy to assume mass and create matter. </p>
<p>There is ONLY energy in this universe and all matter is but a store of immense energy.<br>
*
There is enough energy inside the space of an empty tea-cup to boil all the oceans of the world*
Richard Feynman</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So is the Higgs boson the Prime Minister (who has power or charisma that attracts other particles) before the flocking begins, or is it the flocking itself or the drag? I’m sorry I still can’t understand it.</p>
<p>Watch this: [The</a> Higgs Boson Explained on Vimeo](<a href=“The Higgs Boson Explained on Vimeo”>The Higgs Boson Explained on Vimeo)</p>
<p>Bay, it’s the field or the room in which the operatives act on the Prime Minister. Remember, energy is mass. In this universe, it’s compressed into particles and we use the equivalence relationship of E = mc^2 to express the vastness of the energy pushed into a tiny space. You can think of this field or room as being the gateway by which energy is pushed onto or into the thing that is then a particle. Think of it as an energy collecting spot. All those operatives are energy clumping together and that becomes a real thing in our universe.</p>
<p>Besides that this field only creates some of the particles we see, it doesn’t get at other fundamental questions like where this energy comes from or even what it is. We can - and have - calculated what energy the field needs to generate particles but we’re in the dark about the other stuff behind it.</p>
<p>There is, as you may know, a big divide between physics that can be approached experimentally and that which is having trouble getting off the mathematical page. The former is particle physics, for which this is a terrific achievement, while the latter is stuff like string theory. I say stuff like because there are competitors like quantum loops.</p>
<p>I thought the article about the discovery in today’s NYTimes did a pretty good job of explaining it. At least I understood it, and I’m definitely not a physicist!</p>
<p>Thanks folks for the explanations. I read the Times article too, but this thread has definitely added to my understanding. Turned out my 22 year old son headed to being an art historian knew all about it. His education was not in vain! HAHA.</p>
<p>Lergnom’s got the best description I think. Particle/theoretical physics is fun to look at, but almost impossible to comprehend everything.</p>
<p>A friend of ours was reseaching Bose Einstein condensates.
This description i can almost follow.
;)</p>
<p>[Bose-Einstein</a> Condensates](<a href=“http://www.jupiterscientific.org/sciinfo/boseeinstein.html]Bose-Einstein”>Bose-Einstein Condensates)</p>
<p>Lergnom,
Are you a teacher? You explain things so well. Here and on the Middle Age Bulge thread.</p>
<p>I’m a scientist but not a theoretical or any other kind of physicist. I’m currently in the Geneva area on business and I plan to take a tour of the CERN facility tomorrow. Hopefully they will provide a nice, easy to understand explanation.</p>
<p>How exciting coureur!</p>
<p>Great thread. Lergnom, you blew my mind. In a good way. My humanities-oriented brain always thought of physics as a mind altering experience. I’m not kidding. I actually FEEL my brain WORKING whenever confronted with physics. It’s better than drugs 
Alas, it’s also just a little brain, so I never had a future in science.</p>
<p>Remember, we still can’t explain a vast array of fundamentals. Gravity. The wave-particle duality. To get even more basic, we don’t know how or why numbers exist and whether they are the “same” everywhere, which then questions whether fundamental laws vary across the universe. We can’t explain the why behind any of the fundamental constants, not even Pi. We’ve been very good at observing and not very good at explaining.</p>
<p>^^Heck, we don’t even know if numbers exist, much less how or why. Platonists vs. non-platonists: do numbers have an independent existence separate from us thinking about them or are they merely a construct of the human mind? </p>
<p>Plato thought they had an independent existence, and probably most mathematicians today agree with him. But not all of them do.</p>
<p>Here’s one: imagine a different value for Pi. That would change the entire scale of every thing that exists in the universe. The value of Pi, which extends into infinity, comes from what? You can’t say it comes from the relationship of circumference or area and radius because that presumes the relationship exists at that scale and generates that number. Take the analytic constant e, which is the base of natural logarithms. It is generated by a number of equations, but more importantly it is the basis for figuring the natural growth of systems. And by natural systems, I mean small things like a shell and unbelievably immense things like spiral galaxies. We have no idea where it comes from. How the heck does a galaxy made of hundreds of millions of stars and countless other stuff fit itself to a logarithmic spiral that is the same exact thing we find in the shape of a spiral beach we walk on? </p>
<p>Why are there at least two kinds of infinity? Cantor proved that some kinds of infinity can be counted, that they can be matched up with the counting numbers, while other kinds of infinity can’t be counted at all. How is it that some infinity is “bigger” than another? How is infinity even possible? </p>
<p>To put these together, we live in time. We don’t know what causes time, just that it is and even that it is reversible at very small scales. How does a constant exist in time? Since we can calculate Pi to many billions of decimal places, how does that kind of infinity fit each moment into a number that literally determines the scale of every physical thing? </p>
<p>That’s why the Higgs finding excites me. It’s a step forward. We will not run out of questions. Many of the most difficult we’re currently ignoring, perhaps because they’re just too hard for us right now.</p>
<p>You can always find things (the what) but Nature will never let us explain why. You can’t even explain why nature won’t let us explain why.</p>
<p>My brain hurts.</p>
<p>One thing I learned at CERN today: the high energy particle collision between two protons that indicate the presence of a Higgs boson is one that produces either four photons, four muons, or two photons plus two muons. That’s what the scientists are sifting through billions of collisions per second to find. </p>
<p>The place is huge, as is the equipment. Unbelievably large electromagnets for example - all assembled to micron tolerance and precision. The coolest thing I saw the control room for the ATLAS project: <a href=“https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic[/url]”>https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic</a>
It looked a NASA control room but with newer, bogger color flat screen monitors and fancier equipment. The dozen or so guys manning the instruments mostly looked so young - grad students and posts docs I’d guess.</p>