Higgs boson: Science explained using sugar and ping-pong balls.
Higgs boson: The poetry of subatomic particles. 5 July 2012Last updated at 01:08 GMT Peter Higgs at Wednesday's Cern seminar The Higgs boson, which scientists at Cern appear to be homing in on after 45 years, gets its name, as everyone knows, from British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to propose its existence. But what about the other part of this great name - boson? This, in fact, is also named after a physicist, Einstein's Indian contemporary, Satyendra Nath Bose. Physicists from Russia to California have given lots of curious and sometimes poetic names to the subatomic particles discovered over the last century or so. Here are 10 of them. 1.
The Higgs boson, proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964, is if it exists what gives matter mass. 2. Three quarks for Muster Mark! A fundamental particle that combines to form a range of other particles, including protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the atomic nucleus. The term was drawn from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (born 1929) in 1962. 3. What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter? - physics-math - 13 December 2011. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 A version of this piece was originally commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason and also appears on their website RichardDawkins.net.
Read more: "LHC sees hint of lightweight Higgs boson" As the world awaits news of the possible discovery of the Higgs boson, there remains a lot of confusion about what it is, why we have had to work hard to find it – and why we should care. First, the short answer: If the Higgs is discovered, it will represent perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect in recent memory, vindicating the construction of one of science's greatest theories and the most complicated machine ever built.
But if the Higgs is all that is found at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a huge amount will remain to be discovered. Now for the long answer: We all know from our own experience that how heavy something feels depends on where it is located. Playing subatomic catch But why a Higgs particle? The Non-Nerd's Guide to the God Particle, the Holy Grail of Particle Physics. VIDEO: Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains the larger implications of the God Particle's discovery. VIDEO: PhD Comics Explains the Higgs Boson. A brief history of a boson: Timeline of Higgs - physics-math - 03 July 2012. It's turned into science's worst-kept secret. Tomorrow, physicists at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland are expected to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson, the culmination of a 50-year quest to find the elusive particle that gives others their mass.
Here's how they got there. Peter Higgs is the first to explicitly predict the particle that would eventually acquire his name in October, but other physicists can also lay claim to the idea of a mass-generating boson. In August, Robert Brout and François Englert independently detail how the mass-generation mechanism could work. Another group – Dick Hagen, Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble – also produce similar ideas independently, publishing shortly after Higgs in November. Identifying exactly who came up with the Higgs could be problematic for the Nobel committee, as the prize can only be shared between a maximum of three people.
Physics blogs buzz with rumours of a Higgs signal at the Tevatron that ultimately prove false. 4 July.