Anyone here enough of a geek to explain significance of the Higgs Boson particle?

[Vinland]

What is it?
What does it prove?

[Savy]

Very hand wavy explanation

If we have two magnets they experience a force, either attracting them together or repelling them. Well the way they explain this in science is that both magnets emit a force carrying particle (a boson) and when this boson hits the magnet this is what makes it experience the force which we can observe.

Well the higgs boson is the same as the boson described above, but instead of magnetic force it's what makes things experience weight basically.

As for what it proves, it basically proves that the model that they use to describe things is right.


edit - I'm sure if you google it there will be much better, easier explanations.

[wufwugy]

All forms of energy except gravity are explained by known particles. Higgs is a particle predicted by the standard physics model that explains gravity

I'm pretty sure that's accurate, but possibly wrong

[JKDS]

Its the foundation for new tiny dick jokes!

[NightGizmo]

MadMojoMonkey is a physicist or something, he answered that question a while back in his physics thread: http://www.flopturnriver.com/pokerfo...ml#post2104535

[kiwiMark]

it proves they're recklessly trying to destroy our universe and MUST BE STOPPE!!111

[a500lbgorilla]

Smaller than stuff are fields. Discrete bumps in fields are stuff. Fields are everywhere. Fields and their bumps interact with one another. There was a problem in completing the description of the observed universe based on fields that lead to the supposition of the higgs field. The higgs field interacts with other fields and their bumps to yield mass.

I am not a physicist nor have I studied or even worked with these descriptions of the smaller than small, but that's essentially it.

[MadMojoMonkey]

The link above is pretty good. I'm not an expert on the Higgs mechanism.

I heard a more knowledgeable physicist than myself describe the Higgs boson as being similar to causing fluid drag on a particle scale. Obviously, this is a dumbed-down explanation for a layman audience. The thing that bugs me is that I've never heard anyone else describe it this way, and so I'm skeptical about reading too much into it.

The fluid drag description would be something like:
When something moves through a fluid, it experiences drag forces proportional to the square of it's speed relative to the fluid. The forces rise due to the energy required to displace the fluid out of the path in front of the moving object and then fill in the vacuum left behind the object, as well as the production of turbulence and/or vortices in the fluid. The production of any heat and sound also dissipates energy, causing a drag force that is miniscule in comparison to the viscous drag.

Here's my problem:
Mass does not increase proportional to the square of the speed of an object relative to some background. Mass DOES increase as speed increases, but in a different way. (The change in an object's mass at speeds less than ~1/3 the speed of light are negligible. An object's mass approaches infinity as that object's speed approaches the speed of light.)

I have a BS in Engineering Physics, so if you have a more direct question, fire away.

Feel free to bump the "physics monkey" thread again if there's something in there that you would like more info on. (I do get a kick out of answering physics questions.)

[MadMojoMonkey]

What is it?

I think I've covered this as much as I can.

What does it prove?

Well, it's just a particle, so it doesn't prove anything. (yuk yuk)
The discovery of the Higgs boson is yet another triumph of the Standard Model. It was predicted by theorists, then after a search, it was found.

Again (I've said this many times), this is the hallmark of good science. When something that has never been observed is predicted to exist by extrapolating logical implications from an existing theory... and that something is later observed, it is a strong indication that the theory is correct.

I guess you can say that it proves that one more set of seeming inconsistencies in the Standard Model has been eliminated. The Standard Model has been shown to be excellent at predicting and describing the universe as we understand it.

[MadMojoMonkey]

If we have two magnets they experience a force, either attracting them together or repelling them. Well the way they explain this in science is that both magnets emit a force carrying particle (a boson) and when this boson hits the magnet this is what makes it experience the force which we can observe.

FUN FACT: The force carrying boson for electromagnetism is the photon! Electric and magnet forces are caused by the exchange of light!

[Savy]

That is a fun fact, didn't know that.

[MadMojoMonkey]

it proves they're recklessly trying to destroy our universe and MUST BE STOPPE!!111

Experiments at MUCH, MUCH higher energies happen regularly, but they are not caused and controlled (in the experimental sense) by humans.

The sun constantly spits out some extremely high energy particles. Sometimes they can be captured with an appropriate sensor array by chance. This is really fun science, but hard to know when and where you should put your sensors, so relatively low yield on the data side.

The idea of making a huge particle accelerator is that humans can control when and where the experimental event takes place, and make sure they have amazing sensors there. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to produce energies even remotely close to those which exist in a stellar core.

So, simultaneously, the LHC at CERN is the highest energy experiment ever created by humans, and really a shockingly low energy device considering some of the data available.

My point is that it's nowhere near a "world ending" device, much less a "universe ending" device. Also, the use of the word reckless was, I believe, a bit hyperbolic. Just cause the whole thing got shut down for a few months when someone left a doughnut where they shouldn't have doesn't mean the whole project is reckless.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Smaller than stuff are fields. Discrete bumps in fields are stuff. Fields are everywhere. Fields and their bumps interact with one another. There was a problem in completing the description of the observed universe based on fields that lead to the supposition of the higgs field. The higgs field interacts with other fields and their bumps to yield mass.

This is actually quite good.

... except for the first sentence. Fields are small? A field exists everywhere, unless you confine a field to a specific region of study. Still, there is an argument that the field exists everywhere, and you are just not interested in most of it.

A field is just a mathematical object which contains at every point in some spatial region (or all space) a number, or set of numbers.

The temperature in a room can be described with a field. Everywhere in the room (even inside the objects in the room, which may contain you) there is a number, which is the temperature of that point.

The exact same is true of the Electric Field, which has some value at all points in space, even if that value may be 0 (as it is inside all metal objects).

Fields can contain vectors, and are thus called vector fields.

In the example of the temperature in a room, now consider the "wind" in the room. At every point in space, there is both a direction and an intensity (speed). Together, those data are the velocity.

So a field is just a mathematical way to talk about the properties of a space.

Some fields interact with each other, as in the case of the electric and magnetic fields. These fields are well known and can be measured even by children. So while a field is a mathematical object, it can describe a very real thing.

[swiggidy]

Not adding anything to this thread, but I have two friends who both worked on the new collider, and I asked both of them this same question (albeit at a bar) and did not come away with any better understanding.

/am also not good at not running on sentences