**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[Savy]

Except Higgs. He's a household name, although maybe that's just because he's British. Maybe random Americans haven't heard of him.

Although I have to admit, I had to google his name to remember if it's John or Peter.

That's only really because science has to justify spending billions of dollars building a toy.

The problem is that when you look through the list for reasons why people won the award the words don't really mean anything to the average person and those that do tend to be for fairly "tame"* things. I think the same is true for most of the awards.

*Not to diminish the work or how important it is.

[OngBonga]

That's only really because science has to justify spending billions of dollars building a toy.

Probably. It'll be interesting to see how famous he is in a decade.

[Savy]

Probably. It'll be interesting to see how famous he is in a decade.

Nah he'll be remembered because he has a pretty important mechanism named after him in a part of physics that will, at least in the foreseeable future, be important in answering some of the biggest questions about life.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Nah he'll be remembered because he has a pretty important mechanism named after him in a part of physics that will, at least in the foreseeable future, be important in answering some of the biggest questions about life.

IDK. It's not something a non-physicist will need to learn about. It'd be a challenge to describe the Higgs field in any non-hand-wavey manner to a 2nd year physics major. It's not something a non-physicist is going to understand in a comprehensive way other than to memorize some statements.

Even the layman's understanding of "Physicists have detected Higgs Bosons." is misleading, because we haven't had any detector register the presence of a Higgs Boson. We've observed the decay products of a particle with the properties hypothesized by Higgs, et al. If it has all the properties of the thing, it is that thing. So we've detected evidence of Higgs Bosons' decay, which implicitly confirms the existence of Higgs Bosons.

If our new understanding of Higgs bosons leads to a new unforeseen shift in technology, then his name will be remembered. Like Einstein's. If Einstein's relativity didn't tell us to look for Black Holes, or enable us to create big explosions, microwave ovens and GPS, then I doubt he'd be much remembered, either, like so many names of Nobel Prize recipients.

[Savy]

IDK. It's not something a non-physicist will need to learn about. It'd be a challenge to describe the Higgs field in any non-hand-wavey manner to a 2nd year physics major. It's not something a non-physicist is going to understand in a comprehensive way other than to memorize some statements.

Even the layman's understanding of "Physicists have detected Higgs Bosons." is misleading, because we haven't had any detector register the presence of a Higgs Boson. We've observed the decay products of a particle with the properties hypothesized by Higgs, et al. If it has all the properties of the thing, it is that thing. So we've detected evidence of Higgs Bosons' decay, which implicitly confirms the existence of Higgs Bosons.

If our new understanding of Higgs bosons leads to a new unforeseen shift in technology, then his name will be remembered. Like Einstein's. If Einstein's relativity didn't tell us to look for Black Holes, or enable us to create big explosions, microwave ovens and GPS, then I doubt he'd be much remembered, either, like so many names of Nobel Prize recipients.

None of those things are relevant to him being remembered. It only needs to be a hand wavy explanation, it doesn't need to be a discovery in terms of here it is in a jar. He's remembered because this big thing that happened that was all over the news for years kept mentioning his name & his name will continue being mentioned in the future because he's pretty fundamental.

Now he's not like a Newton or Einstein where he is cemented in popular culture but he wouldn't be a pointless answer (tv reference I doubt you get).

[MadMojoMonkey]

That's only really because science has to justify spending billions of dollars building a toy.

"'Cause it's da biggest toy, though!" seems justification enough to me.

We've worked our way up to this point over millennia. First particle accelerator was bangin' 2 rocks together and seeing what's inside.
We're a bit more sophisticated than that, nowadays. We have Punkin' Chunkin' competitions and stuff.

We didn't build a particle accelerator that big until we'd exhausted the experiments we could think to do with lower energy accelerators. Having built that one, we've confirmed a hypothesized implication of our other theories, the Higgs field, which is always a hallmark of good science.