If you've had any interested in physics at all you've heard about a thing called the

Higgs boson.

But just what is it then why is it interesting?

In 1964 a physicist by the name of Peter Higgs

took some ideas that were floating around at the time,

added an insight or two of his own, and proposed that there was an energy field

that permeated the entire universe.

This energy field is now called the "Higgs field."

The reason he proposed this field was that nobody understood why some

subatomic particles had a great deal of mass

while others had little and some had none at all!

The energy field that Higgs proposed would interact

with the sub-atomic particles and give them their mass. Very massive particles

would interact a lot of the field while massless particles wouldn't interact at all.

To better understand the idea, we can use the analogy of water and swimmers.

In our analogy the water serves the role

of the Higgs field.

A barracuda, being supremely streamlined, interacts only slightly with

the field and can move through it very easily.

The barracuda would then be similar to a low-mass particle.

In contrast, my buddy Eddie, no stranger to doughnuts

can only move very slowly through the water.

In our analogy, Eddie is a massive particle made massive by interacting a lot with

the water.

The lightest of the familiar subatomic particles is the electron, while in the subatomic

world the king of mass is the top quark.

It weighs about as much as an entire atom of gold,

about three hundred and fifty thousand times more than the electron!

I'd like to stress that we believe the top quark is not more massive because

it's bigger. It's not!

In fact, we believe that both the top quark and the electron are exactly the same size!

Indeed, they both have zero size!

The top quark is more massive than the electron simply because it interacts

more with the Higgs field. Actually,

if the Higgs field didn't exist,

neither of these particles would have any mass at all!

Now, in the press

you don't hear about the Higgs field but rather the Higgs boson.

How are these two things related?

The Higgs boson is the smallest bit of the Higgs field.

To understand how that works we should again return to water.

Everyone knows what water is.

If you're immersed in it you know that water is everywhere. It's a continuous medium

and there are no holes in it.

We also know that water is made of molecules - specifically H20.

If you hold these two ideas in your head with the realization that water consists

of countless individual molecules you can now begin to appreciate

the Higgs boson.

The Higgs field that gives subatomic particles their mass is made of countless individual

Higgs bosons, just like water is made of individual molecules.

You should keep in mind that the Higgs boson hasn't been discovered yet, and

what I'm describing is simply the most popular idea as to why subatomic

particles have the masses that they do.

As I speak

my colleagues and I are studying data taken at huge particle accelerators to see if

this idea is true.

Stay tuned!

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