Since the last science book was such a dud, I wanted to pick another one specifically about something I am curious about. I know that recently the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson, sometimes known as the so-called “God Particle.” Now, the reason the Higgs Boson has that unfortunate nickname has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with sensationalist journalism. The Higgs Boson does not confirm (or deny) the existence of God. All it does is give things mass.
I knew all this going into Lisa Randall’s Amazon single, “Higgs Discovery,” but I just wanted to get that short rant out of the way. It is hard to read or write about the Higgs Boson without dealing with the “God Particle” nickname.
For those who do not know what the Higgs Boson does, or why it is so important, I will try to explain. Emphasis on try. I am not, and do not claim to be, a physicist, or even a scientist. I am just a girl interested in these sorts of things.
For a while, physicists have been wondering why photons have no mass. Or rather why most things do have mass. According to the math, everything should be traveling at the speed of light, which obviously is not what happens. Then one day, a man named Higgs (and some various other men) came up with the idea of a field, like the electromagnetic field without the electrical charge, that gives particles mass. The best analogy i have heard, the one that helped me understand it best, was about a cocktail party.
Say there is a cocktail party with lots of people milling around, talking. All over the room, there are people. Joe Schmoe walks in, looking for his friends. He doesn’t really know anyone there, so no one stops him as he walks through the room. Then, a celebrity walks into the room. Everyone gets excited and wants to talk to this famous person. The celebrity wants to find the bar to get a drink, but all the enthusiastic fans are impeding her way. The people milling around and stopping the celebrity are the Higgs field. Joe Schmoe is a photon (a particle of light), and the celebrity is a particle with mass. The more a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the more mass it has (The more guests wanting to talk to the celebrity). If a particle does not interact with the field, like with Joe Schmoe, the particle does not have mass. Photons do not interact with the Higgs field, which is why they do not have mass and are thus able to travel at the speed of light.
I hope that was clear. If you didn’t follow that, let me know. I can try to explain more clearly. But anyway, I was curious about real world applications of the Higgs boson discovery. Alas, the discovery is still too new for that, but I did gain a better understanding of what the people at CERN did and why they are confident that they actually made a discovery. Apparently the Higgs Boson is super mega unstable, so they could not actually measure it, but they were able to predict what particles it would break down into (thank you math!), and they found those. This was a dense read, but fascinating. Randall is not as good at explaining complex concepts as Brian Greene, but that’s okay. As long as you commit to the book, and are comfortable rereading the harder passages, the explanation is all there.