My one sentence explanation as to it's importance: It's the particle that explains why other particles have mass.
edit ... in that book Lederman said:
It’s called the God Particle, says physicist, Leon Lederman, in his book of the same title, because we couldn’t call it the Goddamn particle. It’s been that frustrating to find.
But, as far as calling it "the God Particle" does Lederman or whoever suggest that this is the bottom of the line particle? Excuse me for not knowing the terms at all, but we had atoms, and then we had electrons, neutrons, etc. that form atoms, and then we had subatomic particles that had something to do with atoms that I don't understand, and now we've gotten to the God Particle that have something to do with subatomic particles that have something to do with atoms... do quarks and whatevers have mass because they are made up of these god particles, or do quarks, etc. exist alongside these newly discovered things as seperate entities? And how does the god particle fit into the atom?
I find all of this fascinating. I guess I should just read the book or something, but I don't have time for that. It's not for religious reasons at all; I just assume there's a reason why he called it the God particle and I'm trying to understand why it would be named something like that... because it sounds important. And if it's important, I like to have a working understanding of it.
You are asking some tough questions that 1) I don't completely understand and 2) that what I do understand is hard to explain simply. I'd rather risk missing some points and over simplifying than trying to be precise but not get my point across, so AD please forgive me. I did walk down the hall and bounce this off of a sciency type person.
I think the answer is "No" if I understand your question is if the Higgs is a "bottom of the line particle". The Higgs Boson isn't more fundamental than any other particle, it's just another piece of the puzzle. Boson's are different than quarks/leptons etc.. in that they are force carriers. For example the photons are responsible for the electromagnetic force, W and Z bosons the weak force. Higgs is no more or less fundamental than any other force carriers - it's another flavor of a photon. Quarks and leptons gain mass when they interact with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is thought to permeate all of space. So you could argue it's special because without it no mass and no universe as we know it, but that's true of any of the fundamental particles. So nothing special other than it's really heavy, and since it's so heavy it take lots of energy to find, and the Tevatron at Fermilab just touches that energy level enough to give strong evidence of it's existence but nothing you could say definitively. Tomorrow, we will probably hear that the LHC does have enough juice to give more evidence - perhaps enough to say without a doubt it exists.
I do recommend the book, I can assure you that it will do nothing to offend or put into doubt a religious person. I mean if you are stuck on the 7 literal day thing .. ok he is going to dispute that. But if you aren't, you just might start to get a grasp of the enormity of it and actually embrace a supernatural start to things even more than you do now (not fat and cole and numbers et. al who I'm pretty sure are situated there). It's a book where you learn and laugh alot. He is really an entertaining writer, and I guarantee you will be laughing as you read it. But time .. yeah I get that. I only read sports books any more, but I went on a 2 year binge of reading stuff about physics and the creation of the universe etc..
Fat Strat wrote:Can someone explain this in fairly simplistic terms? I think I understand what the "God particle" is, but I'm not sure. And I'm curious as to why they felt like it should be named the "God particle". That seems unnecessarily controversial to me.
And AD, why is this so unsatisfying?
This is my guess on AD's take on it ... but some find it unsatisfying because it's "messy". We have been going back and forth in history from simple elegant solutions to messy solutions and back - from Democritus' simple solution of the atom to a hodge-podge list of basic elements and then back to an elegant solution that had three particles (protons, neutrons, electrons) and now back to essentially a fairly messy periodic table of basic elements (the Standard Model).
Yep. Exactly. In physics, and a lot of science, you hope to explain complex observations by showing how they arise from a simpler underlying reality. The periodic table was obviously a huge scientific achievement, but it wouldn't be very satisfying as an explanation if the basic stuff of the universe was some hundred odd elements, even if they do have systemic patterns of behavior. The discovery of the nucleus, electronic structure, and so on "explains" the periodic table in way that is much more satisfying than the table itself. Of course, nature has no obligation to organize itself according to my aesthetic tastes, so maybe the standard model is just the way it is, but I hoped that the failure to find the Higgs was a sign that something was missing and gave rise to an opportunity to build a deeper explanation. I read a popular book by a CERN guy who stated that a lot of dirt was being swept under the Higgs rug further increasing my hopes for that outcome. Incorporating gravity into the standard model is still an opportunity, and there may be others in principle, but progress requires new experimental input much more than theoretical speculation, and it's getting to the point where the experiments are just not practical.
jim wrote:I think the answer is "No" if I understand your question is if the Higgs is a "bottom of the line particle". The Higgs Boson isn't more fundamental than any other particle, it's just another piece of the puzzle. Boson's are different than quarks/leptons etc.. in that they are force carriers. For example the photons are responsible for the electromagnetic force, W and Z bosons the weak force. Higgs is no more or less fundamental than any other force carriers - it's another flavor of a photon. Quarks and leptons gain mass when they interact with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is thought to permeate all of space. So you could argue it's special because without it no mass and no universe as we know it, but that's true of any of the fundamental particles. So nothing special other than it's really heavy, and since it's so heavy it take lots of energy to find, and the Tevatron at Fermilab just touches that energy level enough to give strong evidence of it's existence but nothing you could say definitively. Tomorrow, we will probably hear that the LHC does have enough juice to give more evidence - perhaps enough to say without a doubt it exists.
Among the many things I don't understand: I assume the Higgs field is supposed to explain inertial mass rather than gravitational mass as gravity is not in the standard model. In the popular descriptions, this is described (with, I'm sure, an imperfect analogy) as a field that permeates all space that all particles have to "push" through giving rise to apparent mass. How do you make something like this work and avoid the problems like those that killed the theory of the luminiferous aether? If there were really some thick syrup in space, shouldn't particles have different apparent masses depending on their motion relative to the syrup? Also, though the existance of the Higgs field might explain the existence of mass, how does it explain the actual masses of particles? Is that still pretty much arbitrary? And why should the coupling to the Higgs field giving particles inertial mass have exactly the same values a the ones giving rise to gravity? Doesn't this imply that the Higgs actually does have something to do with gravity despite the lack of gravity in the standard model?
jim wrote:I think the answer is "No" if I understand your question is if the Higgs is a "bottom of the line particle". The Higgs Boson isn't more fundamental than any other particle, it's just another piece of the puzzle. Boson's are different than quarks/leptons etc.. in that they are force carriers. For example the photons are responsible for the electromagnetic force, W and Z bosons the weak force. Higgs is no more or less fundamental than any other force carriers - it's another flavor of a photon. Quarks and leptons gain mass when they interact with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is thought to permeate all of space. So you could argue it's special because without it no mass and no universe as we know it, but that's true of any of the fundamental particles. So nothing special other than it's really heavy, and since it's so heavy it take lots of energy to find, and the Tevatron at Fermilab just touches that energy level enough to give strong evidence of it's existence but nothing you could say definitively. Tomorrow, we will probably hear that the LHC does have enough juice to give more evidence - perhaps enough to say without a doubt it exists.
Among the many things I don't understand: I assume the Higgs field is supposed to explain inertial mass rather than gravitational mass as gravity is not in the standard model. In the popular descriptions, this is described (with, I'm sure, an imperfect analogy) as a field that permeates all space that all particles have to "push" through giving rise to apparent mass. How do you make something like this work and avoid the problems like those that killed the theory of the luminiferous aether? If there were really some thick syrup in space, shouldn't particles have different apparent masses depending on their motion relative to the syrup? Also, though the existance of the Higgs field might explain the existence of mass, how does it explain the actual masses of particles? Is that still pretty much arbitrary? And why should the coupling to the Higgs field giving particles inertial mass have exactly the same values a the ones giving rise to gravity? Doesn't this imply that the Higgs actually does have something to do with gravity despite the lack of gravity in the standard model?
Not sure that is true, the graviton has been hypothesized. Your other questions ... I'll try to ask someone.
The hunt for the Higgs boson - the ‘God particle’ that holds the universe together - is over.
Scientists at Switzerland's CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research) announced the discovery to an audience including Professor Peter Higgs, who first suggested the existence of the particle in 1964 after he dreamed up the idea while walking in the Highlands.
Professor Higgs, 83, wiped a tear from his eye as the findings were announced, and later said: 'It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime.'
An audience of the world's leading physicists rose in a standing ovation to celebrate the find - the culmination of a decades-long search at the Large Hadron Collider and other particle accelerators such as America's Tevatron.
Although it still doesn't really explain the benefits of finding the Higgs boson. If this indeed the Higgs, then does this blaze the trail to interstellar travel or something?
