

The Higgs Boson - A one page explanation - brfox
http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/

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Jun8
What these explanations lack, and is so hard for the educated layman to
understand, I think, is _why_ this is so important to physicists. If you were
a "layman" reading Maxwell's work (or rather Oliver Heaviside's, who put it in
the much simpler form we know), you question would be similar: "I understand
about photons and the electromagnetic force and the coolness of predicting the
speed of light using theoretical mean. But what is it useful for?"
Mathematicians face the same difficulty in explaining Riemann's hypothesis or
the Poincare conjecture to people.

Someone needs to explain the following clearly:

* What if the Higgs boson doesn't exist? does this mean Gigg' theory is incorrect?

* What is Higgs' theory is totally incorrect?

* What if the boson has mass 10M (or 10000M) rather than M, how would the world (universe) be different?

* If the boson is found, are we "done", i.e. can we proceed with a coming up with a GUT?

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Jun8
The layman's understanding of the matter may be asymptotically limited:
<http://www.isgtw.org/images/2010/Chast_2010_04_26.jpg>

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pavel_lishin
I think I remember my father telling me about a cat who wandered into a
particle collider as it was being built. It died inside, and nobody realized
it until they tried to pump it down to a vacuum - and kept failing, because
the dead animal kept outgassing.

I can't find any corroborating evidence after a 5 minute google search, so it
might be an urban legend - but regardless, the answer to the next-to-last
question is pretty well known.

~~~
Jun8
The story of a Russian physicist sticking his head in an accelerator is told
here: [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3468/what-
would-h...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3468/what-would-happen-
if-you-put-your-hand-in-front-of-the-7-tev-beam-at-lhc). Half of his face was
badly burnt but he survived and even completed his PhD!

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beefman
That's a five-page explanation, each by a different author with a unique level
of skill. And taken together, a better explanation than five pages written by
the one author of median skill. However even more efficient is reading the two
best pages, which IMO are

[http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs3.htm...](http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs3.html)
and
[http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs5.htm...](http://hep.physics.utoronto.ca/BerndStelzer/higgs/higgs5.html)

~~~
lobster_johnson
As far as I recall, David Miller's one was actually invented to explain Higgs
to Margaret Thatcher hself, the "ex-Prime Minister" in the analogy, back in
1993:

> Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly
> distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The
> ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her
> neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she
> moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has
> left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always
> clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she
> has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once
> moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving
> again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

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pitchups
The best layman explanation for the Higgs Boson : (from the second link on
that page)

Higgs proposed that ".. the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in
some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they
travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what
appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by
particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the
particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. ..... We know
from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the
particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a
particle associated with the Higg's field, and this is the Higgs boson."

~~~
brfox
I like that one, too. But then I read the others and they seem to give a
totally different picture, like: symmetric pencils falling in space. It is
interesting to read how the different physicists visualize and explain this
concept.

~~~
JL2010
And with that comment I'd like to share this:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y> Physicist Richard Feynman
describes an experience where he and a fellow student visualized the
elementary concept of counting in different ways... "What we're really doing
is having some big translation scheme going on where we're translating what
this fellow says into our images."

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szany
Sean Carroll did it in 420 characters:

<http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741225250963456>

<http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741443379920896>

<http://twitter.com/#!/seanmcarroll/status/68741774100799488>

(Background:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/13/...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/13/3tweets/))

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pratikpatel
Relevant one-pager on string theory: <http://i.imgur.com/MrSHv.gif>

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Maro
Unfortunately, the LHC has not found the Higgs so far, and it's not looking
good, with only a narrow window remaining:

<http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3864>

~~~
starwed
Comprehension fail?

> _The remaining mass range for the Higgs is the expected one, and, as
> expected, this is the hardest place to separate the Higgs from the
> background. If it’s really there, the data collected during the rest of this
> year should be enough to give a statistically significant signal._

