![]() ![]() This $10 billion machine smashes protons together at unprecedented energies to look for indications of never-before-seen particles and other clues to outstanding mysteries about the universe. Scientists had to look for the particle's signature at the Large Hadron Collider, which operates in a 17-mile tunnel underneath the border between France and Switzerland. It's not as if a particle just showed up and said, "Hi, I'm a Higgs boson sorry I'm late." More data is needed to determine what exactly the results mean. You can think about the Higgs field like the air. If there's a piano in the room and you can hear someone playing it, there must be air, because sound needs air to travel through. OK, so how about detecting the Higgs bosons? Imagine air isn't something that you need to survive, but you want to know if there is air in the room that you are standing in, says Arkani-Hamed. Similarly, if the universe is like a party, people who are relatively unknown will pass through the room quickly, while more popular people are slowed down by their friends, who correspond to Higgs bosons. "We think we have found these teenage girls," he told CNN Wednesday. If he tries to move through them, they slow him down, and his speed decreases the more they're attracted to him. Martin Archer, a physicist at Imperial College in London, explains it differently: He compares the phenomenon to Justin Bieber in a crowd of teenage girls. "As far as the Higgs particle itself, it’s actually the tiniest nugget of this molasses-like substance," he said. As electrons move through the bath they experience a resistance, which corresponds to mass. Imagine we are all immersed in an invisible molasses-like bath, physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University said earlier this year. If Higgs bosons were just free-floating, we wouldn't need a $10 billion collider to detect them, Arkani-Hamed explains. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to excite the field enough to detect a Higgs boson. "It's amazing that something so simple is actually involved," Arkani-Hamed said of the Higgs boson.įor the public, however, it's not such an elegant idea: The theory goes that everything in our universe exists in a Higgs field, which is uniform everywhere. In fact, Arkani-Hamed, who works at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said he was "dead certain" that the Higgs would be found, and would have staked a year's salary on it. Profile: Colliding with the universe's best-kept secrets "It's an enormous celebration and everyone's incredibly excited to have found it, but this is by no means a gigantic surprise," said prominent theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed. Scientists from the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN) said yesterday that they had discovered a new particle with attributes of the Higgs boson, a particle that had never been detected, but needs to exist in order for current theories about the universe to remain true. ![]() Beyond that, physicists have to get creative. We know that this particle is responsible for the fact that matter - i.e. It's like molasses! But sort of like the air! Yet it also behaves like fans of Justin Bieber!Įveryone's talking about the Higgs boson, even though there's no really great metaphor for describing what it is and how it works. ![]()
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