• The Higgs Boson is Actually the Higgs Boson
    76 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Vaught;39902748]So the Higgs field is harder to move through the more mass something has? I suppose that makes sense. What about things on a larger scale, like people size?[/QUOTE] Well, we're talking particles here, you wouldn't really be able to "weigh" something people size because this is at a much, much smaller scale where classic mechanics no longer apply. Fundamentally the mass of a particle should be proportional to how much it interacts with the field. [QUOTE=Vaught;39902748]So the Higgs Boson is basically a 'piece' of the omnipresent Higgs field? What would happen if you gathered enough of these Bosons? Or does that not matter?[/QUOTE] The Higgs boson mostly serves to prove the existence of the Higgs field, which is what gives mass to particles through the Higgs mechanism, but the boson itself is nothing all too exciting. The Higgs boson is more of a "excitation" of the Higgs field, which basically serves to show that the very hard to see field exists.
So the Higgs boson is really just to confirm the existence of the Higgs field, but doesn't exactly complete the Standard Model (I have no idea what this is, the video sorta touched on it but went over my head), something about weak nuclear force and math that really just blow me away. Trying to find some equation that will output mass without using mass as an input? I'm horribly confused. Watched it twice too. I think the stick figures distract more than help explain. Egh, I really wish I could understand this.
[QUOTE=Yahnich;39902914]pothetically gather a lot of those bosons, i guess if you had a lot of higgs bosons interacting with you that would mean you'd have a lot of mass i guess, but it's not really something that you can do, gathering higgs bosons[/QUOTE] Nothing would happen, they decay pretty much right away. If you had a bunch of Higgs bosons in the same place it would mean strictly that, that you have a lot of Higgs bosons in the same place, but they would nearly instantly become something else. You can't like, shoot Higgs bosons at things to make them massive. [QUOTE=Vaught;39902897]So the Higgs boson is really just to confirm the existence of the Higgs field, but doesn't exactly complete the Standard Model (I have no idea what this is, the video sorta touched on it but went over my head), something about weak nuclear force and math that really just blow me away. Trying to find some equation that will output mass without using mass as an input? I'm horribly confused. Watched it twice too. I think the stick figures distract more than help explain. Egh, I really wish I could understand this.[/QUOTE] Well, it's because this is not an easy concept to grasp. The Standard Model, in short, is a theory in particle physics that serves to explain 3 (electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear interactions) out of 4 (Gravity is missing) fundamental forces of the universe. I can give you yet another video that explains this. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_RhISgoXUs[/media] The purpose of the Standard Model is essentially to attempt to predict how particles interact. Bosons are in layman terms the carriers of these forces pretty much serving as the glue that holds all matter together (Although not really, this is a simplification, but still). Fermions are every particle that composes what we know as matter, and the Standard Model pretty much wants to explain everything in terms of a fundamental amount of particles and their interactions.
[QUOTE=Vaught;39902897]So the Higgs boson is really just to confirm the existence of the Higgs field, but doesn't exactly complete the Standard Model (I have no idea what this is, the video sorta touched on it but went over my head), something about weak nuclear force and math that really just blow me away. [/QUOTE] No, the higgs boson does complete the standard model - mr.minutephysics as saying that [I]if[/I] it didn't it would be more intresting as the standard model doesn't touch on gravity at all, and so they'd have to come up with a new one
So...its to confirm the higgs field's existence and to allow greater explanation/more explanation/more hypotheses on how things work on a quantum scale (At least in regards to the 3 of 4)? Is this right?
[QUOTE=Vaught;39903629]So...its to confirm the higgs field's existence and to allow greater explanation/more explanation/more hypotheses on how things work on a quantum scale (At least in regards to the 3 of 4)? Is this right?[/QUOTE] Pretty much. It lets us know why certain particles have mass, and why others don't, which solves one of the great unexplained mysteries in physics, and lets us know which particles have mass and why. All it takes now is finding an equivalence in quantum terms with gravity and we would effectively have a way to predict basically any interaction.
Ah, I think I understand (a bit) now. Thanks for helping me, and to a greater extent every other non-physics buff, out!
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;39893065][URL]http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23265-mystery-boson-earns-higgs-status-thanks-to-w-particle.html[/URL] Arxiv pre-print: [URL]http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1812[/URL] And there was much rejoicing.[/QUOTE] And the last big piece of the Standard Model comes together. For those of you think this is useless or unimportant information, I highly encourage you to read the wikipedia article ([URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Significance"]Higgs Boson[/URL]) under the section "Significance" (I linked directly to it). Also: [video=youtube;xISEnAhfynI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xISEnAhfynI[/video]
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