The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
See also Alan Boyle's outstanding coverage, most recently here and here.
The Higgs Boson Explained
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Tue Jul 3, 2012 1:54 AM EDT
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The Vimeo video is mired in lots of details that experimental physicists are interested in but has little to do with getting a clear picture of the Higgs theory itself.
NOVA did a much much better job of explaining this concept. See this video, and fast forward to timecode 29:30.
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My 2 minute version to people is this:
Ancient greeks believed that outer space was once thought not to be empty, but full of stuff called “aether” a kind of fluid that celestial bodies moved within- a notion that was discarded at the beginning of the 20th century. Today our common sense view is that space as not some kind of substance with properties, but the absence of anything. Yet from the perspective of advanced physics, the idea of space is that it is not empty but an entity with properties is closer to the truth. Some of these properties defy common sense. For example, space is like a rubber sheet that bends in the presence of massive objects. Einstein postulated this property, and it was verified by a satellite experiment called Gravity B which required 35 years and nearly $1 billion to develop.
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Another property of space is that it has a Higgs field- which can be pictured as a large auditorium full of paparazzi. When Ezra Klein shows up, the paparazzi virtually ignore him, and he can move very quickly through the crowd. Then Rachel shows up, the paparazzi go nuts and crowd around her. If she is moving slowly, it is much harder to speed her up due to the Higgs field effect crowding around her. If she is moving quickly, then she and the entire crowd of paparazzi are moving quickly, and so much more difficult to slow down. The paparazzi give Rachel the properties of a more massive object due to their stronger interaction with her.
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So the Higgs effect is a property of what we think of as empty space, and this theory is so widely accepted that most physicists think it would be bizarre if it were not discovered. It is possible to blast empty space with very high energy and chip a little bit of the Higgs field off so that we could detect it as the Higgs Boson- a particle about 130 times the mass of a proton. Lower power accelerators like the one used at FermiLab reported in March that their data showed there was a 250 to 1 probability that they had been generating thousands of Higgs particles at a particular energy level. Today they updated the raised the certainty of their finding to 550 to 1, but this is still insufficient confidence for physicists to declare discovery of the Higgs. Further observations by Cern’s Hadron collider may provide sufficient data to push the certainty high enough.
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That is what may be reported on July 4th. Anyway, the molasses metaphor is pretty awful. There was a contest on metaphors for the Higgs, and the one I and Nova used was the winner, though it was in the form of Margaret Thatcher, not Rachel moving through a crowd of politicos. (source)
Great piece. Hurrah for science.
An aside: The sound that goes with the new transition graphic (the paper fluttering thing) is like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Anyone else find it deeply irritating?
Nobel Physicist Leon Lederman wrote ' The God Particle ' about the higgs boson ! It is one of the most approachable books on this subject I have ever read. His theory is not religious in nature though the name of this book may imply that. He is so very funny and uses humor to illustrate many of his points !! Check it out !
PS Here are some great websites to visit that are listed in Alan Boyle's article in the Cosmic Log on MSNBC :
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/02/12529401-has-the-higgs-boson-been-found-signs-point-to-almost?lite
The big story on July 4
Here are some websites to watch leading up to Wednesday's big reveal:
Morgan Freeman's "Through the Wormhole" had an interesting bit of history about the boson. It seems Higgs wrote a paper positing the existence of the boson, but the folks over in Europe wouldn't publish it. So he edited it a bit, and it was published here. The "Europe Folks" read it, said, "hmmmm", and spent a gazillion euros building the CERN super collider to test his theory.
Wow. What a great point Day. I believe that what open minded, brave Scientists are often doing ( like Higgs ) is accessing deep knowledge that comes before the scientific process finally hangs the ' good information ' label on a specific notion. In a sense, we know what we know and know that we know it. Some of us ( like Higgs ) just trust what they know before others ' validate ' what they know. What a waste of money, as you say, that the scientific process can be. Convincing the old farts to accept new information is a trite but true facet of progress.
Ezra could have gone with the human drama angle of this. Culturally and economically, celebrating the individualist champions in science is very necessary to combat the Santorum like voices who question the need for university educations which they correctly understand to be generally correlated with views that diverge from establishment right wing dogma. We saw this in Texas last week with School education guidance that assaults the need for encouraging critical thinking.
The individualistic metaphor is often hijacked by the right to assault collectivist metaphors. In order to deter this message, a longer narrative on Higgs would point out that 3 separate and distinct sets of researchers simultaneously were developing the Higgs theory. This sort of spontaneous and simultaneous discovery (eg Leibniz and Newton independently developed calculus at about the same time) suggests that the "Great Man" model is just as wrong when applied to the history of technology as it is when applied to history (Eg as Howard Zinn showed in microhistories). We are more like a hive of bees. Our difference is that we have scouts that are highly trained in harnessing their intuitive powers with the mental discipline to illuminate subjects in terms of mathematical models. Science is a superoganism- a collective effort. It is not so much the first person that discovers something is a once in a generation genius who wins the day due to her plucky individualism. It is because there are many of these good scouts and they are exhausting all avenues. They are all faithfully and doggedly pursuing a goal that serves the greater good of the hive. If some die or go down a blind alley, no matter, there will be others who will find the way. Some of them might appear to be nuts to pursue a particular course but ho knows. The barrier in that "blind alley" may be a paper thin wall separating the hive from a massive new source of pollen.
Anyway, more of the biographical side of this may be found in the Nova link I gave above. Actually, Higgs himself is a European, and many of the scientists at Princeton at the time he "won over the establishment" were Europeans. As mentioned earlier, Higgs was just one of 3 groups simultaneously developing the theory. Nationalism is not particularly backed up by the facts, but if you want to score it that way, consider the accepted longer names of the mechanism: Brout–Englert–Higgs effect, or the Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism, or the Anderson–Higgs mechanism. 2 Beligians, two Brits, 3 Americans. Mostly European, with the first one across the line a Brit.
As for the LHC collider- many of the researchers on site are American, and in fact the terabytes of data on the collisions is shared globally with researchers around the world virtually instantaneously. So sure- beat the nationalist drum to try to get more federal research funding because it is ludicrous how little we spend. NSF's budget for university research is 3.2 billion- less than a tenth of a penny of each tax dollar. But to be accurate, the science community is not particularly chauvinistic along national boundaries, but are clustered more by personal biases towards one particular theoretical direction versus another. The clusters are less and less correlated with nationality, since nowadays you can just as soon mull over some peculiar experimental result with someone via online chat as you could in the MIT or Oxford research lab coffee shop.
It was way over my head!