The Higgs Boson

[angra]

A Higg boson walks into a church.

The priest rushes up and says "Hey get out, we don't allow Higgs Bosons in this place!"

The Boson replies "But without me how can you have Mass?"

[angra]

QI's take on "nothing" and Ben Miller's attempt to explain the Higgs fields to a bunch of comedians (before the recent discovery).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-tlpLf8Hpk

What I find amazing is that even the emptiest emptiest space in the universe contains a field of potential particles which can burst into existence at any time, once given mass by a Higgs boson.

I'm not a scientist, but for me this ranks with men on the moon as the greatest discovery/achievement in my lifetime.

And you realise the LHC only cost as much as 3 modern US bombers?

Seems a pretty good bargain.

[jack]

What’s often not appreciated is that the Higgs boson, as an ‘implication’ of particle physics, was considered so ‘completely obvious’ that it didn't appear in the first draft of Peter Higgs’ 1964 paper. As Frank Close of Oxford University explained...

In the first draft of the paper that Higgs wrote he didn’t even mention it, and the referee turned the paper down. And then Higgs thought, maybe I’d better think of some implications, and he added this extra implication which is now the boson. So if the referee hadn’t turned the paper down, even Higgs might not have mentioned it. [1]

Thus, the Higgs boson first appeared in the scientific literature almost as an afterthought, helped along by the lately-maligned peer review process.

There's also some interesting background on Higgs and his life and career in an article in today's Oz. [2]

1. www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/higgs-boson-to-reveal-the-mechanism-for-origins-of/2964744
2. www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/bittersweet-triumph-for-quiet-revolutionary-peter-higgs/story-e6frg8y6-1226418273522