Higgs boson

The first thing to say about the Higgs boson is that the stress is on the first word. Boson is a thing named after a person, not a person who was Higgs' colleague. More importantly it should never have been called the God particle as Br Consomalgno sj explains.

"The name 'the God particle' was given to it as a joke by Leon Lederman," the Vatican astronomer recalled. "It was basically a provocative title for book he was writing on particle physics. He said that if there was a particle that could exist that could explain all the little things we wanted to explain, it would be a gift from God. It is a metaphor and has nothing to do with theology."

(If you click through to that story you will see a picture of something even harder to find than a Higgs boson - a Jesuit brother in a dog collar).

I watched two videos meant to explain the significance of the possible find. They start from different ends. One goes through everything and then arrives at a discussion of the Higgs field. The other starts with the Higgs field and conveys the same information form there. I learnt a few things and learnt more things I would never understand. I also learnt that young physicists like stop motion animation. Some prefer it digital, some prefer it real.
LHC = Large Hadron Collider.




The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.