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comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  4868 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nowhere Left to Hide: the Higgs boson.
http://www.phy.uct.ac.za/courses/phy400w/particle/higgs.htm In 1993 the UK science minister challenged physicists to produce a one page answer to the question, what is the Higgs boson and why do we want to find it? -as someone that was unfamiliar with Higgs boson, it was a helpful read.




mk  ·  4862 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Awesome link. Bookmarked. I think there should be a sight that is composed of these. Wikipedia is close, but it's interesting to compare how experts explain it.
mike  ·  4868 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Good read, that is. So... Higgs bosons are like aether?

(from the comments: "It's always in the last place you look"; "So the Higgs Boson is under my sofa cushions?")

fred  ·  4868 days ago  ·  link  ·  
"that's why I always look in the last place first". -also from the comments.
AnSionnachRua  ·  4868 days ago  ·  link  ·  
You mean the luminiferous aether? It certainly seems like it, at least to an ordinary person like myself. Both were thought up in order to explain gaps in our theories.

Yup: "The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the weak interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries electromagnetic forces is massless." (From the second article in newgreen's link).

But then, this is part of how science works.

Excellent link, newgreen, by the way.

thenewgreen  ·  4519 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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