Rule Number 1

  1. In which I explain the Higgs Boson to my girlfriend, who is a biologist not a physicist.

    • Alex Wright:
      ok, so, first I should explain what a Boson is
    • Krista:
      ok
    • coles notes version please
    • Alex Wright:
    • alright, so, a boson is a field mediating particle, like a photon
    • are you familiar with the electromagnetic field?
    • Krista:
    • yes
    • Alex Wright:
    • ok, so the photon is the boson that mediates the electromagnetic field.
    • the field, and force, doesn't exist without and is made up of photons. If you excite the field to a certain energy, photons are released.
    • and we can observe them
    • Krista:
    • yes I understand that
    • Alex Wright:
    • it's like when you slosh around a bucket of water and some of the water at the surface splashes up into a drop separate from the larger body of water
    • ok, so that's the basics of bosons
    • the Higgs boson is a very special type of boson
    • You know that atoms are essentially 98% empty space, yes?
    • Krista:
    • ok
    • Alex Wright:
    • you've got your nucleus, and the electrons are floating around about as far away as jupiter from the sun, if we're talking scale here.
    • Krista:
    • yes
    • I know that
    • Alex Wright:
    • so most of the universe is about 98% nothing
    • but this doesn't really make sense, because if it was truly empty, everything would be zooming around at the speed of light
    • einstein's general relativity tells us that the thing that keeps particles form zooming about at light speed is mass.
    • some particles don't have mass, like photons and electrons, which obviously travel at light speed.
    • Krista:
    • ok
    • Alex Wright:
    • but what creates mass?
    • 50 years ago, a smart guy named Peter Higgs suggested that that 98% of empty space wasn't empty at all, he hypothesized that this empty space was actually completely saturated with the Higgs Field
    • the Higgs field acts like a quantum molasses which slows down these particles as they travel through space.
    • Krista:
    • ooo cool
    • Alex Wright:
    • so, he proposed this 50 years ago, and described the phenomenon with mathematics, and it made sense
    • but the problem was, the Higgs field has such high energy, and because of Einstein's E=mc^2 equation, such high mass properties, it takes an immense amount of energy to excite the field enough to observe the particle
    • and then they did
    • Krista:
    • ohhh
    • Ok. wow I actually get it.
    • a few seconds ago
    • Alex Wright:
    • Yay
    • Krista:
    • you should post that explanation.
    • because every other one makes no sense.

    2. Tagged:  Higgs   Boson   Higgs Boson   Science   Physics   Explaining Science to my Girlfriend 

    Posted 11 months ago 467 notes

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