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Okay, here's the deal.
On July 4th, 2012,
scientists at CERN in Switzerland
gathered around computers,
waiting for a dump of significant data.
Science communicators all over the world were watching
and waiting for the Higgs boson.
I was actually there too.
Quantum physics is tough.
I think I've aged better.
Less hair, more flare, you know?
And finally, the data, the Higgs boson,
it was discovered, yeah!
Peter Higgs,
the physicist who predicted the particle's existence
a half a century earlier wiped tears from his eyes.
Champagne was popped.
And that was 10 years ago.
So like you might be wondering
and I was wondering this too,
what did the Higgs boson on do for us?
Are we smashing atoms just for funsies?
Maybe, but probably not.
Put simply, what Higgs you done for me lately?
I have the answer and it's massive.
(upbeat electronic music)
All right, that was a cliff hanger mildly and also a pun.
You're welcome.
I'm Trace and this is my show.
I also have mass.
So the short answer is this.
The Higgs might keep our universe from collapsing
and the Higgs might also prove
that there's a multiverse of universes.
Okay, hold up.
How?
How does this particle, or field, or whatever do that?
It doesn't help us build spaceships.
It doesn't make our phones faster.
It doesn't reverse climate change.
So what does the Higgs actually do for me?
Well, that comes down to an intricate understanding
of how the universe works.
Finding new particles is like seeing the code of the Matrix.
It doesn't really help you on its own.
Knowing it just makes things more detailed.
No, wait a minute.
So what you're saying is physicists from all over the world,
they collaborated, they got friendly,
and they built the largest machine in existence.
They spent billions
and they smashed trillions of particles
at nearly the speed of light.
And we have like no actual practical application?
And so, that's it.
Yeah, I mean, except not at all.
On a daily basis, Skeptical Trace,
the Higgs does like a lot.
It makes days even possible, for example.
The Higgs boson interacts
with the corresponding Higgs field,
which permeates the entire universe.
And when particles interact with the Higgs field,
it gives them what we experience as mass in our reality.
Can you imagine the universe without mass, Skeptical Trace?
I guess not.
I thought so.
Also, it does stop the universe from collapsing on itself,
but not for the reason you think.
It's not like the Higgsy B
is literally holding up the pillars of creation or anything,
but that's pretty cool.
(Skeptical Trace coughing)
Yes, it literally is holding the pillars, those pillars,
but I'm talking about like not gravity and mass.
I appreciate your skepticism, Skeptical Trace.
The moon landing was real.
9/11 was an outside job.
Birds are real animals.
I'm done with this gag.
Conspiracies!
So the takeaway here is the Higgs boson will not,
repeat, not change your life.
It doesn't help you make coffee better.
It doesn't self drive your car or give you a raise.
And in fact, knowing the existence of almost any particle
isn't gonna make a huge tangible difference
in your life short term.
But long term, it can do a lot.
So here's an analogy.
Imagine that we know sound is there.
You can hear it.
You know it can be useful,
but let's say you don't know that much about it.
Even though you know microphones pick up the sound,
we don't know how it got from me to the microphone.
Discovering the Higgs field
is like discovering air particles exist
and that they move sound.
Now that we understand the medium,
we can start to learn what we can do with it
and how it may affect other things.
And in the long term, that sh could be incredible.
Let me give you an example.
Electrons were discovered in the 1890s.
We didn't need to know how electrons worked
to use electricity.
Ben Franklin's famous kite experiments,
they didn't know electrons were part of it.
But I'll come back to Ben Franklin later.
But since learning that these particles
that we call electrons exist,
we can now harness their power for well, literal power,
but also industrial and commercial applications.
Computers use them, your house uses them.
Medical technology uses electrons
and also their positronic cousins.
Literally, everything we do in modern society
depends on us knowing how electrons behave.
And it took us a long time from their discovery
until we fully understood them.
And we're still learning things.
But over time, we got better at it.
And the Higgs,
it's just the newest kid on the block.
So while little Higgsothy hasn't changed things yet,
they might someday.
And to understand how that works,
we gotta get technical, so buckle up.
There are four fundamental forces in nature:
gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear.
The standard model of particle physics
is the current favorite framework
for categorizing and explaining elementary particles.
Here it is.
There are two main groups, fermions and bosons.
Fermions have two subgroups, quarks and leptons.
Quarks are what protons and neutrons are made of,
specifically a combination of the two lightest,
the up and down quarks.
There are six total quirks
and you don't need to know all this.
I'm just getting detailed.
Leptons include electrons and electron neutrinos.
Once again, there are six leptons
and two more heavier generations.
And by the way, all of these have antimatter counterparts,
but that is a whole other video.
So nowhere in these two groups do we find little Higgsothy.
She's over here in the bosons.
These particles carry
those four fundamental forces of nature.
Photons are light energy.
Gluons bind quarks together to form protons and neutrons.
Neither of those have mass.
W and Z bosons govern some subatomic radioactive decay.
And gravitons, which we haven't actually confirmed exist,
would carry the force of gravity,
if they're out there.
We don't know yet,
The Higgs boson is a different type of boson,
so it falls over here.
When one is popped into existence,
it immediately breaks into other particles
and it has less mass overall
than physicists thought it would,
which we're gonna put a pin in that to come back to it.
But back to our main story.
So now that we know the Higgs particle exists,
we know the Higgs field exists too.
The Higgs field is this invisible quantum field
that permeates the entire universe.
Some subatomic particles feel the tug of that field.
Heavier particles feel it more than lighter particles.
The harder the field pulls on a particle,
the more mass we see it having.
We know that without the Higgs field,
nuclear fusion is impossible,
the sun doesn't shine and we live in eternal darkness.
Actually, technically, we don't live at all because no mass.
So discovering the Higgs boson slash Higgs field
was slash is a big deal
if you wanna know more about why we all exist,
like the mechanisms, not mandalas.
A department head at CERN said, quote,
"Particle physics has changed more in the past 10 years
than in the previous 30 years."
That is not a coinkidink.
The Higgs was there that whole 10 year time.
Discovering this new particle
opens up all sorts of questions too,
like why the Higgs doesn't seem to spin
like other elementary particles.
Maybe it's because the field just exists everywhere,
that Higgs field is everywhere all the time?
Electrons spin because electromagnetism,
it doesn't do that.
It's just different.
Remember when I said the Higgs
keeps the universe from collapsing,
might prove the multiverse, et cetera?
Those really fun, cool questions.
Well, the existence of the Higgs field also means
that there are always particles with mass
popping in and out of existence.
And thus, the universe isn't actually a perfect vacuum.
If the Higgs field decays,
which it is supposed to do eventually,
that would form a true vacuum
which would spread at the speed of light
from the point that it was formed,
demolishing everything in the universe
until it's all just a vacuum.
But when and how, hey, who knows?
It's probably not worth worrying about.
The Higgs also might prove the multiverse exists
because of that lowish mass of the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson has a mass of 125 gigaelectron volts or GeV.
For reference, a proton weighs about one GeV.
So it's 125 times heavier than a proton,
which sounds like a lot,
but the Higgs boson on isn't a chonky boy.
It's actually smaller than expected.
And physicists love symmetry,
the math used to describe our universe.
It works both ways.
It's symmetrical.
So for example,
you reverse all the electrical charges in a system,
it works the same.
You've got parity,
which is things in a mirror work the same.
You reverse the flow of time, it's all the same.
But thanks to the Higgs, we're looking at a universe
that's a little different than we thought.
And some of the symmetries aren't so even,
which really bugs people in the physics world
like a painting that's just a little bit off.
They think it's because our universe was just born this way
and that's just how it works.
After the Big Bang,
multiple versions of the universe were formed,
each with different properties
of these elementary particles or so goes the theory.
With our Higgs having a lower than expected mass of 125 GeV,
maybe there are multiverses
with Higgs's with different masses.
And maybe for some reason, ours works,
whereas other universes with larger masses
collapsed on themselves.
The Higgs's discovery is just another bit of evidence
that the multiverse is real
and that we are in an okay one.
I wouldn't say a great one all the time, but an okay one.
Of course, that means for the math to work,
the Higgs would need some particle friends
to modify the strong nuclear force
to keep things symmetrical.
And I don't know why, all of the details exactly,
but the CERN physicists say so, so I'm telling you.
Higgs's discovery means
that we need to find these new particles,
which means more research is needed.
And in the end,
even though we don't have a great answer
to what has Higgs done for me lately,
we do have some good things that Higgsy has been doing.
On top of that though,
the tech invented to prove the Higgs boson existence,
that does affect your life.
If you work in nuclear medicine,
rely on computer science, or use the internet,
all of these were pushed forward
because of the construction, planning,
and running of research
leading to the discovery of the Higgs boson.
It's wild.
It took about five decades in the largest
and most complex machine ever built by humanity
smashing protons into each other head on
at nearly the speed of light to find the Higgs boson,
and we were all just dragged into the future along the way.
Quick sidebar.
You know how I've been saying
that we found the Higgs in 2012?
We actually didn't, not directly,
but I'm not gonna get into it here.
I will over on Nebula.
So if you haven't joined,
you can go there for several more minutes
of like real crunchy physics.
But it's now been 10 years
and they're still wondering who Higgs be.
Physicists have been mixing in circles,
cliques, and social quarteries.
That's me.
I'm not a physicist.
And they've learned
that there might actually be five Higgs bosons.
And you know what that means?
They will be happy underground.
LHC is underground.
They've learned a lot about the Higgs
in the subsequent decade.
They know it can decay into pairs of tau leptons,
a heavy relative of electrons.
And they know the Higgs can form from two top quarks,
which each have almost as much mass
as a whole atom of gold.
Along with a bunch of other confirmations of theories
and hypotheses relating to the origins
and makeup of our universe.
All of that has come from these Higgs smashes.
And if the Higgs interacts in some unexpected way,
that points to something more that we need to research
and potentially an entirely new avenue
of particle physics to explore.
And by research, which I've said a few times,
we mean collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
particle accelerator at CERN.
It's the biggest in the world,
they want to build a bigger one,
and they're looking at the data,
billions and billions more collisions
that we need to answer these questions.
And so the physicists,
they were all like more, more, more!
And while you're at it, they said,
can we put more energy into this system like overall?
Can we make the collisions a little brighter
and like up the resolution of the giant detectors?
Yep, that's what we did.
A little too much there.
A few years back, I actually went to CERN
because they were doing these upgrades
and I wanted to know what was going on
at the largest particle accelerator
in the world when it was closed,
so you can watch that series on my channel.
Now, in July of 2012, the LHC upgrades are done
and it can run it nearly twice the energy it had
when it first spotted the Higgs boson.
Physicists plan to use this incredible power
to refine their measurements,
look for evidence of dark matter,
and possibly find those other Higgs bosons in the family.
And fittingly, the LHC's third run
began on July 5th of 2022,
10 years and one day
after the Higgs boson's discovery was announced.
So a decade goes by
and there's no like monumental discovery
to match finding the Higgs itself,
but we waited like 50 years
to discover it in the first place
and we barely started to fathom
what's hidden behind the Higgs boson on and the Higgs field.
Just imagine what that could mean long term.
Imagine back to the discovery of the electron.
We didn't know what it could be used for.
We had no idea.
The electron was a novelty.
Literally, you would see it at a side show.
It was a cool discovery,
but we didn't know what to do with it.
And then we learned to control it a bit
and put it to work lighting our homes,
powering mathematical machines,
creating giant electromagnets
to levitate trains that travel at mind-bending speeds.
These things were all unimaginable,
magical things when it was discovered.
And now, you can sit anywhere on planet earth,
and thanks to the power of the electron
and our harnessing of it,
watch this video on something the size of a deck of cards.
That is wild.
The Higgs boson's tug is what gives particles a mass.
Imagine if we could control the Higgs boson even a little
in the way that we can with electrons and electromagnetism.
What could that mean?
The possibilities are science fiction
in just the most fantastical way.
Before you go, speaking of discovering electrons
and Ben Franklin's kite experiments,
I actually worked with the Franklin Institute
earlier this year to explore the evolution of innovation
in a show that we called Ingenious.
And got to do this and also this.
And it wasn't just a show
where I get to play with amazing technology
from the museum archives,
but we took these amazing inventions throughout history
and we asked this simple question,
what is ingenious about it?
What's more fantastic, pocket watches or Apple watches?
What is an automaton in the 17th century
versus a robot today?
X-rays, electricity, robotics,
computers, telecommunications.
Each episode takes a fresh look
at different types of innovation
from the Franklin Institute's vault.
And we'd connect that object to the innovations
that we're seeing today.
And I got to learn about amazing history, which I love.
Plus, we really dug into the melding of art,
and science, and engineering.
It was so, so fun.
You can binge the entire season of Ingenious
right now on youtube.com/TheFranklinInstitutePHL
or at beyond.fi.edu.
I have to say,
Ben Franklin was actually my childhood hero,
so working with them really meant a lot,
and I really hope that you love it and you enjoy it.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks so much to all of you for being a part of this show
and for watching.
And thanks to my Patrons
for throwing their weight behind this channel.
Get it, weight, mass?
Forget about it.
But also thanks to you right now,
just you for watching this.
If you know somebody who might be interested,
share this video with them.
It costs you nothing,
but it really helps grow this channel
and I have a goal of hitting 100,000 subscribers this year.
And time's ticking,
so I'll be releasing more and more videos
throughout the rest of 2022.
If you want to know something
and you want me to make a video on it,
throw it down in the comments, shoot me a tweet.
I will put it on my list.
Please consider subscribing to keep learning.
I'm Trace and I'll see you in the future.