so the Higgs
Idea this whole business has to do with the origin of mass so first. What is mass, it's something
We're all quite familiar with you know when you push on any object be it a rock a mack truck
Whatever the resistance you feel when you push on the object is the mass of the object
now where does the mass of the object come from well clearly it's got to come from the
Constituents the particles that make [up] the object
But then the next question is where does their mass come from especially when we're talking about fundamental particles like electrons
And quarks where does their heft where does their mass come from here is the idea according to this Higgs approach
Imagine imagine that space itself is filled with a kind of invisible substance
it's called the Higgs field, but think of it, sort of like
a cosmic molasses and then when particles like electrons
Say quarks if they're trying to move through space
they have to kind of push through this cosmic molasses and they experience
a resistance as they try to do so it's sort of like if you throw a little pebble into a vat of
Molasses you can see that the pebble is
Experiencing resistance the same would go for the particles and that resistance they when you push on an electron from its
interactions with that surrounding Higgs molasses would be the mass of
the Electron now that analogy is not perfect it might lead you to think that
an electron would always be brought to rest as it experiences some friction against the molasses as its traveling through empty space
That's not correct this drag force only manifests itself when the particle is trying to speed up or slow down
But it's not a bad way to think about how
According to Higgs particles would be imbued with Mass
Pushing through the ambient molasses is where the Mass
Comes from well this idea that space is filled with the Higgs field as higgs molasses
It's a kind of a wild idea when it was first put forward
Frankly most physicists didn't believe that this idea was correct, so how would you?
Verify this idea through experiment. Well here's one possibility the one that has actually been done
take
Particles, make them go around said the large Hadron collider near the speed of light and slam into each other
When they slam into each other they kind of are banging into space. They're kind of slapping space
They're kind of spanking space and when you spank space
If it really is filled with this molasses then the molasses should kind of jiggle
And if you jiggle the molasses in the right way
You should be able to flick off a tiny speck of the higgs field and that tiny speck
Would be a Higgs
Particle, and that indeed is what we believe has happened at the Large Hadron Collider
Very hard to find these particles, calculations show that roughly one in a trillion of these
Spankings of space these collisions of particles will actually flick off one of these Higgs particles
But now there's very strong evidence that the Higgs particle has been found that this Higgs idea is right
the Higgs idea is confirmation is
Really important for a number of reasons. Number one?
We physicists aim to answer basic
fundamental questions, and one of the most basic of all is where to the
elementary Fundamental Particles get their heft, get their mass and this suggestion, which appears to be correct is
A vital Step forward
A second reason why this idea and it's confirmation is important, is the Higgs particle is a new
Kind of matter not just a new run-of-the-Mill
Particle you see the particles that we know about like
Electrons and neutrinos and quarks, they all spin around sort of like a top in a quantum mechanical way
But the point is they all spin around
the higgs particle is the first species of
Elementary Particles that doesn't Spin at all. The first spin-less species of particle
So it's like finding some alien new life-form, but now in the kingdom of particles
So that's a very important step forward
The other thing that is worth emphasizing
Especially when you come at physics as I do as a theorist
the idea of The Higgs Field and the Higgs particle began as
mathematical symbols in an equation in a paper, and then over the course of 40 years through
Developing that idea, developing technology to test it. We've now shown that the mathematics
led the way it has shown us a
deeper level of reality that we couldn't test when the ideas were first put on the table and that transition from
mathematical idea to a confirmed feature of reality
That's really what we theorist live for so those are three reasons. Why we are so excited
That this discovery has now been confirmed and rightly been awarded the Nobel prize