The Higgs Boson.

" Not only is the truth stranger than we can understand, it is stranger then we are capable of understanding." - Unknown

The Higgs Boson, possibly the most important particle and dubbed the 'God Particle' - even though this saying came from a book - "The God Particle: If The Universe Is The Answer, What Is The Question?". According to most people, the author wanted to call it the 'Goddamn' particle because it is so hard to find.

The ironic part about calling it the 'God particle' is that it has nothing at all to do with religion, well it had a part in creating the universe as we know it.

Even though we think we have found it (apparently with 5sigma precession, which is about 1/1,000,000 chance of being a 'fluke') it is still classed as hypothetic, until is it actually found, and proven. 

The Higgs Boson, many people expect its name to be Latin, or Greek, its actually just the man who discovered/predicted it's second name. Peter Higgs.

Finding the Higgs has proven difficult. We can never observe it directly, but we know/predict what it will decay into. So we smash protons together at 99.9% of c and observe the collision, we look for the trail of particles it should leave behind and try ad find it from there.

The hardest part about finding the Higgs is that the standard model (see previous posts) doesn't predict its mass, so we basically have to guess where it could be. 

The Higgs allows particles to what you could say gain mass. The Higgs field is a medium of Higgs'. But how does it act? I'm going to use one of Brain Cox's analogies for this explanation.

Imagine a room full of people (these are the Higgs Bosons, the floor is the Higgs medium), and someone who is very 'unpopular' walks in, the room will split in two, and everyone will avoid this person, right?

This is what a Higgs does to massless particles such as a photon etc.

But... If someone very popular walks in, people will crowd round, as they like him. And he will gain mass, due to these Higgs'. This is why we have mass in a very basic analogy.

The Higgs is on of the most important particles in the TOE (theory of everything) and if we find it, we will learn so much about the universe. Why photons are massless, why we have mass, why the forces (electromagnetic, strong, weak, gravity) act like the do and we will have a better understanding of the early universe. How quarks were made, how protons were formed, then nuclei and now, well... us.

Thanks for reading, Ben.