This is a great day for science
The discovery of the Higgs Boson is a huge deal. Rather than trying to explain it myself, just go read this article by Phil Plait, aka Bad Astronomer, over at Discover, it’s got lots of good information in an understandable form.
OK, the quick version. The Higgs particle is extremely important, because the Standard Model of particle physics – the basic idea of how all particles behave – predicts it exists and is what (indirectly) gives many other particles mass. In other words, the reason electrons, protons, and neutrons have mass is because of this Higgs beastie. Last year, the Guardian put up a nice article explaining this. A more technical discussion is on Discover Magazine’s Cosmic Variance blog from 2007. Sean Carroll has been live-blogging the announcement, and has lots of good info as well.
This particle is very hard to detect, because it doesn’t live long. Once it forms it decays in a burst of energy and other particles (think of them as shrapnel) extremely rapidly. The only way to make them is to smash other particles together at incredibly high energies, and look at the resulting collisions. If the Higgs exists, then it will decay and give off a characteristic bit of energy. The problem is, lots of things give off that much energy, so you have to see the Higgs signal on top of all that noise.
Go read the rest
