And now, to set the final tick on the predictable Crazy German topics (we've already had animes and games... which one is missing?); today we talk about:
I can almost taste the salty essence of your tears of joy after hearing about this.
Okay, so there's this certain award called the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. Basically, they honor the best science-related book written for a non-specialist audience, that is to say, popular science. Or in other words, you and I will understand those books perfectly without having any degree in the subject in question. Assumed you and I can read. But since we're communicating through this... well, written blog post, I guess we can skip that part... can we? Yes, we can.
The book that scooped the award this time is "The Particle at the End of the Universe" by Sean Carroll. Among the five nominated authors, he was the only physicist. And yet, he won. Personally, I'm very glad that they chose a book that talks about particle physics. I'd love to see that topic getting more popular between the commonality. After all, if explained in a tangible way, it can be easily comprehended without getting too much into the details just as any other science (we all read articles about medicine, biology, etc.; why not physics as well?). But what probably makes this specific issue that interesting is that it could give us answers to the huge questions. And we all like huge things. You know what I mean ;) A huge cake will always be better than a small cake. Just some simple maths ;)
So what is all that stuff about the Higgs boson? I'll give you my own reduced, amateurish and simplified version. No guarantee on the validity of the following statements.
Ok, so you know that, according to quantum mechanics, all the matter and energy in the universe is made of particles. We always only speak of atoms which consist of protons, neutrons and electrons, though there are other kinds of particles. You also know that all the particles have mass, don't you? It's pure logic, isn't it? Isn't it?
Well, it is not. Because not all of the particles have mass. For example, photons, which are the particles of light, don't have mass. But why? Almost all the other particles do actually have mass, like the infamous neutrinos, so why are photons the strange ones? Well, I guess it's because they watch animes and stuff like that... Sorry, inside joke.
And here the theoretical physicists come into play. Sometimes they overdo it and invent some crazy theories which probably couldn't be analized experimentally in hundred years. But sometimes some of them do their job well and they find some kind of reasonable explanation. They predict a future discovery. They postulate a certain physical reality or law. Well, there was that physics nerd answering to the name of Peter Higgs. He claimed that there had to be some kind of physical field, afterwards called the Higgs field in honor of his work, that "gives" the particles their mass. This field is also made up of particles, the Higgs bosons (bosons form a certain class of particles, this is of no major importance now). These particles are omnipresent and so is the field (note that they sometimes refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle").
We can explain the phenomenon of mass thanks to the Higgs field. Some particles, due to their characteristics, interact with the Higgs field, some don't. Thus, some particles have mass and some don't. How do particles gain mass from the Higgs field? Well, since Einstein's famous formula E=mc² we know that energy and mass are the same thing when we refer to the world of particles. When a particle is accelerated, part of its mass transforms into kinetic energy. When we baffle the particle, part of its energy transforms back into mass.
The upmost limit of speed is the speed of light. Therefore, the upmost limit of energy is the energy of a particle travelling at the speed of light. And that means, if the particle has the maximum of energy, it has the minimum of mass, which is 0. That's why photons, the particles of light, have no mass. Now imagine there's that Higgs field full of Higgs bosons. Most particles will interact with the Higgs bosons as they move around. As they do, the Higgs bosons act like brakes. Brakes that are everywhere. Since they are everywhere, they lower the possible maximum of speed (that is to say, energy) of a particle. So, if the energy can't reach the maximum, there will always be some residue: the particle's mass.
But now think about this. How do you detect something as fundamental in our universe, something as elusive as the Higgs bosons? It's like trying to show a fish what water is. Well, that's the reason why the story behind the science in relation to the Higgs boson is so interesting. It's seems that scientists at the CERN identified the Higgs boson last year. But they still have to confirm their discovery.
The three new words I've learnt are the following.
Now you go and tell me about three physics concepts you've learnt. Come on!
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