What do you think?
Rate this book
79 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
“I’ll answer one more interesting question that I’ve been asked. Where does the mass of the Higgs boson itself come from? The answer is that the Higgs boson interacts with the Higgs field. So just as with other elementary particles, the Higgs field accounts for the Higgs boson’s mass.”I have read this sentence thirty or forty times. I’m sure it means something but not to me. Apparently the Higgs boson, a particle, is transformed when it enters a Higgs field, which it never really left since the field is everywhere, but through which the existing Higgs boson becomes... a Higgs boson. Clears that up then, doesn’t it?
Spurious polarizaqtions are the source of problematic predictions for high-energy scattering, so the symmetry allows only physical polarizations -- the ones that really exist and are consistent with the symmetry -- to remain.Hoo boy! If I were a Tea Party type, I would at this point take out my checkbook and write a huge contribution to CERN, whose Large Hadron Collider staff discovered the proof for the existence of the so-called God Particle.
This discovery confirms that the Standard Model of particle physics is consistent. The Standard Model describes the most elementary components that are known in matter, such as quarks, leptons (like the electron), and the three nongravitational forces through which they interact— electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. Most Standard Model particles have nonzero masses, which we know through many measurements.… But the origin of those particle masses was not yet known.
[P]eople have to recognize that science can be complex. If we accept only simple stories, the description will necessarily be distorted. When advances are subtle or complicated, scientists should be willing to go the extra distance to give proper explanations and the public should be more patient about the truth. Even so, some difficulties are unavoidable.