The Higgs Boson in One Minute… or Two…

If you’re still scratching your head, trying to figure out all the Higgs Boson news, the great folks from MinutePhysics have put together a new video to explain it all. However, since this is all a little complicated, it’s going to take more than one minute. Parts 2 and 3 are on their way!

9 Replies to “The Higgs Boson in One Minute… or Two…”

  1. The Z, as a neutrino/antineutrino pair qualifies as a graviton (George Gamow’s book…Proj.Phys.Reader), and a heavy Z consisting of ~ 90 Gev/c sqr, splitting into two equal pairs of ~ 45 Gev each, and interacting with an ambiet W, will give you a resonance @ just about 125.99 Gev/c sqr, which is what they are seeing at the LHC. check the baut forum Dec. 06,2011. pete

  2. The other two previous videos explaining Higgs were brilliant.

    This one is rubbish.

  3. With current controversy on whom will be the recipient(s) for the Nobel award in physics for this finding it is well to consider the words of Don Lincoln who worked at Fermilab and author of “The Quantum Frontier, The Large Hadron Collider,” He wrote:

    “As the scientific results come in and certain people become known as *the voice of the LHC* we should never forget the teams that designed and built this equipment. Without them, those voices would be forever mute.”

    Some of the engineering hurdles overcome and accomplished during the LHC construction are outlined here:

    http://www.elements-science.co.uk/2011/11/the-man-who-built-the-lhc/

    A few fun facts about Professor Peter Higgs: He does not have a television at home and does not use a computer. Friends check his e-mails for him and he rarely answers the telephone or gives interviews. He has a penchant for old vinyl records and values his physics books and journals as highly as did old Prospero his books on sorcery.

    83-year old Professor Peter Higgs paid the ultimate price by placing his particle before his wife in his own words: “I put my science career before my family.” His wife Jody Williamson became a classic example of a physics widow and the marriage unfortunately ended in divorce. Professor Higgs is also an atheist a fact which is largely not mentioned in the media which so vigorously but erroneously dubs the hypothetical particle after “God.” Professor Higgs uses hearing aids let us hope when the Nobel prize in physics is presented the applause for this larger than life character will not necessitate they being worn on the occasion……. Kudos Professor Higgs.

  4. Nice video, but it is not true that the Higgs boson has been discovered. The Higgs boson has a certain set of properties, because those properties explain certain things in the predictive theories. However, if the boson that was discovered recently at CERN has different properties than the ones postulated by Higgs et all, then it is not the Higgs boson. To start out a video with such an incorrect statement is irresponsible, and contributes bad information about science to the world.

    1. Almost certainly a Higgs boson has been found, the rest of the predicted mass range has been excluded and this particle has the expected general properties in the jet channels.

      More importantly here though, it is a shorthand for having found the Higgs field that is responsible for the Higgs mechanism, which discovery and verification what the theorist part of any Noble prize will be awarded for. It predicts some SM masses, and it is our first universal scalar field.

      We can’t blame articles for accepting what the particle physics field accepts.

      1. I think you’re just parroting words from other articles. The physics field does not accept that the Higgs boson has been found. This is just something you’ve made up.

        *A* boson has been found, apparently in the mass range where the Higgs boson is required to be for Higgs’s theory to be correct. With further experimentation, and better results, the exact mass will be determined. It is not yet known exactly.

        Non-withstanding the mass, it is also not known what the spin of the new boson is, what its colour charge is, or what its electric charge is.

        Only when we know for certain that:
        1) There is only one particle, not several
        2) The particle’s mass agrees with the predicted/required mass
        3) The particle has no spin
        4) The particle has no electric charge
        5) The particle has no colour charge,

        can we call this the Higgs boson.

        It its discovered that this particle has spin, which is probably the next thing we’ll learn, then it’s not the Higgs boson.

        I will agree, however, that finding such an extremely difficult to detect particle at the predicted range is an amazing accomplishment.

  5. Or we could just accept that the plasma between galactic objects conducts huge electrical charges and the universe runs on electricity? That removes the need for “dark matter” or energy and fits the actual, real observable universe quite neatly. I’m still trying to figure out why exactly the “electric universe” concept is so airly rejected? It seems to work a lot better than the current ideas, where we have to keep inventing magic energies, particles or “black holes”?

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