Finally, the Higgs Boson.

After such a long time and so much effort spent on searching for the elusive Higgs Boson, the good people of CERN has finally managed to isolate this hard to find particle. As a physics person, I am really glad that we are one step closer to knowing more about our universe. This is because, at this point of time, the most coherent way of explaining our world is though The Standard Model. This model is a collection of knowledge that had been acquired throughout many many years of scientific endeavor. Admittedly, there is still some things that are not accounted for but hey, its work in progress.

The standard model attempts to link all the known fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong) by reducing their interaction into an exchange of particles. Its been very successful except that it does not account for mass. Everyone knows the concept of mass and gravity. We feel it everyday but it is still very mysterious because we don't know what causes it? Issac Newton found out how gravity worked and was able to make predictions of how stellar objects move, Einstein improved it and explained that mass causes the bending of space-time, sucking everything towards itself. Peter Higgs, the guy who suggested the existence of the Higgs boson, found inconsistencies in the Standard Model that may be fixed by the addition of gauge bosons. In layman terms, why the hell doesn't light have mass? Why do massy particles even have mass in the first place? So, the Higgs Boson is the particle which is kind of responsible for mass in the theory of The Standard Model. If the Higgs Boson could not be found, then it means that what we think we know about anything with mass could be VERY WRONG. So, yay!

The Higgs boson, which is predicted to be "very massive" in terms of energy, meant that a lot of energy has to be used to create it, which is why CERN's particle accelerators span several countries. Their accelerators accelerate charged particles in opposite directions and make them slam into each other as they meet on the other side of the circular loop. slamming extremely energetic particles together will result in an explosion that creates new particles from the energy of the initial colliding particles. Most particles created are those that we already know. Some of these particles are extremely unstable while they are in isolated while some interact very weakly. These two issues pose a problem for detection and thus it is a pain in the ass to identify them.

The Higgs Boson goes a long way towards validating the our current knowledge of our world in terms of the Standard Model theory and gives us more room to expanding into the unknown. On this weighty subject, it is time to log off and prepare for my Vietnamese test!