Physicists at the particle accelerator at in Switzerland finally announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. This is a monumental event in the science community, and everyone should know why. After sharing the news with my friends and family, I realized that it’s a hard concept to grasp. Here’s how I described the discovery to my Aunt on Facebook when she asked me to dummy it down for her:
“You know how we learned in high school chemistry that atoms are made up of even smaller particles known as protons, neutrons and electrons. Well now scientists know that the protons, neutrons and electrons are made up of even SMALLER particles, known as fermions and bosons. They had an idea of how many fermions and bosons there were based on the forces of nature, but there was one missing and it was the one responsible for gravity! The missing boson, aka Higgs boson, has been sought after since the 60’s, and it’s the biggest reason for the construction of the multi-billion dollar particle accelerator in Switzerland. Now that they verified it exists, they hope to realize it didn’t work the way they thought, possibly leading to a new scientific understanding of the universe as fundamental as the Einstein‘s famous E=mc^2! We hope..”
Large Hadron Collider at CERN
So how did they find the Higgs boson if it’s so small? Very carefully. Using the particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, scientists smash atoms together to probe the intricacies of the tiny inter-workings. It’s similar to watching a car pass on the highway; It’s hard to tell if it’s a 6 cylinder or 8 because all we see is the outer shell. But if that car happens to crash into another, going at full speed, we may be able to see an engine fly out of the car and determine how many cylinders it has. The particle accelerator uses very expensive super-conducting technology to power an intense magnetic field, strong enough to whirl the particles around in a circle, faster than 99% the speed of light before they crash into one another.
Scientific American July 2012
Why does the Higgs boson matter? Textbooks will be revised, technology will be advanced and our overall understanding of the universe will expand. Take GPS satellites for example. When Einstein began researching the fabric of our space-time cosmos, it might have been just as hard for the common folk to comprehend how this impacted their life. Then he discovered that time travels different depending on the speed of the observer in space, leading to the technology that led to modern-day GPS devices.
I stumbled across the excerpt above from an article in the July 2012 edition of Scientific American. Not even a week has passed and the information has already changed. Despite the excitement of the recent discovery, the best is yet to come. Once the scientists gather the Higgs boson data, they will determine if their assumptions about the boson’s behavior was accurate. Unlike most professions, scientists hope to be proven wrong. If the boson behaves unusually, it could easily disrupt our understanding of existence and lead to a scientific revolution.
by Jesse DePinto
Jesse DePinto 
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