So earlier today, scientists announced that they found evidence of the higgs boson particle. I understand it is something in particle physics that they used a particle accelerator to find, but honestly, what is the higgs boson particle? Is it like the same thing as dark or anti matter? what does it do? whats so important about it?
-
The question is: What is what is mass? Why does matter resist acceleration? Why is F = MA true?
Higgs proposed an answer to that question:
Analogy digression: A magnetic field exerts a force on charged particles (electrons, protons, and their anti-particles)
Higgs proposed that there is a field (The Higgs Field) like the gravitation field that pervades space-time. We would not know it was there and could not detect it EXCEPT there exists a Boson in the structure of matter (The Higgs Boson) that interacts with the Higgs Field like a charged particle interacts with a magnetic field and causes matter to resist acceleration
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_f…
Higgs proposed an answer to that question:
Analogy digression: A magnetic field exerts a force on charged particles (electrons, protons, and their anti-particles)
Higgs proposed that there is a field (The Higgs Field) like the gravitation field that pervades space-time. We would not know it was there and could not detect it EXCEPT there exists a Boson in the structure of matter (The Higgs Boson) that interacts with the Higgs Field like a charged particle interacts with a magnetic field and causes matter to resist acceleration
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_f…
-
It's not dark or anti-matter. It's normal. Basically, it's the particle that gives mass to other particles - substance and weight, basically. It's important because it's the last particle of the Standard Model to be discovered. The standard model is our model of all the elementary particles and forces. We'd found all others, but this one.