This morning, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced that they have all-but-discovered a new particle that behaves a lot like the long-predicted Higgs boson.
Paul Baker announced it to the blog, and Robert’s magazine tells all about it here.
Yay! This is exciting!
I read about it in the newspaper yesterday.
At that point it was all still rumors. This morning the scientists made the official announcement, with graphs and tables and statistics all laid out in high-tech Comic Sans.
Eeeeee… So exciting!
Gosh, this is exciting! Maybe years from now, kids will be interviewing us or something to see what it was like to be around when the Higgs was discovered.
So cool! /)^3^(\
So exciting!! I can’t wait to see where this leads.
And can I just say, Vi Hart already has a sonnet out dedicated to it ♥
So awesome! I heard about it via text at lunch today!
YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
;
GLEEEP
Hey! So there’s this wonderful series of videos, called PHD Comics. They explain (or talk about what we don’t know about!) cool science stuff in a way that’s easily understandable– things like dark matter, or, relatedly, the Higgs boson. I think it’s mostly harmless, so I’ll leave it here for the GAPA’s opinion…
http:// vimeo. com/41038445
If not, you could probably google PHD comics + Higgs boson.
Sorry I’m just still really super excited right now. I remember my sophemore year of high school, reading an article about the so-called “God particle.” That was the first time I’d heard of it and it just seemed like such a cool idea. And even though there was all this hype about being on the brink of discovering it I never actually believed it would happen so soon!
My excitement may have a lot to do with the fact that this is one of the first science-y things I learned about that was still unsolved and a total mystery and it made an impact on me. But ahh!! WE ARE LEARNING SO MUCH ALL THE TIME
*science flail*
I totally get what you’re saying here! I have similar feelings towards the Higgs Boson!
It is exciting. I wish reporters would stop calling it the “God particle,” though. Physicists don’t call it that. One physicist, Leon Lederman, coined the term to sell a book he wrote when he was expecting to discover it himself. But he didn’t discover it, and I think the nickname confuses and upsets people.
Especially since soon after the announcement there were a lot of nasty comments aimed at atheists, and remarking on how all athiests must be feeling pretty dumb now.
In response to that though I just like to imagine their faces when they learn what the Higgs boson actually is and realize that their comments had nothing in relation with what was really going on.
Sadly most of them probably won’t ever bother to learn more about it :/
Just to point out that Lederman originally wanted to refer to it in print as “that godd**n particle” because of its annoying elusiveness (asterisks inserted for sensitive Musebloggers). But his editor thought that might cause offence among the godly, so he insisted on amending it to “God particle”. Neither Lederman nor Higgs was happy about it. There was never any intention to deify a boson.
That’s one story Lederman told, but I’m not sure I believe it. It sounds like one of his many jokes.
Besides, it’s traditional to blame the editor for anything embarrassing that winds up in print. (My writers do it all the time.)
Fascinating! Except for when I think about the stuff I don’t know and plan to learn about the topic and my brain melts. That’s often still fun though.
I think the PhD video mentioned in comment 9 is worth embedding. (Some browsers probably won’t see it.)
I didn’t really know exactly what the Higgs Boson was supposed to be/do, so this is very helpful.
I think it’s supposed to give mass to mater, which sounds really weird if you think about it, which is also why the Higgs is called the “god particle”.