higgsbosonup

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Peter Higgs. A short Bio behind the man.

Peter Higgs, full name Peter Ware Higgs, born in England in 1929, a British physicist awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics for proposing the existence of the boson that would revolutionize how we understand the universe (Gregersen, 2020). Earning his doctorate in physics in 1954 at the University of London, he later met his colleague Francois Englert in his time at the University of Edinburgh, where they both collaborated in the effort to discover this boson

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I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge.

Peter Higgs, in an interview about the discovery

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What is the Higgs Boson

Also referred to as the Higgs particle, it is the particle that is categorized as a carrier particle or boson, of the Higgs Field, a field in which it pervades the space and provides all the necessary elementary subatomic particles–like the protons and quarks–with the mass as they interact (Sutton, 2020). Think of the Higgs Boson like milk tea, wherein the boson is the single pearl and the splash of milk tea is the field. Knowing that the field exists, with the help of the boson, grants us the answers to how the elementary particles work and interact and how the existence of their mass is portrayed in this field.

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The Significance of the Higgs Discovery

I know what you are wondering, “what’s this subatomic particle have to do with society?”; the answer is simple, it affects us in how we understand how the universe began. The discovery of the Higgs Boson paves the way in our understanding in the origins of subatomic particles. The field its self brings knowledge that elementary particles like the bosons gain mass through this field based on the efforts of the  ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider(CERN, 2021). We can then now theorize that the possibility of this field existing in the Big Bang helps society in understanding the origins how these elementary particles gained mass(Science and Technologies Facilities Council, 2017). With this, physics has now produced one of the many possible glues to the building blocks of the universe.

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What does this mean for society?

This means that the existence of the Higgs field provides more to the inconclusive Standard Model of the Universe. Think of it as the next puzzle piece into completing the entire portrait you are desperately trying to finish. In doing so, we are closer to getting to the truth on how the universe began and the Standard Model’s completion. This discovery is now the stepping stone into our closer understanding in the cosmological makeup of the universe.

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References

CERN, (2021). The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Date accessed March 15, 2021 https://home.cern/science/physics/higgs-boson

Gregersen, E. (2020, November 23). Peter Higgs. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Higgs

STFC. (2017). Home. Home - Science and Technology Facilities Council. https://stfc.ukri.org/research/particle-physics-and-particle-astrophysics/peter-higgs-a-truly-british-scientist/why-is-the-higgs-discovery-so-significant/#:~:text=So%20the%20discovery%20of%20the,remember%20they%20are%20only%20analogies). Sutton, C. (2020, January 10). Higgs boson. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Higgs-boson