Data from the $4 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest atom smasher, have greatly increased what physicists know about the Higgs boson. The subatomic particle is responsible for giving other elementary particles mass. But what exactly have we discovered about the elusive Higgs field? Will it lead us to the next great scientific discovery of the 21st century?
The Higgs Field, Explained [TED-Ed] by Don Lincoln
Video (3 minutes)
“Suppose there is a large cocktail party at the CERN laboratory filled with particle physics researchers. This crowd of physicists represents the Higgs field. If a tax collector entered the party, nobody would want to talk to them and they could very easily cross the room to get to the bar. The tax collector wouldn’t interact with the crowd in much the same way that some particles don’t interact with the Higgs field…”
A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass [Quanta] by Natalie Wolchover
Article (14 minutes)
“What if our universe really is as accidentally fine-tuned as a pencil balanced on its tip, singled out as our cosmic address from an inconceivably vast array of bubble universes inside an eternally frothing ‘multiverse’ sea simply because life requires such an outrageous accident to exist?”
Why Our Universe Might Exist on a Knife-Edge [TED] by Gian Giudice
Video (14 minutes)
“We have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. According to the Higgs theory, at that instant, a dramatic event took place in the universe…”
How Texas Lost the World’s Largest Super Collider [Texas Monthly] by Trevor Quirk
Article (26 minutes)
“It would require the construction of two cavernous subterranean facilities that would house particle detectors with weights comparable to battleships. It would comprise 4,728 magnets that amounted to 41,500 tons of iron (roughly four Eiffel towers) and would require the supercooling effect of 2 million liters of liquid helium…”
CERN People Video Series [CERN People]
Video Series (60 minutes)
“Everybody knows that if the LHC finds something that anyone, anywhere has predicted, they will get a Nobel Prize the next year…”
Rockin’ Physicists Turn the Higgs Boson into Heavy Metal [Nerdist] by Kyle Hill
Video (1 minutes) & Article (2 minutes)
“To create the track, physicist Piotr Traczyk used data from the search for the Higgs and transformed it into musical notes, with as little change to the ‘music’ produced as possible…”
What Next for the Large Hadron Collider? [BBC] by Pallab Ghosh
Article (10 minutes)
“We’d love to find something completely unexpected and we might, and that’s the exciting bit…”
Longer Reads
- The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind by Don Lincoln
- Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space by Lisa Randall
- CERN: How We Found the Higgs Boson by Michael Krause
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New Subscriber: Trevor Quirk, a Salt Lake City writer who authored this week’s article on Texas’ lost super collider.
