Higgs Boson Found?

(NOTE:  Edited at 5:57pm on 9-JUL-2012 to correct the gluon as the force-carrying particle of the strong nuclear force (aka the colour force) )

Higgs Boson Found?

It was on the Drudge Report a while back … but there hasn’t been that much follow-up about it in the main-stream news media.  This, however, is where I need to be careful.  Most readers know that I’m interested in physics (as well as politics,) so I tend to watch announcements like this.

The discovery of the Higgs, if true, is a huge step forward.  It tends to confirm one of the great theories of our time, the Standard Model of Particles and Forces(*1).  It also tends to confirm quantum theory(*2), and provides a building block of sorts for further theories, such as super-symmetry(*3) and string-field theory(*4). 

The particle, in fact, turns out to be crucial to the Standard Model, as it explains why other elementary particles (with the notable exceptions of the photon (electro-magnetism) and the gluon (strong nuclear force aka the colour force)) have mass.  Specifically, it explains why the photon has no mass while the W and Z bosons are very heavy. 

And while they’ve announced the discovery of a particle with Higgs-like properties (the certainty that it is Higgs-like is 99.999%) there still remains that tiny bit of question.  More research is needed to see if it is an actual Higgs, or whether or not it’s just a particle with Higgs-like properties. 

And that brings up a question which I’ll be addressing in another post.  The Higgs has been called the “God Particle.”  But what does that do about the existence of God?

NOTES:

(*1) – Standard Model:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

(*2) – Quantum Theory:  www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/30/2/30-2-carson.pdf [.PDF file}

(*3) – Super-Symmetry: http://hitoshi.berkeley.edu/public_html/susy/susy.html

(*4) – String-Field Theory: http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/sft.pdf [.PDF file]

NOTE 2:  The second, third, and fourth links are introductions to the subjects.