This is a video heavy day, but considering how little I’ve posted lately, well, at least I’m giving you something.
News of the Higgs boson, the elusive God Particle, has been spreading across the internet with a very recent announcement that a Higgs-like particle has been found. Why is this a big deal:
According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.
Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.
The video above is a bit of a Tonight Show rip-off where a film crew walks around Williamsburg, Brooklyn to ask the young urbanites what they think the Higgs boson is. My favorite answer – a heavy metal band. A couple people get it right, including a guy who wrote a poem about it. Unfortunately, he does not recite his poem in the video.
If you don’t follow physics or regularly read the news, you may not know why this is such a big deal, so here is another video, narrated by physicist Daniel Whiteson and illustrated a la Minute Physics (which has it’s own explanatory video), that explains the HB for the layman (like myself).
