Science
There is a lot of excitement going on in the world of science. Researchers from European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) announced that the Higgs boson particle exists. It is called the "God particle" which exists between a very specific set of particles and which serves a kind of invisible glue that binds the universe together.
The Higgs boson, until now a theoretical particle, is key to understanding why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give objects weight.
For people far from physics, the general euphoria about the Higgs boson is most likely incomprehensible. What does all this mean?
What is the Higgs boson?
A boson is a type of subatomic particle that imparts force. The Higgs boson was postulated in 1964 by an English professor Peter Higgs, who suggested that its existence will explain why matter, from atoms to planets, has mass and does not float around the Universe such as photons of light.
Why did it take so long to find him?
To hypothesize something in theory and prove its existence is not an easy task. If the Higgs boson does exist, it only lasts for a fraction of a second. According to the theory, a sufficient amount of it can be detected if beams of protons are collided at a sufficiently high energy. Before the Large Hadron Collider, which was built several years ago, this level of energy could not be achieved.
Have scientists really found the Higgs boson?
This is not entirely true, at least not at the level they would like to achieve. It's safe to say that they found a new subatomic particle with a mass of approximately 130 protons, and the preliminary results do fit into what we call the Higgs boson. There is an assumption that this could be the Higgs boson, or one of several - according to the theory, there is more than one.
Why is this discovery important?
Physicists who are trying to understand the Universe have come up with a theoretical framework that unifies the various forces of nature. It's called the Standard Model. But the problem was that this model did not explain why matter has mass without involving the Higgs boson.
That is, the discovery of this subatomic particle is powerful support for the Standard Model, physical evidence of the invisible field of the Universe that gave mass to all matter after the Big Bang, causing particles to coalesce into stars, planets and everything else. If the boson were not found, then the entire system of views of theoretical physics would fall apart." No Higgs boson - no mass, no mass - no you, no me, no anything else".
The elementary particle Higgs boson, named after the British physicist Peter Higgs, who theoretically predicted its existence back in 1964, is perhaps one of the most mysterious and amazing in modern physics. It was she who caused a lot of controversy and discussion in the scientific community, and someone even assigned her such an unusual epithet as “a piece of God.” There are also skeptics who claim that the Higgs boson does not exist and all this is nothing more than a scientific hoax. What the Higgs boson actually is, how it was discovered, what properties it has, read about it further.
What is the Higgs boson: an explanation in simple language
To explain the essence of the Higgs boson as simply and clearly as possible not only to a scientific physicist, but also to an ordinary person interested in science, it is necessary to resort to the language of allegories and comparisons. Although, of course, all allegories and comparisons that relate to the physics of elementary particles cannot be true and accurate. The same electromagnetic field or quantum wave is neither a field nor a wave in the sense in which people usually imagine them, just as the atoms themselves are by no means smaller copies of the Solar system, in which electrons revolve around the atomic nucleus like planets around them. And although allegories and comparisons still do not convey the very essence of those things that happen in quantum physics, they nevertheless allow us to get closer to understanding these things.
Interesting fact: in 1993, the British Minister of Education even announced a competition for the simplest explanation of what the Higgs boson is. The winner was an explanation related to the party.
So, imagine a crowded party, then some celebrity (for example, a “rock star”) enters the room and guests immediately begin to follow her, everyone wants to communicate with the “star,” while the “rock star” himself moves slower than all the other guests. Then people gather in separate groups in which they discuss some news or gossip related to this rock star, while people move chaotically from group to group. As a result, it seems that people are discussing gossip, closely surrounding the celebrity, but without his direct participation. So, all the people participating in the party are the Higgs field, groups of people are a disturbance of the field, and the celebrity itself, because of which they were formed, is the Higgs boson.
If this allegory is not entirely clear to you, then here is another one: imagine a smooth billiard table on which there are balls - elementary particles. These balls easily scatter in different directions and move everywhere without obstacles. Now imagine that the billiard table is covered with some kind of sticky substance that makes it difficult for the balls to move along it. This sticky mass is the Higgs field, the mass of this field is equal to the mass of the particles that stick to it. The Higgs boson is a particle that corresponds to this sticky field. That is, if you hit a billiard table with this sticky mass hard, then a small amount of this very sticky mass will temporarily form a bubble, which will soon spread over the table again, and so, this bubble is the Higgs boson.
Discovery of the Higgs boson
As we wrote at the beginning, the Higgs boson was first discovered theoretically by British physicist Peter Higgs, who suggested that some previously unknown elementary particle was involved in the process of spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking in the standard model of particle physics. This happened in 1964, immediately after that the search for the real existence of this elementary particle began, however, for many years they failed. Because of this, some scientists jokingly began to call the Higgs boson the “damned particle” or the “God particle.”
And so, in order to confirm or refute the existence of this mysterious “particle of God,” a giant particle accelerator was built in 2012. Experiments on it experimentally confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, and the discoverer of the particle, Peter Higgs, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for this discovery.
Returning to our analogy about the billiard table, in order to see the Higgs boson, physicists needed to hit this sticky mass that lies on the table with the proper force in order to get a bubble out of it, the Higgs boson itself. So, the particle accelerators of the last 20th century were not so powerful as to provide a “hit on the table” with the required force, and only the Large Hadron Collider, created at the beginning of our 21st century, as they say, helped physicists “hit the table” with the proper force and see with your own eyes “a piece of God.”
The benefits of the Higgs boson
To a person far from science in general and from physics in particular, the search for a certain elementary particle may seem pointless, but the discovery of the Higgs boson is of considerable importance for science. First of all, our knowledge of the boson will help with calculations that are carried out in theoretical physics when studying the structure of the Universe.
In particular, physicists have suggested that the entire space surrounding us is filled with Higgs bosons. When interacting with other elementary particles, bosons impart their mass to them, and if it is possible to calculate the mass of certain elementary particles, then the mass of the Higgs boson can also be calculated. And if we have the mass of the Higgs boson, then using it, going in the opposite direction, we can also calculate the masses of other elementary particles.
Of course, all this is very amateurish reasoning from the point of view of academic physics, but our magazine is also popular science, to talk about serious scientific matters in simple and understandable language.
The danger of the Higgs boson
Concerns about the Higgs boson and experiments with it were identified by British scientist Stephen Hawking. According to Hawking, the Higgs boson is an extremely unstable elementary particle and, as a result of a certain set of circumstances, can lead to the decay of the vacuum and the complete disappearance of such concepts as space and time. But don’t worry, in order for something like this to happen, it is necessary to build a collider the size of our entire planet.
Properties of the Higgs boson
- The Higgs boson, like other elementary particles, is subject to influence.
- The Higgs boson has zero spin (angular momentum of elementary particles).
- The Higgs boson has an electrical and color charge.
- There are 4 main channels for the birth of the Higgs boson: after the fusion of 2 gluons (main), the fusion of WW or ZZ pairs, accompanied by a W or Z boson, along with top quarks.
- The Higgs boson decays into a b-quark-b-antiquark pair, into 2 photons, into two electron-positron and/or muon-antimuon pairs, or into an electron-positron and/or muon-antimuon pair with a neutrino pair.
A word to the skeptics
Of course, there are skeptics who claim that no Higgs boson exists in reality, and that all this was invented by scientists for the selfish purpose of taking taxpayers’ money, which supposedly goes for scientific research of elementary particles, but in fact into the pockets of certain people.
Higgs boson, video
And in conclusion, an interesting documentary video about the Higgs boson.
In simple terms, the Higgs boson is the most expensive particle of all time. If all it took was a vacuum tube and a couple of brilliant minds, for example, the search for the Higgs boson required the creation of experimental energy rarely seen on Earth. The Large Hadron Collider needs no introduction, being one of the most famous and successful scientific experiments, but its profile particle, as before, is shrouded in mystery for most of the population. It has been called the God Particle, but thanks to the efforts of literally thousands of scientists, we no longer have to take its existence for granted.
The last unknown
What is it and what is the importance of its discovery? Why has it become the subject of so much hype, funding and misinformation? For two reasons. First, it was the last undiscovered particle needed to confirm the Standard Model of physics. Its discovery meant that an entire generation of scientific publications had not been in vain. Secondly, this boson gives other particles their mass, which gives it special meaning and some “magic”. We tend to think of mass as an intrinsic property of things, but physicists think differently. In simple terms, the Higgs boson is a particle without which mass fundamentally does not exist.
One more field
The reason lies in the so-called Higgs field. It was described even before the Higgs boson, since physicists calculated it for the needs of their own theories and observations, which required the presence of a new field, the action of which would extend to the entire Universe. Reinforcing hypotheses by inventing new parts of the universe is dangerous. In the past, for example, this led to the creation of the theory of the ether. But the more mathematical calculations were made, the more physicists realized that the Higgs field must exist in reality. The only problem was the lack of practical possibilities for observing it.
In the Standard Model, physicists obtain mass through a mechanism based on the existence of the Higgs field that permeates all of space. It creates Higgs bosons, which require large amounts of energy, and this is the main reason why scientists need modern particle accelerators to conduct high-energy experiments.
Where does mass come from?
The strength of weak nuclear interactions decreases rapidly with increasing distance. According to quantum field theory, this means that the particles that are involved in its creation - W and Z bosons - must have mass, unlike gluons and photons, which have no mass.
The problem is that gauge theories only deal with massless elements. If gauge bosons have mass, then such a hypothesis cannot be reasonably defined. The Higgs mechanism avoids this problem by introducing a new field called the Higgs field. At high energies, gauge bosons have no mass, and the hypothesis works as expected. At low energies, the field causes symmetry breaking, which allows elements to have mass.
What is the Higgs boson?
The Higgs field produces particles called Higgs bosons. The theory does not specify their mass, but as a result of the experiment it was determined that it is equal to 125 GeV. In simple terms, the existence of the Higgs boson finally confirmed the Standard Model.
The mechanism, field and boson are named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs. Although he was not the first to propose these concepts, but, as often happens in physics, he simply turned out to be the one after whom they were named.
Symmetry breaking
It was believed that the Higgs field was responsible for the fact that particles that should not have mass did. This is a universal medium that gives massless particles different masses. This violation of symmetry is explained by analogy with light - all wavelengths move in a vacuum at the same speed, but in a prism each wavelength can be isolated. This is, of course, an incorrect analogy, since white light contains all wavelengths, but the example shows how the Higgs field appears to create mass due to symmetry breaking. The prism breaks the speed symmetry of different wavelengths of light by separating them, and the Higgs field is thought to break the mass symmetry of some particles that are otherwise symmetrically massless.
How to explain the Higgs boson in simple terms? Only recently have physicists realized that if the Higgs field really exists, its action would require the presence of a suitable carrier with properties that make it observable. It was assumed that this particle belonged to bosons. The Higgs boson in simple terms is the so-called carrier force, the same as photons, which are the carriers of the electromagnetic field of the Universe. Photons, in a sense, are local excitations of it, just as the Higgs boson is a local excitation of its field. Proving the existence of a particle with the properties expected by physicists was actually equivalent to direct proof of the existence of a field.
Experiment
Many years of planning have allowed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to become an experiment sufficient to potentially disprove the Higgs boson theory. The 27 km ring of super-powerful electromagnets can accelerate charged particles to significant fractions, causing collisions of sufficient force to separate them into components, as well as deform the space around the point of impact. According to calculations, at a collision energy of a sufficiently high level, a boson can be charged so that it decays and this can be observed. This energy was so great that some even panicked and predicted the end of the world, and the imagination of others was so wild that the discovery of the Higgs boson was described as an opportunity to look into an alternative dimension.
Final confirmation
Initial observations seemed to actually refute the predictions, and no sign of the particle could be found. Some of the researchers involved in the campaign to spend billions of dollars even appeared on television and meekly stated the fact that disproving a scientific theory is just as important as confirming it. After some time, however, the measurements began to add up to the overall picture, and on March 14, 2013, CERN officially announced confirmation of the existence of the particle. There is evidence to suggest the existence of multiple bosons, but this idea needs further study.
Two years after CERN announced the discovery of the particle, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider were able to confirm it. On the one hand, this was a huge victory for science, but on the other hand, many scientists were disappointed. If anyone was hoping that the Higgs boson would be the particle that would lead to weird and wonderful regions beyond the Standard Model - supersymmetry, dark matter, dark energy - then, unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case.
A study published in Nature Physics confirmed the decay into fermions. predicts that, in simple terms, the Higgs boson is the particle that gives fermions their mass. The collider's CMS detector finally confirmed their decay into fermions - down quarks and tau leptons.
Higgs boson in simple terms: what is it?
This study definitively confirmed that this is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is located in the mass-energy region of 125 GeV, has no spin, and can decay into many lighter elements - pairs of photons, fermions, etc. Thanks to this, we can confidently say that the Higgs boson, in simple terms, is a particle , giving mass to everything.
The standard behavior of the newly discovered element was disappointing. If its decay were even slightly different, it would be related to fermions differently, and new lines of research would emerge. On the other hand, this means that we have not advanced one step beyond the Standard Model, which does not take into account gravity, dark energy, dark matter and other bizarre phenomena of reality.
Now we can only guess what caused them. The most popular theory is supersymmetry, which states that every Standard Model particle has an incredibly heavy superpartner (thus making up 23% of the Universe - dark matter). Upgrading the collider to double its collision energy to 13 TeV will likely enable detection of these superparticles. Otherwise, supersymmetry will have to wait for the construction of a more powerful successor to the LHC.
Future prospects
So what will physics be like after the Higgs boson? The LHC just recently reopened with major improvements and is capable of seeing everything from antimatter to dark energy. It is believed to interact with the normal one solely through gravity and through the creation of mass, and the significance of the Higgs boson is key to understanding exactly how this happens. The main flaw of the Standard Model is that it cannot explain the force of gravity - such a model could be called the Grand Unified Theory - and some believe that the particle and the Higgs field may provide the bridge that physicists are so desperate to find.
The existence of the Higgs boson has been confirmed, but its complete understanding is still very far away. Will future experiments refute supersymmetry and the idea of its decomposition into dark matter itself? Or will they confirm every last detail of the standard model's predictions about the properties of the Higgs boson, and this area of research will be finished forever?
But representatives of religions actively urge journalists and scientists not to call the Higgs boson a particle of God. This nickname of an open elementary particle implies that the secret of creation will sooner or later be revealed by the scientific world and become accessible to the human mind. And this, according to many religions, is an absolute fallacy. Elementary particles cannot be assigned divine qualities, otherwise it would seem that science is trying to artificially create the process of creation in a laboratory or study God using modern means.
Philosophers also became opponents of the use of the term “God particle”. The mystical rise of the natural sciences is reminiscent of ancient explanations of the mystery of creation, which ancient theologians and philosophers tried to unravel. In addition, by calling an elementary particle a particle of God, the promise is fulfilled to reveal all of space, to discover the last particle, after which to open more. Thus, the results of philosophical and theological research cannot be replaced by the research of modern physics.
The name “God particle” is nothing more than a marketing tactic that appeared after Leon Reederman published his paper on the problem of the Higgs boson. The book "The God Particle" was published in 1993. Since then, this “” Higgs boson has gained its popularity. However, physicists themselves treat this pretentious term ironically and try not to use it.
However, the discovery of the Higgs boson is extremely important for modern science. It is, according to the Standard Model of the structure of the Universe, that gives science the key to unraveling the mechanism of mass formation. Physicists also believe that the Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago and marked the beginning of the Universe, could not have happened without the participation of this boson. It was the force that gave rise to the emergence of this elementary particle that gave rise to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets from the primordial one. From all this it follows that by discovering the Higgs boson, scientists have come closer to solving the origin of the Universe and have received confirmation of the model of its structure.
In addition, the ironic name “God particle” also speaks to the difficulties that scientists encountered in proving the existence of the hypothetical particle, first predicted by the Higgs in 1964. To conduct a scientific experiment to obtain the God particle, the Large Hadron Collider was built, costing more than 8 billion dollars. Then for several years they could not get it to work. And now we have to prove that the discovered particle is the one missing in the Standard Model of the Universe.
"God particle", or Higgs boson in scientific terminology
A person is constantly in search. He is never content with superficial knowledge, but constantly sets out on a journey to new worlds, to the distant and unknown. According to Aristotle, “All men by nature strive for knowledge.”
The Church considers man to be the image of God, and just as God is limitless and infinite, man’s desire to find the answer to the most pressing questions is equally immeasurable: “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? That is why science is considered a great gift to humanity from God, the result of the development of abilities inherent in man by God. God gave man His inspired creative gift, endowed him with the ability to think, the desire to create, the ability to discover the unknown and apply new knowledge to improve his life.
In 1954, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, abbreviated CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), was founded. In 1981, after many years of preparatory work, the first experiments on hadron collisions were carried out at the SPS accelerator - a proton supersynchrotron - at the CERN center, located on the Franco-Swiss border. The purpose of these experiments was to attempt to propose a scientifically based theory about the nature of the material world and what happened in the first moments of the life of the Universe immediately after its origin.
During the experiment, scientists collide tiny material particles (so-called elementary particles) with each other at a speed close to the speed of light. By choosing the right particles and the speed of their movement, it is possible to create conditions that approximately reproduce those that existed at the very beginning of the Universe. Thus, by studying the consequences of particle collisions and confirming or refuting currently existing theories based on experimental results, scientists are trying to recreate the first pages of the history of our Universe.
In addition, scientists create conditions in laboratories under which the rarest elementary particles can function. Such particles may have existed at certain stages of the development of the Universe and played a role in the formation of the modern material world. An example of such a particle is the Higgs particle (also called the Higgs boson).
According to Professor Peter Higgs' theory, first published in 1964, elementary particles gain mass by interacting with a special elementary particle called the Higgs boson. Having mass, particles can cluster together to form matter as we know it today. The experimental discovery of this new elementary particle was supposed to confirm the correctness of Peter Higgs' theory. Thus, for the first time, it becomes possible to understand how elementary particles acquired mass and connected with each other in various ways to form the modern world. Scientists called the sought-after Higgs particle the “Goddamn particle” because “it could never be detected.”
In 1993, Nobel laureate physicist Leon Max Lederman, in a book co-authored with Professor Dick Teresi subtitled If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?, gave the Higgs boson the nickname "God particle" because the book's editor refused release it under the title “damned particle.” Later, Lederman, explaining the choice of this “term,” said that, firstly, the name “damned particle” really sounded too vulgar and could not be used, and secondly, this particle, in fact, can be called “ particle of God,” taking into account its central and leading role in theories of the creation of matter, as well as in elucidating questions that seemed incomprehensible just recently.
On the morning of Wednesday July 4, 2012, the CERN research center announced from Geneva that experiments to detect the “Higgs particle” were nearing completion, as a particle resembling the Higgs boson had been discovered. This particle lives only one thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second! And although conclusive evidence has not yet been presented that the discovered particle is the sought-after Higgs boson, most of the scientific community has accepted this hypothesis. A little later, Peter Higgs himself, who was already 83 years old, excitedly announced from CERN that he did not dare to hope that this discovery would happen during his lifetime, and at the same time told his family to keep the champagne in the refrigerator for now, since scientists still had a significant and long Job. It is not without reason that many scientists claim that “the Higgs boson opens the way to understanding about four percent of the Universe.”
However, the term “God particle” and even more so the term “God particle” cannot be considered successful. Even Peter Higgs himself publicly acknowledged the term as “pretentious,” emphasizing that inappropriate use of it causes justifiable resentment and confuses people. Physicists prefer not to use this term at all, believing that it is inherently erroneous and leads to an incorrect interpretation of the true meaning of their research.
Many physicists believe that this elementary particle is nothing more than a part of God's creation, like all other objects around us. And all physicists unanimously - both believers and non-believers - admit that the Higgs boson is a part of nature, and not God, and has no greater right to be recognized as God than, for example, the sun or some stone. Truly, how naive it is to believe that the Church is “afraid” of the discovery of the “Higgs particle”! It is as naive as it is to be afraid of “clashes” between science and religion. Louis Pasteur said: “Lack of knowledge takes you away from God, but real science leads you to Him.” The Church blesses science, provided that it respects man and does not destroy his personality. Scripture says that “the Lord created medicine and other sciences.” The great Fathers of the Church and many Orthodox saints taught at universities. Basil the Great's work "Conversations on the Six Days", containing interpretation and commentary on the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, became a source of inspiration for many generations of astronomers, geologists, doctors and other scientists. The teaching of Saint Gregory of Nyssa on the creation of the world, created in the 4th century. after R.H., is considered a harbinger of the big bang theory (“Big-Bang”), which is understood as a surge of God’s energy. This series can be continued endlessly. Science is trying to offer its own explanation of the processes of creation and the structure of the world, although many of its representatives consider these formulations extremely dangerous! Orthodox theology, in full accordance with its true calling, in its teaching places emphasis on the One who created the world and man. As has been rightly noted, science answers the question “how”, theology answers the question “Who”!
Metropolitan Hierotheus of Nafpaktos correctly notes: “Science makes many discoveries that are designed to bring benefit and not harm to man, while Orthodox theology provides answers to the spiritual quests of people and helps them find selfless love for God and for their neighbor in the era when it was proclaimed not only the “death of God,” but also the “death of one’s neighbor.” Ultimately, no matter how many discoveries science makes, a person always feels the need for a personal God, for unselfish love, for inner peace and freedom, for spiritual completeness; he always wants to know what is beyond creation, what happens after death, what is eternal life, etc.” The Church teaches that the Lord created the world out of love, that Divine love is joyful and creative. The Lord is not an abstract idea and is not matter, God is a Person, God is Love. With the help of the Logos - the Divine Word, which is His uncreated energy, the Lord creates all creation. “Nothing forced the Lord to create the world. The driving force behind God's creation was His love. Instead of saying that the Universe was created by Him out of nothing, we need to say that it was created by Him from Himself, that is, out of love. The creation of the world was rather not an act of His free will, but an act of His free love” (Metropolitan Callistus Ware, “The Orthodox Way”). Fortunately for us, the Lord is not an engineer, mechanic, or builder. The Lord is, first of all, the Father. That is why the world is an excess of God’s love, and that is why the Lord cares about the world. Man is the crown of creation, and God calls upon him in his constant joyful and grateful desire for His Creator to lead all creation with him to infinite perfection. From all of the above, a natural conclusion suggests itself that love is the true “elementary particle” of God. Everything - and most importantly, our life - acquires significance and deep meaning only when they interact with this extraordinary “particle,” the only manifestation of the essence of God, which gives meaning to human knowledge and at the same time goes beyond its limits. For, according to such simple words of the Evangelist John, “God is love!”
