The God Particle
Since the 1970s the descriptions of weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force have been combined into a single description called the electroweak force. It requires a symmetry conferred by a particle named the Higgs boson. A boson is the collective name for all force-carrying particles (so far, we have come across the gluon, photon, W and Z bosons). Physicists were aware that if the W and Z particles had no mass they would be indistinguishable from the massless photon. The Higgs boson was posited in order to come up with a mathematical description to explain the suspected deeper symmetry that connects W, Z and photon particles. In the electroweak theory all these particles start out as the same thing, and only become these different particles when the symmetry of the Higgs field is broken. The Higgs field slows some fo the particles down and confers mass on them. This is highly significant. The Higgs boson, and the field it generates, is what changes what would otherwise be a world entirely made out of radiation into a world that has things in it that have mass. Finally, we are getting close to understanding how light can become stuff. For obvious reasons, the Higgs boson has been given the nickname ‘the God particle,’ though in fact it is properly named for the English physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed this broken symmetry in the 1960s. For now, however, the Higgs boson has not been detected. Again, it is thought that some light might be thrown on the matter by the Large Hadron Collider.
I’ve been reading Christopher Potter’s You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe. Potter published this ten years ago, in 2009, and it was neat to read this part and to know that we have since confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson.
