In which I explain the Higgs Boson to my girlfriend, who is a biologist not a physicist.

• Alex Wright: ok, so, first I should explain what a Boson is
• Krista: ok
• coles notes version please
• Alex Wright:
• alright, so, a boson is a field mediating particle, like a photon
• are you familiar with the electromagnetic field?
• Krista:
• yes
• Alex Wright:
• ok, so the photon is the boson that mediates the electromagnetic field.
• the field, and force, doesn't exist without and is made up of photons. If you excite the field to a certain energy, photons are released.
• and we can observe them
• Krista:
• yes I understand that
• Alex Wright:
• it's like when you slosh around a bucket of water and some of the water at the surface splashes up into a drop separate from the larger body of water
• ok, so that's the basics of bosons
• the Higgs boson is a very special type of boson
• You know that atoms are essentially 98% empty space, yes?
• Krista:
• ok
• Alex Wright:
• you've got your nucleus, and the electrons are floating around about as far away as jupiter from the sun, if we're talking scale here.
• Krista:
• yes
• I know that
• Alex Wright:
• so most of the universe is about 98% nothing
• but this doesn't really make sense, because if it was truly empty, everything would be zooming around at the speed of light
• einstein's general relativity tells us that the thing that keeps particles form zooming about at light speed is mass.
• some particles don't have mass, like photons and electrons, which obviously travel at light speed.
• Krista:
• ok
• Alex Wright:
• but what creates mass?
• 50 years ago, a smart guy named Peter Higgs suggested that that 98% of empty space wasn't empty at all, he hypothesized that this empty space was actually completely saturated with the Higgs Field
• the Higgs field acts like a quantum molasses which slows down these particles as they travel through space.
• Krista:
• ooo cool
• Alex Wright:
• so, he proposed this 50 years ago, and described the phenomenon with mathematics, and it made sense
• but the problem was, the Higgs field has such high energy, and because of Einstein's E=mc^2 equation, such high mass properties, it takes an immense amount of energy to excite the field enough to observe the particle
• and then they did
• Krista:
• ohhh
• Ok. wow I actually get it.
• a few seconds ago
• Alex Wright:
• Yay
• Krista:
• you should post that explanation.
• because every other one makes no sense.