• Question: what is the higgs boson

    Asked by to Edward on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Edward Hughes

      Edward Hughes answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Hi stovie99,

      Good question! I guess you probably heard of it on the news recently. The Higgs boson is a particle we’ve only just discovered using a massive particle smasher in Switzerland. The reason it took so long to find is that you need huge energies to produce it for long enough to be detected!

      So what does the Higgs boson do? Well, it’s responsible for giving things mass. Without the Higgs, everything would be massless and move at the same speed, just like light rays. It would be a pretty boring existence, because there wouldn’t be any concept of time!

      Our best theories of particles rely on the idea of symmetry. The problem is that too much symmetry means you can’t have mass! It’s like trying to write using only symmetrical letters – you won’t be able to say much. So something called the Higgs field comes along and breaks the symmetry, allowing particles to have mass. As a byproduct of this you get a heavy particle called a Higgs boson.

      Hope that makes sense!

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