![]() ![]() But the could be a mixture of several materials. The simplest possibility … is that it’s made from one new particle, the so-called Higgs particle. We know its name: the Higgs condensate, after Peter Higgs, a Scots physicist who pioneered some of these ideas. So we don’t really know what this new material ether is. “No presently known form of matter has the right properties. Einstein dispelled this myth, right? Wrong.įrank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT, writes in his 2008 book The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces: We know now, the story goes, that there is no ether. The ether is generally described, along with things like phlogiston, as one of science’s big screw-ups. (Much of the following discussion is adapted from an in-progress book I’m working on). I agree with these claims but I find the Higgs field discussion very interesting from another perspective: The Higgs field has brought back the notion of an ether. There is still plenty of room for doubt and interpretation.įor many, however, despite the ongoing uncertainties, which will be reduced with additional experiments, the new findings represent an amazing vindication of the power of the human mind and of international collaboration. This is far from a confident assertion that the Higgs boson has been found, as many outlets erroneously reported. So what did the European science team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a multi-billion dollar project completed in 2008, find exactly? Well, UC Santa Barbara physicist Joe Incandela, spokesman for one of the LHC teams, announced that after going through literally trillions of data points, they had uncovered strong evidence of something Higgs-like. Without the Higgs field, particles would all travel at the speed of light and have no mass. As massive particles travel through the field they are slowed down like a spoon pushed through molasses. Or so the theory goes.ĭennis Overbye in the New York Times provides a good analogy: the Higgs boson, and the Higgs field that it creates, is like molasses. The Higgs boson imparts mass to massive particles like electrons and protons. Photons are a type of boson, which are essentially energy particles, as opposed to fermions, which are matter particles. Particles like photons, the quantum of light, don’t have mass. Particles like electrons and protons have mass. The problem is that the theory predicts the presence of the Higgs boson as a necessary ingredient for imparting mass to particles that have mass and it hadn’t been found after decades of searching. The Higgs boson is a key particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, which currently stands as our best theory of the very small. What the heck is the Higgs boson, has it really been found, and why should we care?
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