Talking about the Higgs Boson - Sixty Symbols

the symbol for the Higgs boson is sadly the most boring thing in the world it's a lowercase letter H it is it depends you know different there's no agreed-upon symbol I think the lowercase H is the most common but uppercase H is used uppercase Phi or lowercase Phi or various other things are sometimes used the Higgs boson is a tiny little vibration in a field called the Higgs field just as the photon the particle of light is a tiny vibration in the electromagnetic field for example the Higgs boson is not important the Higgs boson is a little bit of a red herring what matters what is crucial for the operation of physics is the Higgs field that pervades all of space and the reason why we've spent so much effort looking for the Higgs boson is because it's evidence that there is something called the Higgs field it's a vibration in this field that we've been looking for for over 40 years now is the Higgs boson the only way to find the Higgs field well it's the direct way so when Steven Weinberg and Selam put together what we call the electroweak theory when they unified electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force they assumed that the universe was full of this thing called the Higgs field and have played a crucial role in making sense of the rest of the physics that followed and that theory made predictions and it fit a lot of data and the predictions came true Nobel Prizes were given to Glashow Weinberg Salaam to a Tufton Veltman for figuring out the mathematical underpinnings of the theory for the experimenters carla rubia and simon van der Meer for finding the W and Z bosons that were predicted but it was relying on this ingredient the Higgs field that had never been directly detected the LHC is an amazing amazing piece of equipment I mean I wrote this book about the search for the Higgs and I came to it as a theoretical cosmologist I was already very very impressed with the experimenters before I started writing the book but I'm much more impressed now having done it the largest machine ever built thousands of people working on it 27 kilometers around thousands of superconducting magnets colder than interstellar space a vacuum inside the bean pipe that is emptier than the atmosphere of the moon and they're colliding particles together protons together at incredibly high energies and just watching what comes out and the amazing single most amazing fact to me about the LHC is that when you collide protons together we have such a wonderful understanding of particle physics that almost everything that comes out is exactly what you would expect so what they do is they just over produce data you know they have a hundred million collisions per second very very roughly the problem with that is that every collision is a megabyte of data and there's no possible way you can store all that information so for every million events that they produce they store one of them to tape they very quickly look at the event say is this possibly interesting oh no they throw it away or yes and they will keep it so this idea of filtering and throwing away almost all the data turns out to be necessary because what you're looking for is you know the one in a hundred billion event you can't do it just by creating less data and keeping it all right you need to go through this elaborate process and miraculously you know there was one thing we thought that was absolutely going to be found at the LHC and we found it and that's the Higgs boson we're still looking for things beyond that of course but what is it about what the Large Hadron Collider does that produces that one in a billion event well if you believe as I do that we should think about particle physics in terms of fields what's really happening is that the inner workings of the protons are quarks and gluons so there's vibrating quark fields and vibrating gluon fields and they smack together and create a very elaborate high amplitude vibration so it's much like if you're playing the piano very loudly in one room there's another piano sitting the room next to you it will begin to hum along in resonance with your sound waves so these gluons and quarks start vibrating and they start the other fields of particle physics - vibrating because all the fields are coupled to each other in very subtle ways so gluons start vibrating and then top quarks start vibrating and ultimately a Higgs vibration is brought into existence and it decays almost instantly in about one Zepto second so you will never see the Higgs boson in any experiment ever done it instantly turns into other things and then the hard work begins because you need to pick out the Higgs events the the collisions where Higgs boson was produced by looking at all the different events you got and say well there's more of this type of event that we would have expected so you do a little bit of detective work and say the only way that could be true is if there's a Higgs when these huge collisions happen with all this energy and all these fields start wiggling why is the higgs field so reluctant to join the party there's there's two reasons the most simple reason is that it's heavy a heavy field is one that has a lot of mass and as we all know e equals MC squared so energy of a particle just sitting there is the mass times the speed of light squared so creating a particle with a lot of mass means you need to take a lot of energy and put into a very very small region of space that's why you need this elaborate 9 billion-dollar particle accelerator just to make a few tiny Higgs bosons and the other thing besides the energy that it takes is how it couples how it interacts with other fields the top court for example is a little bit heavier than the Higgs boson but it's a little bit easier to make because it interacts more directly with other fields that we know about so in particle physics you just can characterize everything you're looking for by how heavy it is and how it interacts how you can make it and the Higgs was right there where the LHC could finally find it Higgs bosons do form very very very rarely but it does happen because you have to remember everything that the Large Hadron Collider does the universe does all the time and better there are cosmic rays that are impacting the Earth's atmosphere with much higher energies than we can produce at the LHC but they're up high in the Earth's atmosphere then the Higgs boson decays one Zepto second later so it's kind of Impractical to search for new exotic particles that way but definitely a Higgs fields are vibrating throughout the universe there is the the non vibrating field you know the background and that is crucially important to all the particle physics electrons and quarks and so forth move through this Higgs like molasses or I should say Blass is like Higgs and that's how they get mass that so it makes the universe interesting you know there's only a small number of fundamental ingredients of reality I mean in fact you could bring it down you could boil it down to four if you wanted to there's gravity there are the other forces of nature all of which sort of have the same kind of basic structure there is the matter particles that make up your atoms you know the the up and down quarks and your protons and neutrons the electrons in your atoms and then there's the Higgs right so it's one of a very very tiny number of fundamental ingredients you need to explain the world around you how much is it worth finding that and verifying that it's there the only accurate answer is that it's priceless right you know it depends on how much money you have to spend on basic research because you're not trying to cure cancer with this you're not trying to fly to Mars or anything like that we're not going to get jetpacks it's not going to make a better iphone but it helps us understand how the world works I mean it's a feature of doing this kind of research that you always do get technological spin-offs the world wide web was a spinoff of research at CERN but that's not why we do it we do it because we want to understand things and fortunately we still have enough money to do it I guess I mean I'm not asking for a jetpack or even a cure to cancer but has this unlocked a new level has this unlocked for you guys has unlocked a new level or is it just is it leur is it the URI well done pat on the back now we're certainly very hopeful that it is not only a capstone achievement but a window onto a whole new world one of the nice things about the Higgs boson is that it's a little bit more sociable than other kinds of particles and we know there are particles we haven't yet detected we know there's dark matter in the universe if it weren't for dark matter and dark energy we might really be worried that the particles we already knew about we're all that we're accessible to us but we know that's not true they're the most of the of the mass in our galaxy is not made of particles that we've created here on earth so we're hopeful that by studying the Higgs boson this gives us a new way of looking for other particles the ways that the Higgs boson is produced the way it decays the way it uses it becomes a force mediating interactions between dark matter particles and other particles these are all new toys for particle physics to study and play with this is going to be going on for twenty thirty forty years into the future these are some incredibly talented hard-working dedicated bright human beings the theorists the technicians and the experimenters who built the theories and built the Large Hadron Collider and they've devoted their lives literally to looking for a particle that may or may not be there and that when you find it is not going to make you any richer it's just going to make you a little bit happier that you found it so I wanted to get across why this was so crucial I mean why physicist in the United States were crushed with disappointment when Congress in 1993 cancelled the United States is competitor to the Large Hadron Collider the superconducting supercollider why physicists are still a little bit on tenterhooks about will there ever be another particle accelerator the scale of the LHC you know they devote their lives to it the theorists might spend their entire life working on a theory that the accelerator then says isn't true you know you have to learn to deal with that but you then get these pictures of Peter Higgs and and and Francois layer and other physicists who came up with the idea of the Higgs boson back in 1964 and they got to be in the room in 2012 when the experimenters told them you are right that is part of nature and that is a kind of sweet triumphant success that we can rarely experience as human beings for me really an incredible singing that has happened in my lifetime as a cosmetologist who's alive at this time you're very fortunate you got to enjoy this announcement you won't live forever I'm sure does it frustrate you that those next things those things that are 40 50 60 years away just beyond your lifetime you'll never get to see do you ever think about that well I think that the great thing about science is that we almost are always focused on what we don't yet understand and sometimes the new understandings come fast and furious you know there are times like the 1920s when quantum mechanics was being put together when it's hard to imagine what it must have been like when I wrote my book about the arrow of time I delved into the work in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics in the 1870s and the debates there are just fascinating to read because they didn't know it was really fundamental stuff and they were building it from scratch and some people didn't believe in atoms at all right and other people were using atoms to explain everything and now in particle physics we put the capstone on the standard model and we're hoping to find dark matter in cosmology we found dark matter and dark energy I can't say over the next 10 years 50 years are we going to be strewn with new shocking experimental results or are we just going to be you know fine-tuning the understanding we already have I think the fact that we don't know which of those is going to happen is part of what actually makes it interesting but I think about someone that Albert Einstein when he was born and I kind of think oh gee I wish I could just tell those guys what we found out a few weeks ago they would have been so happy to know better and it'll be the same for you when you were gone I wish I could have told Sean about this thing he would have loved to know that does that does that eat away it does it does not actually because you could say about anybody right you could say the a what would I 9 have told Newton but you know Newton had his own fun right he got to invent physics basically right I mean Newton could have told Galileo things but Galileo did his own his own thing I think that every generation gets to apply the talents it has to the problems that it's faced with and right now in science not just particle physics and cosmology but overall there's so many great problems and so much interesting data coming in and that we are at no loss for interesting questions to puzzle over the change of the evolution of the universe we only need one we only need the trigger equation it in the Copenhagen interpretation the the thing that we teach our students the thing that's in the textbooks

Channel: Sixty Symbols

Views: 324,157

Rating: 4.9658961 out of 5

Keywords: sixtysymbols, higgs boson, sean carroll

Id: OvN-prp1N78

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2013