• Question: What is the Higgs boson and why is it also called a god particle?

    Asked by desorgherm to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 18 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Jess Bean

      Jess Bean answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      The Higgs Boson is a type of particle in an atom. It’s the particle which gives an atom mass (or weight). Light particles, called photons, have no mass.

      Scientists in the 1960s (Professor Higgs) realised that the Higgs Boson should exist in order for particles to have mass. They couldn’t see this particle though as it is so small and hard to separate from the rest of the atom. This is one of the reasons the Large Hadron Collider was built. The Large Hadron Collider (www.lhc.ac.uk) is a massive science experiment near Geneva on mainland Europe. The experiment allows two beams of atoms to be smashed together, so scientists can look at what the atoms are made of. Last summer the scientists working there found evidence of the Higgs Boson which is really big science news, as the theory has been around over 50 years!

      Newspapers and other places sometimes called the Higgs Boson the God Particle because it gives everything mass.

    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      I’d only add one thing to Jess’ answer – the Higg’s boson is not a particle inside an atom like an electron or a proton but it is what gives everything mass – and mass is basically what makes stuff heavy.

      In the last century physicists realised that forces (like electricity and magnetism and nuclear) can be described by particles exchanging other particles (in electromagnetism it electrons exchanging photons) … but no one really knew what made things heavy… Higgs suggested that this was another force which worked by exchanging particles – and the particles that were exchanged were called Higgs Boson.

      It’s called the God Particle because it’s so important to the best understanding we have of basic physics…

    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Just a couple of thigs to add, first of the Higgs particle isn’t actually that small in particle terms, it’s about 100 times heavier than a proton in fact.

      Also the Large Hadron collider collides protons, not whole atoms, at the energies the particles in the collider have atoms would just fly apart!

      The reason it was so hard to find was because it is so big, to make one you have to give two particles enough energy so that when it collides the energy can be changed into a higgs boson, but the Higgs is so big that this amount of energy is huge. If you start with less, you can’t make a Higgs boson. That’s why you need a huge collider with powerful electromagnets.

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