• Question: What on Earth is a Higgs Boson?

    Asked by CARROTZZ to Adrian on 9 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by FoxetaFox.
    • Photo: Adrian Buzatu

      Adrian Buzatu answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      A Higgs boson is another elementary particle, a fundamental building block of the Universe. It is very special, though. It is the only known elementary particle that has a quantum number called spin to the value of zero. The particles that form matter (electrons, quarks) have a spin of 1/2. The particles that carry forces (photons, gluons, W and Z bosons) have spin 1. The Higgs boson is the only particle of spin zero.

      It is predicted by the theory that explains why the matter and force particles have mass. If they didn’t, they would be traveling at the speed of light all the time. Thus atoms would not exist and us would not exist.

      The discovery of the Higgs boson was so important, that the Nobel Prize was awarded right away, in 2013. To the theorists that had predicted the particle 50 years before.

      I explained more about the Higgs boson in a talk at TEDxUniversityOfGlasgow:

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