![]() ![]() ![]() There is no doubt that this discovery, if confirmed, is a triumph for the Standard Model. Prior to July 2012, physicists had confirmed the existence for all the elementary particles of the Standard Model except one-the Higgs boson. The Standard Model is the theory that describes the relationships between elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces (it does not include gravity). The Higgs boson, in turn, can be thought of as the smallest possible ripple in the Higgs field. Particles that interact strongly with the Higgs field have more mass, and vice versa. Researchers think that one of these fields-a scalar field called the Higgs field-gives particles mass through their interaction with this field. Roughly speaking, quantum field theory views particles as “ripples” in the fields. In modern physics, however, the reality is more complicated. There is a tendency to intuitively think of particles as being like little round marbles. Vector fields have both numbers and directions associated with each point in space an example of a vector field would be the electric field surrounding a charged object. A temperature field, for instance, would assign a temperature to each point in space and could, for instance, be used to show how the temperature within a room varies with location. Some fields are characterized by numbers at each point in space and are called scalar fields. ![]() A field is a quantity that has a value at each point in space. Quantum mechanics is a theory that successfully describes the behavior of matter and energy at subatomic and atomic scales, and quantum field theory is an extension of quantum mechanics. In order to understand the importance of the Higgs boson, it is necessary to review some modern physics. I am not particularly religious, but I find the term an ‘in your face’ affront to those who ,” wrote physicist Vivek Sharma, a leader of the Higgs search. Although the Higgs boson has been nicknamed the “God particle,” it is widely agreed that the name is more for publicity than accuracy, and many physicists do not like it. The Higgs particle is called a boson because it falls into the second category.Įvidence for the Higgs boson was obtained from data collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, as well as at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider in the United States. Particles can generally be classified into two categories, according to the quantum mechanical rules that they obey: fermions and bosons. 1 Does this discovery have relevance for the creation-evolution controversy? Scientists from Europe’s CERN research center presented evidence on July 4, 2012, for a particle that is likely the Higgs boson, the last remaining elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. ![]()
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