The God Particle

The Higgs boson.
...I don't even know.

You may have heard of the “Higgs boson particle” in the news lately. It’s the thing that CERN is working so hard on this year, sending out news reports daily, it seems. In reality, the Higgs boson is one of the only theoretical fundamental particles that hasn’t been observed yet, and even more important, it’s the key to a grand unification of Physics theory.

But... what is it?

Let’s start from the beginning. Ever since people started to describe their surroundings, they recognized that matter has mass. Rather, they knew on an elementary level that things had weight. It took a little longer, probably around the time the Greeks named the atom, to narrow down the idea of ‘mass’. As science evolved and developed over the next thousand years, the definition of mass didn’t really change; it was just a fraction of one part of something over more parts of that something.

With this system, there wasn’t much of a standard when it came to weighing things. Just like the meter, every culture used their most common or easily obtained object as a scale-to-scale comparison for everything else. Even as scientists like Galileo, Newton and Kepler continued to find new properties of mass, such as the effects of gravity, the concept of mass itself didn’t really change. It wasn’t until after the discovery and significant research of atomic particles that things became a little clearer. In the early 1800s. the chemist John Dalton published a table of atomic weights for a couple of the most common organic elements, like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Hydrogen, being the lightest, was assigned a mass of 1, and all other elements were multiples of this number. William Proust confirmed this idea in 1815 by pinpointing hydrogen as the fundamental unit of an atom, thereby making the “Proust Hypothesis” the standard for some time.

"Is that what they're calling it these days?"

However, like many great minds in history, Proust was wrong. The concept of mass became much more complicated when smaller particles like protons and electrons were discovered. These couldn’t be ratios of hydrogen, because they were what hydrogen was made of. Lucky for us, Einstein reconciled this problem using his theory of Special Relativity. He postulated that all mass is related to its energy, no matter what form that mass is in. This connection is so deep, in fact, that particle mass can actually be related as a unit of energy, the electron-volt (eV). To be clear, this is not to say that matter can turn into matter-less energy at any point; just that the mass of a system is always conserved.

We’ve come a long way from our humble understandings of mass, and the concept itself is not exactly foreign to anyone in this day and age. Yet consider this: photons carry energy, but are massless. Electrons carry energy, but have mass. What happened to make one particle massless and the other not? This is a question that none of the scientists above could answer. A theoretical physicist, on the other hand, would tell you this: the Higgs boson. The reason scientists at CERN are working so hard to find this elusive particle is that it may be the thing that gives mass to energy, an incredible theory if it’s proven.

The trouble is that, well, they haven’t been able to find it yet.

They were kind of busy.

This isn’t to say they aren’t getting close. The word on the street is that CERN is narrowing down its search enough that the evidence should be conclusive by the end of the year. The scariest part is that they may not find what they’re looking for. The Higgs boson is purely theoretical; it works well on paper, but doesn’t seem to be popping up in the real world. If their search ends in failure, it will be back to the drawing boards to try and come up with another theory. Yet if their search succeeds… suffice to say, it would be pretty awesome.