You read that right: three, not four! There's strong nuclear, gravity, and a strange hybrid of electromagnetic and weak nuclear called, appropriately enough, the electroweak force. One clue to this perplexing mystery is that, at high enough energy densities - like, say, in the business end of a particle collider - there are only three forces of nature. RELATED: LHC Opens the Quantum Physics Floodgatesīut why? Really, why? Why are the forces of nature so dang different? In the boson world, the electromagnetic force is completely different from the weak nuclear force in terms of mass, range, and interactions, and their respective force carriers aren't even on speaking terms, let alone related to each other. It's nothing at all like the families of fermions: In that realm, a simple change of charge or different measure of mass will get you a new kind of particle. These four forces of nature are, as you may have noticed, radically different from one another. And gravity is carried by … well, perhaps that's a subject for another day. The photon carries the electromagnetic force, while the W+, W-and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force and a set of gluons carries the strong nuclear force. Physicists observe four forces of nature: electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravity. The "interesting thing" that the Higgs boson does in the universe relates to a fundamental question of modern physics. Speaking of work: It's the Higgs field, not the Higgs particle, that's doing interesting things in the universe. Machines like the Large Hadron Collider are trying to study the Higgs field, but the only way to do so is to make some Higgs particles (i.e., some slaps in the field) and see how they work. I'm spending a couple of paragraphs making this distinction clear because the hunt for the Higgs boson isn't about the particle itself. Every kind of particle that scientists know of, from the electron to a photon, is associated with its own space-time-filling vibrating field. A single particle is just the minimum possible amount of energy that a field can support.
In other words, you can slap a field and make some particles.
In this view (and indeed, in reality), particles can be created and destroyed at will, simply by adding or removing energy from the field. This field can take different values at different points in space-time, and each value corresponds to the average number of particles observers see in that patch. No, in the contemporary view of the rules of the universe, the primary physical object is the field, an entity that permeates all of space and time. So right there, the name gives you a hint: Because this particle is called a "boson," it must have something to do with forces.īut modern particle physics isn't really about the particles themselves, and that goes for the Higgs boson, too. Meanwhile, the bosons are the forces between them: photons, gluons and so on. Think electrons, quarks, protons, neutrinos and all their friends. Very, very loosely, you can think of fermions as the building blocks of the everyday world. "Boson" is the term for one of the two kinds of particles in the universe, with the other called a "fermion" (after Enrico Fermi). RELATED: The Higgs Boson Should Have Crushed the Universe Indeed, it references two people, further highlighting the particle's importance: Peter Higgs, who with a bunch of colleagues first proposed the particle back in the 1960s, and Satyendra Nath Bose, who was a pioneering figure in the early days of particle physics. The particle's real name, the Higgs boson, is actually quite informative. I'm sure he thought it was just a cute name (especially since Lederman claims his publisher rejected his original idea of the "God damn Particle"), but the media went crazy with the name, and now it's hard to disentangle the real physics of the Higgs from the hype. Physicist Leon Lederman coined the nickname "God Particle" in the early '90s and used it as the title of his book on the subject.
It has a perfectly acceptable name: the Higgs boson. Oh, and physicists don't really care about the particle.įirst, I want to talk about the particle's name. The Higgs boson is indeed an important part of modern physics, but elevating it to the status of a deity seems a bit of a stretch, and the whole "making mass" thing isn't even this particle's most important job. It doesn't help that the Higgs has the horrible nickname of "the God Particle" and is often described as being "responsible for mass in the universe" or something like that. The Higgs boson and its role in the universe are not the easiest things to explain. He contributed this article to 's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Sutter is also host of Ask a Spaceman, RealSpace and COSI Science Now. Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI science center.
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