Scientists across the world seem to be in celebration mode this week with what is deemed as the 21st century’s greatest scientific discovery – the Higgs boson.
Apparently, if scientists fail to find the Higgs boson, all that have been established about how everything works in the universe would be meaningless. This means that we would probably have all this nice equations and formulas that govern every little thing in the world but they would have been incorrect.
And even while the rest of us do not understand a thing about it, this discovery is expected to change the world in previously unimaginable ways — at least that’s what the scientists are in the opinion of. Adding to the confusion is the declarations from the likes of them that this could also affect philosophy and religion along with everything else.
Before we all freak out about this incomprehensible and somewhat important discovery, let’s at least try to understand just what all this fuss is about.
Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner for his work in quantum physics, took time to explain some things on one of his books called The Character of Physical Law. According to him, no one really understands quantum physics (surprise!) because as one digs deeper into the sub-atomic realm, its practical implications and meaning gets overshadowed by the mathematical challenge.
Meanwhile, Norton Scientific Journal experts point out that a boson is a special type of particle (Higgs being a person’s name appended to it) because apparently, two of them can occupy the same space, at the same time. That claim alone turned the most basic of my scientific knowledge upside down. From what we know, two stones cannot possibly occupy the same space simultaneously. Scientists are aware of this confusion so they suggest that we stop referring to bosons as particles but as “entities” instead. (Though that doesn’t make much difference to me.)
Of course, the most important thing about Higgs boson is its being the reason for other particles to have mass (i.e. to have weight at all). So it is sort of a particle that “imparts mass to other particles” — except that, it is not really right to call it a ‘particle’.
Seems like the science community failed in communicating to the general public their enthusiasm about this great discovery. People are as anxious as ever to know just how exactly this is going to change anything, especially because everyone has an investment in this – through taxpayers’ money that funded the project.
But I’m sure they’ll figure out an effective way to explain the whole thing to the rest of us, eventually.
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