**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

3rd grade version, 2nd attempt.

OK, so there's all these theories in physics and mostly they work together like a charm. Not everywhere, though. The current theories of electricity and what a layman would call "nuclear radiation processes" are our example. Both work well on their own, but when joined, the math says that particles should have no mass. The theories are compatible except in this respect and they work extremely well on their own. Something's missing.

If you try to manipulate the existing theories to "get" particles to have mass, something always gets broken. I mean, something that makes even less sense comes up in the theory, and it comes up all over the place.

The missing thing is called the Higgs Mechanism, the process by which particles acquire mass. It's a theory from the 1960's by a guy named Higgs. He wasn't the only one who came up with it. He was working with partners, but that's not what I mean. I mean 3 papers from 3 different countries were published at the same time with the same theory. It was there to be guessed.

So. the Higgs mechanism states there is a field (just like an electric field) that particles interact with. Let's call it the Higgs field. By interacting with the Higgs field, particles acquire mass.
How do the particles interact with the Higgs field? What particle in the Higgs field do they interact with?
Why, the Higgs boson is what we'll call the new particle.

The theory says there should be a particle that is extremely unstable (it decays into other particles in much less than 1 second), that can be detected in very high energy collisions, like the collisions in particle accelerators.

It took years of building a big enough particle accelerator to make a high enough energy collision to have any hope of detecting a Higgs boson. The LHC at CERN has accomplished this task. After more years of experimenting, scientists have found a particle with some of the properties that Higgs suggested the Higgs particle should have.

So there you have it. The Higgs boson has been found. Now we can study it in further experiments at higher energies and, hopefully, neatly tie 2 separate theories into 1.

[eberetta1]

It took years of building a big enough particle accelerator to make a high enough energy collision to have any hope of detecting a Higgs boson. The LHC at CERN has accomplished this task. After more years of experimenting, scientists have found a particle with some of the properties that Higgs suggested the Higgs particle should have.

Could this thing accidentally create a black hole on Earth...

[MadMojoMonkey]

Could [the LHC at CERN] accidentally create a black hole on Earth...

Well... I wouldn't say, "accidentally"... more like "hopefully". It would give us the chance to observe Hawking Radiation and award a Nobel before he dies.

The thing about the LHC at CERN is that it's a controlled environment. It's not even close to the highest energy experiments that are conducted on earth. It's just that the other ones are caused by cosmic rays. For those experiments, it's hard to get the detectors in the right place at the right time since we don't know when or where to look. Cosmic rays come predominantly in low energies, but extremely high energy particles have been observed, as much as 50 times more energy than possible at the LHC. These extremely high energy particles hit the Earth ~1 per year per km^2... so you see what I mean about not knowing where or when to look.

Bear in mind that the LHC runs 400 million experiments per second when it's switched on, of which ~100,000 per second will yield "interesting" results... I.e. a particle collision that could have produced a Higgs boson.