LHC confirms Higgs Boson discovery

That's basically it, yeah.

And weak force is from W and Z bosons, which we think is another aspect of the same force as electromagnetism because the effects kinda merge at really high energy. Which is actually another puzzle that the Higgs boson would click the last few pieces into place for, because when the symmetry breaks the bosons generated kinda don't have mass yet.

Yeah, subatomic physics gets really weird. I'd have to dig into my old textbook to go into detail, but frankly that thing made my head hurt.

edited 4th Jul '12 7:25:17 PM by Pykrete

Mass also affects other things, like how much force is necessary to accelerate a given object.

@Pykrete: There's a reason I want to go into renewable energy engineering for my master's, not further down the path of physics. I love physics, but christ, it just gives me headaches sometimes.

And, hey... gravity. Don't forget that.

Heee... we might be one step closer to anti-gravity shoes!

edited 4th Jul '12 11:39:34 PM by Euodiachloris

From what I recall, there's no actual reason for that type of mass and gravitational "charge" to be the same. Relativity just assumes they are, and Relativity works, so nobody has any reason to think otherwise.

edited 5th Jul '12 4:45:12 AM by Yej

That layman's terms article really makes it clear what they are talking about. Bravo. So they're saying that the Higgs field is kind of like a cosmic mass soup through which particles travel — the more of it they drag behind them, the heavier they seem. So particles themselves are inherently massless but still appear to have mass because of their impact on the Higgs field. The Higgs boson is the means by which changes in the field propagate themselves. Beautiful.

That reminds me: do we have any experimental confirmation of the graviton yet? Or has that one been debunked? I really need to keep up with current physics research...

edited 5th Jul '12 11:58:33 AM by Fighteer

I'm pretty sure the graviton is still only theoretical at the moment.

The idea is that we can describe all the other interactive forces with force carrying bosons so hey, let's do it with gravity and gravitons and oh wait, that really screws everything up and is damned difficult to work into any other theory because it effects the stress-energy tensor. Perhaps we should just try to look for it...oh its interaction strength is like a gazillion time smaller.

Again, being a layman, it's rather amazing how analogous the way the Higgs field appears to operate for mass is to the way the space-time curvature operates for gravity. I refuse to believe that's a coincidence.

There's some underlying mathematical reality that lies at the foundation of both phenomena (mass and gravity.) So that's why they're connected.

Or that's what it looks like to me.

I haven't dug into gravity too much (relativity is way beyond undergraduate work, believe me), but Best Of has the right of it, I think.

As to the graviton, no, we have no proof of it yet. It's purely theoretical, and has many issues, as the other poster mentioned.

Could Higgs Boson particles be manipulated to decrease, say, a spacecraft's mass to allow it to get over the effect speeding up toward light speed has?

Uh... I doubt it?

The thing is, you'd have to inherently change the particles the craft is made of to get that result. Because mass is the result of the interaction of matter with the Higgs field. That means that, when you have a particle - say, an electron - interacting with the Higgs field, it's going to have a fixed mass due to that interaction, because the electron isn't changing.

As the spacecraft you'll be building will be made out of, you know, matter, the mass of all those components will be more or less fixed, as you can't get rid of particles without changing the ship itself.

The only way I could see to "lessen" the mass and allow more speed would be if we could somehow cancel out the Higgs field, in a local region... but I have no idea if that's even possible in the slightest. It sounds like science fiction, to my intuition, but that doesn't mean it's not theoretically possible. I just highly doubt that it is.

If there were a way to reduce the density of the higgs field it might be possible to counteract the increase in mass as an object gains velocity. Intuition tells me it gains mass by passing through more higgs bosons. Don't hold your breath for a way to do this.

For those who are confused as to what Director Cannon is talking about, the enabling device of the Mass Effect series lets you decrease the mass of an object (allowing for Casual Interstellar Travel) and increase it (making a railgun that spits out bullets the size of a grain of sand practical). At first blush, that sounds like what the Higgs Boson can do, so you can understand why everyone is a little giddy.

I'd again like to point out I've yet to take even a high school physics class. I'm going into this rather green.

I should point out that we might - maybe, possibly, MAYBE - be able to manipulate the Higgs Field. We do not know yet.

IF we can, we would, theoretically, be able to lower or increase the mass of matter in a local region. However, we would not be able to break the speed of light in any fashion. We may be able to lower mass enough that we can approach the speed of light - say, 0.99c, (where c is the speed of light), but we will not be able to surpass it.

So we may be able to get near light-speed travel at some point in the future, but faster-than-light travel is still, by all current physical understanding, impossible.

(Again; physics undergraduate student. I know enough to have at least a vague understanding of what I'm on about here. )

Yeah, I wasn't thinking this would be the magic FTL solution, but if manipulating a Higgs field could let us get up to a sizable percentage of the speed of light.

Yeah. I figured. But I wanted to point it out before anyone else tried to bring it up, as people keep using the phrase "mass effect..." which, in the games, implies FTL.

The issue with near-lightspeed travel is the amount of energy it takes to get there, which increases exponentially as you approach c. It is likely that manipulating the Higgs field to lower the mass equivalence, if such is even possible, would require an amount of energy comparable to that needed to accelerate a mass to the desired speed in the first place. Nature operates on the TAANSTAFL principle. Nothing happens for free, conservation of energy, yadda yadda.

edited 5th Jul '12 7:55:34 PM by Fighteer

Just out of curiosity I wanted to ask a question. So this Higgs Boson is what makes matter have mass correct? Now mass and such affects gravity from my limited physics understanding. Couldn't this be a pretty dangerous weapon if we could manipulate it?

That's a pretty big if there. I think being able to manipulate any form of matter (or energy) could be incredibly destructive or useful. However, saying that is very different from doing it. "Manipulate" is kind of vague in the first place. If we could "manipulate" electrons we could make all our enemies spontaneously combust by looking at them...

edited 5th Jul '12 8:23:56 PM by Clarste

By the way, I'm not talking anywhere in the near term. Centuries at the very least.

@Fighteer: I know. I was just pointing out that even if such things are possible, FTL is still impossible.

@Kostya: Depends on how cost-efficient manipulation is. It's a; probably a hundred or more years off from being possible, if it even is possible, and b; likely to take particle physics experiments on the scale of the LHC or so to do it. Not exactly man-portable weapons of war.

@Clarste: Everything we do is manipulating matter. If you shoot a bullet at someone, when the bullet deforms on impact, you're manipulating the bullet to kill someone. So, technically, we already manipulate matter.

Well, that was my point. It's so vague as to be useless.