The Higgs Boson, AKA the God Particle, Explained with Animation

Ever since the Large Hadron Col­lid­er (LHC) went online in 2008, physi­cists have been con­duct­ing exper­i­ments, hop­ing to final­ly prove or dis­prove the exis­tence of The God Par­ti­cle, oth­er­wise known as the Hig­gs Boson. CERN (which oper­ates the LHC) gives this basic intro­duc­tion to the the­o­rized par­ti­cle:

A major break­through in par­ti­cle physics came in the 1970s when physi­cists real­ized that there are very close ties between two of the four fun­da­men­tal forces – name­ly, the weak force and the elec­tro­mag­net­ic force. The two forces can be described with­in the same the­o­ry, which forms the basis of the Stan­dard Mod­el. This ‘uni­fi­ca­tion’ implies that elec­tric­i­ty, mag­net­ism, light and some types of radioac­tiv­i­ty are all man­i­fes­ta­tions of a sin­gle under­ly­ing force called, unsur­pris­ing­ly, the elec­troweak force. But in order for this uni­fi­ca­tion to work math­e­mat­i­cal­ly, it requires that the force-car­ry­ing par­ti­cles have no mass. We know from exper­i­ments that this is not true, so physi­cists Peter Hig­gs, Robert Brout and François Englert came up with a solu­tion to solve this conun­drum.

They sug­gest­ed that all par­ti­cles had no mass just after the Big Bang. As the Uni­verse cooled and the tem­per­a­ture fell below a crit­i­cal val­ue, an invis­i­ble force field called the ‘Hig­gs field’ was formed togeth­er with the asso­ci­at­ed ‘Hig­gs boson’. The field pre­vails through­out the cos­mos: any par­ti­cles that inter­act with it are giv­en a mass via the Hig­gs boson. The more they inter­act, the heav­ier they become, where­as par­ti­cles that nev­er inter­act are left with no mass at all.

That quick state­ment sets the stage for watch­ing the video above. Here we have Daniel White­son, a physics pro­fes­sor at UC Irvine, giv­ing us a fuller expla­na­tion of the Hig­gs Boson, mer­ci­ful­ly using ani­ma­tion to demys­ti­fy the the­o­ry and the LHC exper­i­ments that may con­firm it soon­er or lat­er. H/T Metafil­ter

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