The Higgs Boson and Its Discovery 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. Today, researchers work­ing at CERN (which oper­ates the LHC) announced that they think they’ve final­ly found it. In case you’re look­ing for a primer on The God Par­ti­cle, we’re bring­ing back a video we first post­ed in April. 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 were used to con­firm it.

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Comments (9)
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  • Tamara says:

    Enough with the dumb­ing-down of sci­ence! Do intel­li­gent adults real­ly need ani­ma­tion to help us ‘get’ this stuff?

  • bren says:

    If you’re real­ly an intel­li­gent adult, you should realise that dif­fer­ent peo­ple learn in dif­fer­ent ways. I am heav­i­ly inter­est­ed in this stuff but i strug­gle with the tech­ni­cal side of things and also with the maths. I’m a design­er not a sci­en­tist — so a sim­ple straight­for­ward visu­al expla­na­tion gets me where i need to be. Its arro­gance like yours which does more harm to the pub­lic under­stand­ing of sci­ence than good.

  • Yes, I need visu­als. I have brain injuries. AND I have an above aver­age IQ. I can NOT retain math­e­mat­ics. I retain/comprehend spo­ken lan­guage & visu­als. Excuse the rest of us for not think­ing like you do, since you are obvi­ous­ly the stan­dard by which every­body else SHOULD live. No WONDER the mobs are mass­ing to burn the library of Alexan­dria again! As Sagan said, “there was nobody there to stop them.” Ivory tow­er snob. Thanks for mak­ing this ani­ma­tion. It REALLY helped. Now, do rel­a­tiv­i­ty and string the­o­ry, please.

  • James says:

    Ani­ma­tion is not the equiv­a­lent of dumb­ing-down. In this case, I agree that it sim­pli­fies the con­cept, but your com­ment makes it sound like ani­ma­tion is for igno­rant peo­ple when it serves many valid func­tions for nar­ra­tive or expos­i­to­ry mat­ters. So please, leave the mis­con­cep­tions aside.

  • OmTamil says:

    While recent­ly con­firmed exis­tence of the Hig­gs boson or “God par­ti­cle” may be the new dis­cov­ery in the mod­ern physics, Ancient Tamil’s dis­cov­ered the knowl­edge thou­sands of years ago through Sai­va Sid­dhan­tham.
    Read more here : http://omtamil.com/home/en/higgs-boson-particle-god-particle-in-tamil-saiva-siddhantham/

  • Nice„ let me to share this post­ing
    thank you

  • Kelle says:

    Excel­lent, thank you so very much. I learn through hear­ing. Once some­thing is heard its imme­di­ate­ly under­stood. Bil­lions of peo­ple bil­lions way to learn. A fool would know this.

  • Chrissy says:

    Gee Tama­ra, did you make your­self feel all big and bad there? Sor­ry not every­one is an Ein­stein like you! How­ev­er, if you were tru­ly an intel­li­gent adult you would know about “left brained” peo­ple vs “right brained” peo­ple and you would know there are visu­al, audio, and kinestet­ic learn­ers. Every­body should be able to enjoy and under­stand sci­ence if they to. What a hor­ri­ble com­ment to make!

  • sci is nt a fun hw dare r u kelle

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