Apparently, we've all been living in the Higgs Field. This week it has been proven beyond the shadow of five sigmas. That's the kind of knowledge I prefer - I can take my time and absorb it, it's not going to shimmy away or change its stripes.
And yet now the Higgs throws us the long anticipated curveball, extending the chart of subatomic particles rather as the periodic table kept marching on through our lifetimes. The Higgs is now sticking out there making all of the previous standard model graphics out of date and breaking their symmetry.
So now what? The Higgs boson (and what letter shall it get?) now shows why fermions have mass, but it is not the graviton. So that search will have to continue. We understand that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but.. if the universe is not moving does that make it have infinite mass? And why exactly does every field have a particle? Well, those are physics questions and they are interminable.
There doesn't seem to be any immediate practical benefit from this new confirmation as far as I can see. The Higgs only acts, apparently, on these fermions and only at Plank lengths. And there has to be further study on exactly what this boson does when it decays. Making it show up has taken lots of energy, so now they're going to continue to explode atoms and see how the boson goes on.
I'm even further intrigued by quantum confinement which is the theory that explains why three quarks that weigh only 8GeV when separated, weigh more than 50 times that when squeezed into a the tight space of a neutron. Quantum mechanics are frightfully non-intuitive.
What has all of this made you (re)consider?
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