Higgs-like discovery from the inside | Jon Butterworth | Life & Physics
Inventing a whole-universe-filling-field to make your maths come out right is quite extreme. But it looks like it might just have worked.We've all talked before about rumours, about hints, about projections and the hows and whys. But finally we have, beyond reasonable doubt, discovered something fundamentally new.To recap: at the Large Hadron Collider we collide protons together head on. Since E=mc2 and we have a lot of E (Energy), this means we can produce new, heavy particles, even if they have a lot of m (mass). c in there is the speed of light, which is a big number.Pretty much anything could in principle turn up, since no one did this before. But one thing - the Higgs boson - had to turn up, or our understanding of fundamental physics was incomplete. Well, let's be frank, wrong.We know that the origin of mass occurs at LHC energies. We know this...
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