This force is carried by the photon, and the W and Z bosons.īut there was a problem. They developed the basic equations of a unified theory which proposed that electricity, magnetism, light, and some types of radioactivity are all manifestations of a single force known as the electroweak force. In the 1970s, physicists realized that there are very close ties between the weak force and the electromagnetic force. When the scientific journal initially rejected Higgs' paper, he revised it with the significant addition that his theory predicted the existence of a heavy boson. You can think of the Higgs field this way: Push a ping-pong ball through the air and it moves almost without resistance, but push that same ping-pong ball through water, and it will be much harder to push. However, scientists don't think this will happen any time soon. It says that a quantum fluctuation could cause a vacuum "bubble" that will expand through space and destroy the universe. The theory of a Higgs boson doomsday has been around for a while. Scientists besides Hawking agree with this. He explained in a book of essays and talks called " Starmus," that the particle could one day cause the end of the universe as we know it. Not only had he lost his bet, but the discovery made him come to a very dire conclusion about the particle. When physicists found the particle in 2012, Hawking lost his bet and said that the discovery made physics less interesting. He actually made a $100 wager with physicist Gordon Kane that physicists wouldn't find the Higgs boson. Source: koto_feja/iStockįor some eminent scientists at the time, including the late, great, Stephen Hawking, the concept of a field imparting mass seemed ludicrous. Scientifically, mass is defined as the resistance offered by a body of matter to a change in speed or position on the application of force. What is the Higgs boson?īack in 1964, English physicist Peter Higgs submitted a paper to a scientific journal that contended that all of space is filled with a field, which came to be called the Higgs field, that imparts mass to objects. These are, in effect, the LEGO bricks of the universe! But, they wouldn't exist without the so-called Higgs boson. Needless to say, this was a big deal in the world of physics! Why this was such a big deal is that the Standard Model (more on that later) accounts for all 17 of the elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces that make up our universe. But, this idea got some serious actual support when the Higgs boson particle was found at CERN in 2012, finally proving that this field gives matter, well mass.
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