Link Of The Week: The Higgs Boson

David Stafford
Aug 25, 2017 · 1 min read

PhD comics has a great nontechnical explanation of Higgs Boson! It also details why we care about it and how we went about finding it.

Mathpages.com has a great technical discussion of the Higgs Boson as well. In fact www.mathpages.com has a lot of interesting articles on math and physics. You should check it out!

The mathpages article makes the point that all mass comes from energy. Einstein’s famous E=mc² implies that any confinement of energy has mass. When you heat up a brick or charge a cell phone they get heavier. Conversely, a mole of ice cube weighs less than a mole of water. If you do the accounting, you’ll find that most of the mass around us comes from the binding energy of quarks inside the protons and neutrons inside our atoms.

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, we now know that all of the particles in the universe have zero intrinsic mass and all observed mass comes from field interactions that confine energy. We finally know what stuff is and that’s kinda cool.

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David Stafford

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I’m a secular humanist, nerd, and technocrat living in the Bay Area. Interests include: mathematics, computer science and humans.

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