The Higgs Boson Particle has been found!

I am not sure how many of you guys are Physicist enthusiasts but I can hardly contain my excitement this is potentially the biggest day in physics history, just wanted to get your guy's opinion or whether you care at all

Great day for physics, undoubtedly.

Not so sure it stacks up with Newton though, pound for pound...

What is the Higgs Boson particle, and what does it have to do with?

The next great (observable) step in discovering what the heck is going on in the universe.

A Higgs boson walks into a church, according to one joke which did the rounds.

"We don't allow Higgs bosons in here!" shouts the priest.

"But without me, how can you have mass?" asks the particle.

The Higgs Boson is a quick fix, a patch if you will, to the fundamental flaws in our way of explaining the universe.

I am going to bet that the way it was found was by inference and induction..

In laymen's terms as best as I can describe it it is what we think gives particles their mass.

Don't even get me started on that guy.  He is amazing and what he did in his time will never ever be matched.

Higgs Boson particle found.

What it means:

The Higgs boson (particle) gives mass to matter.
According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

The god particle is the link between energy and mass.  It is why energy can be weighed and why energy and mass are interchangeable, and it is present in everything.  Big discovery.

The excitement is great and all, but for god's sake stop calling it the god particle.

This all pisses Tom Cruise off.

Pretty sure I even read somewhere that it was supposed to be the particle that proved whether GOD existed or not...

Pretty sure it falls a little short of proving that. I heard it's discovery was supposed to prove that vampires are more powerful than unicorns.

That's the problem. It has nothing whatsoever to do with that, it's just the last integral piece of the Standard Model of particle physics to be observed. The "God Particle" nonsense is pure, unadulterated silliness.

It's an important particle, because according to the theory, interactions with it are what give mass to the other particles. It was hard to find because the theory had an unconstrained parameter: the mass of the Higgs. We've known for a long time it had to be massive, since otherwise it would have been found long ago, but until recently there wasn't really any particularly useful upper bound on that mass. It was not a forgone conclusion that even the LHC would find it.

Without the Higgs, we'd have a significant hole in our understanding of particle physics. This would be a big problem because the Standard Model is ridiculously accurate. It has made predictions that agree with later measurements to something absurd like 15 digits of precision. It's so good that it'd be crazy (but possible) for this part to be wrong. In some ways, it'd have been more exciting if it hadn't been found, because there'd be an obvious mystery to attack.

It's still premature to say that this mystery is solved, however. The results announced this week tell us that a new particle has been found, and it behaves as the Higgs boson is expected to behave in a few situations. There are other properties of the particle that need to be examined to see if it has all the expected properties that the Higgs boson should have: it's still a serious possibility that the theory was only approximately correct, and the new particle is not exactly a Higgs boson.

What you may notice from the above is that none of it has anything to do with whether God exists. The only thing that any of this would tell us about God is that, if he exists, he's very organized in his approach to the Universe, and maybe a bit of a math nerd. Even that's a reach, though, because maybe He just likes toying with us.