Tag Archives: Higgs mechanism

Is the Higgs boson doing its job?

At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how they interact, and why the … Continue reading

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Peter Higgs, self-promoter

I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the sixth season, shows … Continue reading

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Tom Kibble (1932-2016)

Kibble was one of the six theorists who, in 1964, came up with the ABEGHHK’tH mechanism to explain how gauge bosons acquired mass. Continue reading

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“Maybe the Higgs boson is fictitious!”

That’s an intriguing and, as he remarks, plausible speculation by the noted condensed-matter physicist Philip Warren Anderson. It appears in a short article penned by him in Nature Physics on January 26, in which he discusses how the Higgs mechanism as in … Continue reading

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Would you just calm down about the Bose in the boson?

July, 2012 – A Higgs boson-like entity is spotted at the Large Hadron Collider. Indians decry the lack of celebration of S.N. Bose, the Bengali physicist whom bosons are named for. January, 2013 – The particle found at the LHC is confirmed … Continue reading

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The travails of science communication

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of science communication, at least so far as I’ve noticed. Every once in a while, there comes along a concept that is gaining in research traction worldwide but is quite tricky to explain … Continue reading

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Signs of a slowdown

The way ahead for particle physics seems dully lit after CERN’s fourth-of-July firecracker. The Higgs announcement got everyone in the physics community excited – and spurred a frenzied submission of pre-prints all rushing to explain the particle’s properties. However, that … Continue reading

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The philosophies in physics

As a big week for physics comes up–a July 4 update by CERN on the search for the Higgs boson followed by ICHEP ’12 at Melbourne–I feel really anxious as a small-time proto-journalist and particle-physics-enthusiast. If CERN announces the discovery … Continue reading

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