Excited About Higgs Excitations


When was the last time an obscure bit of particle physics flashed into popular culture? Oh yeah, the Large Hadron Collider, with all the talk of God particles and Armageddon. Hence was surprised to find "Higgs excitation" bubbling up on Google trends. A new discovery, perhaps? Nah... just a geeky comic strip!

But if you're not mathematically challenged then XKCD has some funny cartoons. Rather hit and miss, but then so is a Higgs boson.

Just as a little info-bite, when physicists refer to the Higgs boson as being a massive particle they do not mean that it is huge in size, but rather that it has mass, or rather rest-mass. This is in contrast to, say, a photon of light which has no rest-mass and exists only in motion. In a very loose analogy this is somewhat like a ball being carried away by the wind. The wind only exists in motion - when it stops it disappears. But the ball, which is massive, still exists when it stops moving. Like I said, a loose analogy!

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