![]() ![]() One way to learn more about the way it works - and whether it truly is responsible for the mass of all the other elementary particles - is by observing the different ways the Higgs boson decays into other particles. In its own right, too, the Higgs boson is continuing to reveal more of its mysteries to scientists at CERN and elsewhere. It was the final piece of the Standard Model jigsaw, and it may lead scientists to an understanding of further mysteries - such as the nature of dark matter - that lie beyond it, according to Pete Wilton (opens in new tab) of Oxford University. "God particle" or not, the discovery of the Higgs boson was enormously significant. Outside the world of high-energy physics, the Higgs boson is often referred to by the evocative and catchy name of the "God particle." This was the title of a 1993 book on the subject by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi - chosen, the authors say, because the publisher wouldn't let them call it the "Goddamn Particle." Much as it's loved by the media, the "God particle" moniker is disliked by many scientists, according to CERN (opens in new tab). (Image credit: Shutterstock) (opens in new tab) The God particle? To discover the Higgs boson, physicists analyzed 30.6 million particle decays that took place in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. However, the two surviving physicists, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle," according to the Nobel Foundation (opens in new tab). Sadly, one of the three scientists behind the original prediction, Robert Brout, had died just over a year earlier. Almost 50 years after it was first proposed, the Higgs boson had finally been found. By July 4, 2012, there was no longer any doubt, and a formal announcement was made to great media fanfare. Fortunately, the LHC proved equal to the task, churning out an increasing number of measurements indicating something tantalizingly Higgs-like around 125 billion eV. ![]() When the LHC started operation in 2008, the only thing scientists knew for certain about the Higgs was that its mass had to be greater than 114 billion eV, according to CERN (opens in new tab) - otherwise it would have been found by the previous generation of particle accelerators. For example, the mass of a proton - the nucleus of a hydrogen atom - is 938 million eV. Physicists measure the mass of particles in units called electron volts (eV). When CERN built the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of its primary motivations was to find the Higgs boson. And its huge mass - by subatomic standards - meant that it could be created only in super-high energy collisions. For one thing, the Higgs boson was expected to be highly unstable, disintegrating into other particles in a tiny fraction of a second, according to physicist Brian Greene (opens in new tab) writing for Smithsonian Magazine. ![]() Higgs' theory was an elegant explanation for the mass of elementary particles, but was it correct? The most obvious way to verify it was to observe a Higgs boson, but that was never going to be easy. The mechanism they proposed involves an invisible but all-pervading field, later dubbed the "Higgs field." It is through interactions with this field that elementary particles acquire their mass. In the 1960s, theoretical physicists, including Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, came up with a possible answer, according to CERN (opens in new tab), the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The question is: How do they get their mass? The remaining 1% of the mass, however, is intrinsic to those elementary particles. Some 99% of the mass of any real-world object, such as a human body, comes from the binding energy holding elementary particles together inside atoms. Since c is just a constant - the speed of light - then what that equation tells us is that, except for a change of measurement units, energy and mass are the same thing. It's the m in Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2, where E is energy. One of the most basic properties of matter is "mass" - a quantity that determines how much resistance an object offers when a force is applied to it, according to the U.S.
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