Higgs Boson Explained Graphically

There is a good chance you have heard about the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012, aka The God Particle, an elementary particle that gives other particles their mass.  This was heralded as (so far) the ultimate discovery by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest ever particle collider built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland.  It provides strong evidence that the Standard Model of particle physics, a somewhat simplified theory of subatomic physics, is correct, or at least not completely wrong.  This is good for proponents of the Standard Model, because while the Higgs Boson had been predicted to exist in 1964, it had not been detected by various particle colliders until last year, concerning scientists that the particle may not exist at all.

The Higgs Boson has made another trip into the headlines this week with the announcement that Francois Englert and Peter Higgs have won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics for their independent predictions of the existence of the Higgs.  This was of course expected, but is a bit controversial, because while multiple scientists made similar predictions about a subatomic particle that gives other particles mass all around the same time, the Nobel Prize is only allowed to be awarded to at most three people, and cannot be awarded posthumously.  That is not even counting the hundreds of scientists involved in actually detecting the Higgs, both successfully at the LHC, and unsuccessfully at other particle colliders in years past.  Nonetheless, rules are rules, and the Nobel Committee picked the two winners they thought were the most deserving.

Higgs Boson For the Masses

All this is well and good, but for the layperson, the idea of the Higgs Boson is just more confusing science that they have no hope of applying to their everyday lives.  Physicists talking of bosons, and Higgs Fields, and multi-billion dollar particle colliders are just a bunch of out of touch scientists completely ungrounded by reality.  The concept of all these subatomic particles is, to them, just incomprehensible nonsense that they have no hope of understanding.

Well this is not true at all.  I'll be honest and say that even I am not familiar with the details of the theories and mathematics behind the Higgs Boson or the Standard Model, but the basic premise is actually not that difficult to understand at all.  It is really just a theory that tries to explain why particles have mass.  This idea seems weird to many people, as we take the idea of mass for granted, but when prompted for a reason why protons, neutrons, and electrons have mass, they are left befuddled.  The Higgs Boson is a subatomic particle that, sort of like a magnet, creates a field that particles travelling through interact with, causing them to change their direction of motion.  To help picture this, imagine how a crappy refrigerator magnet interacts less intensely with the refrigerator door, while a strong magnet like you would find in a computer hard drive, interacts much more strongly.

What is the Higgs graphic from The New York Times

Okay, so that attempt at an explanation is probably not the best, especially since you still have to try and imagine what I am talking about.  Lets ignore that and use a visual means of explaining the Higgs Boson, an animated comic called What is the Higgs, created by Nigel Holmes, Jonathan Corum, Alicia DeSantis, Xaquín G.V. and Josh Williams over at The New York Times.  This is a really simple, visual explanation of the Higgs, that I think does more to explain what the Higgs Boson is than any number of pages of text possibly could.  It does nothing to explain the physics behind the Higgs, but if you are baffled by all this Higgs Boson talk, at least now you can have some idea of what people are talking about.