Particle physics usually has a hard time competing with
politics and celebrity gossip for headlines, but the Higgs
boson has garnered some serious attention. That's
exactly what happened on July 4, 2012, though, when
scientists at CERN announced that they'd found a
particle that behaved the way they expect the Higgs
boson to behave. Maybe the famed boson's grand and
controversial nickname, the "God Particle," has kept
media outlets buzzing. Then again, the intriguing
possibility that the Higgs boson is responsible for all the
mass in the universe rather captures the imagination,
too. Or perhaps we're simply excited to learn more
about our world, and we know that if the Higgs boson
does exist, we'll unravel the mystery a little more.
In order to truly understand what the Higgs boson is,
however, we need to examine one of the most
prominent theories describing the way the cosmos
works: the standard model . The model comes to us by
way of particle physics , a field filled with physicists
dedicated to reducing our complicated universe to its
most basic building blocks. It's a challenge we've been
tackling for centuries, and we've made a lot of progress.
First we discovered atoms, then protons, neutrons and
electrons, and finally quarks and leptons (more on those
later). But the universe doesn't only contain matter; it
also contains forces that act upon that matter. The
standard model has given us more insight into the types
of matter and forces than perhaps any other theory we
have.
Here's the gist of the standard model, which was
developed in the early 1970s: Our entire universe is
made of 12 different matter particles and four forces
[source: European Organization for Nuclear Research ].
Among those 12 particles, you'll encounter six quarks
and six leptons. Quarks make up protons and neutrons,
while members of the lepton family include the electron
and the electron neutrino , its neutrally charged
counterpart. Scientists think that leptons and quarks are
indivisible; that you can't break them apart into smaller
particles. Along with all those particles, the standard
model also acknowledges four forces: gravity ,
electromagnetic, strong and weak.
As theories go, the standard model has been very
effective, aside from its failure to fit in gravity. Armed
with it, physicists have predicted the existence of
certain particles years before they were verified
empirically. Unfortunately, the model still has another
missing piece -- the Higgs boson. What is it, and why is
it necessary for the universe the standard model
describes to work? Let's find out.