Saturday, October 09, 2004
The Higgs boson in one page
The property of mass is clearly an important part of physics. But even as physicists have delved further and further into the fabric of our reality they haven’t yet been able to show how the various particles they have discovered acquire mass. In order for the acquisition of mass to square with their most accurate models for the rest of reality there needs to exist a thus far undiscovered particle called the Higgs boson that gives other particles their mass. All this, like much of modern physics, ranges from the counter intuitive (after all we consider mass an intrinsic property of matter) to the incomprehensible for the layman so in 1993 the then UK Minister of Science, William Waldegrave, asked several physicists to answer in one page the following question