Friday, July 20, 2012

The Higgs Boson, AKA the God Particle, Explained with Animation



Yeah, that clears it all up for me. Now I understand perfectly. Or not. The animation does help, though. I'm no brain surgeon but I have taken quite a bit of college calculus, chemistry and calculus-based physics. I've read Brian Greene and Feynman. I'm not a complete moron, but still it is a little tough to picture things that make electrons look huge in comparison.

3 comments:

wstachour said...

It's probably as close as I'll ever get to understanding this business. Partly, it's because I think the whole realm is really outside the grasp of a human mind: we're primates evolved to deal with middle temperatures, short distances, small numbers as the stuff of survival. THIS goes way beyond that, into the counter-intuitive.

All credit to our species--or a small segment of it--that can pursue something like this for which the payoff is distant and uncertain. Fascinating.

dbackdad said...

Yes, thank goodness that someone has the capacity to understand it and that at least some governments have the foresight to fund it. I really think that it is in this realm that most of the "next big things" will be. Meaning ... much faster space travel, clean energy, a better understanding of our universe, etc.

wstachour said...

It's hard to wrap our heads around the notion that what is firmly known now was once as barely-comprehensible--or simply INcomprehensible to most of us--as this stuff is now. I just can't conceive that this will all make perfect sense one day.

And maybe it won't. Relativity is very well understood and much-verified by the scientific community, but the general public hasn't the first clue (come to think of it, we're collectively clueless about most science).

Makes you wonder how society will advance when the leading edge is so far beyond the normal person's grasp.