Is the Higgs boson doing its job?
At the heart of particle physics lies the Standard Model, a theory that has stood for nearly half a century as the best description of the subatomic realm. It tells us what particles exist, how they i…
Higgs mechanism
8 posts
Peter Higgs, self-promoter
I was randomly rewatching The Big Bang Theory on Netflix today when I spotted this gem: Okay, maybe less a gem and more a shiny stone, but still. The screenshot, taken from the third episode of the s…
Tom Kibble (1932-2016)
Kibble was one of the six theorists who, in 1964, came up with the ABEGHHK'tH mechanism to explain how gauge bosons acquired mass.…
"Maybe the Higgs boson is fictitious!"
That's an intriguing and, as he remarks, plausible speculation by the noted condensed-matter physicist Philip Warren Anderson. It appears in a short article penned by him in Nature Physics on Janu…
Would you just calm down about the Bose in the boson?
July, 2012 - A Higgs boson-like entity is spotted at the Large Hadron Collider. Indians decry the lack of celebration of S.N. Bose, the Bengali physicist whom bosons are named for. January, 2013 - Th…
The travails of science communication
There's an interesting phenomenon in the world of science communication, at least so far as I've noticed. Every once in a while, there comes along a concept that is gaining in research tractio…
Signs of a slowdown
The way ahead for particle physics seems dully lit after CERN's fourth-of-July firecracker. The Higgs announcement got everyone in the physics community excited - and spurred a frenzied submission…
The philosophies in physics
As a big week for physics comes up–a July 4 update by CERN on the search for the Higgs boson followed by ICHEP '12 at Melbourne–I feel really anxious as a small-time proto-journalist and particle-…