Large Hadron Collider was worth it?!

Wow! I'm back. This is truly shocking even to myself, I mean when was my last post?! Eras ago, I know. I mean even Blogger changed since then, it also managed to delete all of the pictures I ever uploaded. Sorry for my long absence.

Well, as wonderful as my glorious return is - the more rattling recent event is the discovery of the Higgs Boson! Something so small is having such a ripple effect among the scientific and the non-scientific communities alike. Don't forget the over-stimulated social media as well. No, it does not "cancel out physics", as some may believe, but it does open new horizons and while solidifying past theories, it is a big step into the bright future of us finally understanding where the beep do we live, or so what is the universe?

On top of that, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which took 30 years to build using $6.4 US dollars of financing finally fulfilled its purpose. A speculative investment, but knowledge is power and science is progress. I don't know where I got my recent manner to speak in general-sounding not-really-that-meaningful pseudo-deep statements, a nasty habit of shallow minds. But LHC was indeed worth it! The Higgs Boson is important, and to those who are still lagging behind the curve in understanding why - here is a brief point-form explanation:

• There are only 4 forces in the universe ("nuclear strong force", "nuclear weak force", "gravity", "electromagnetism"). 
• Fields, such as the electromagnetic field, are not like a secluded, defined, invisible areas in which the forces (ex. electromagnetism) operates. It is more like a fog of virtual photons which radiates from the point source of the field. 
• All 4 forces are carried by these virtual particles, called virtual because they exist only for a limited time and space & are in a way abstractions that cannot be described in terms of real particles but are used to represent carriers of force. These particles are called Gauge bosons. 
• We've seen all of them except for the graviton - the boson of gravity. 
• All forces have a point source from which the bosons radiate. 

That, is an essential explanation of what is happening in the universe. From there we can theorize about why things act the way they do, have the properties they have, where energy comes from etc. One question though could not be answered through this model - why does matter have mass? 

• There are some particles with very small mass, like electrons, other particles with huge amounts of mass - what makes them different? Size - no, they are all of the same size-less no-volume size! 
• In the 1960's, a number of theorists including Higgs theorized that there is a special field which permeates the entire universe evenly, not from a point source like the four source fields. An evenly distributed fog of force carriers which some particles interact more with than others. 
• So a top quark, with 350000x more mass than an electron, just interacts with this permeating field more than the electron. Photons (light particles) don't interact with it at all, which is why they are always flying around with the speed of light. If there would be no mass then everything else would be flying with the speed of light, and not in a good superman way. 
• A simpler way to represent it is that a real particle passing through the Higgs field (which is everywhere) gets infused with mass as certain Higgs field particles attach themselves to it.
• The Higgs boson is not the type of particle that attaches itself to other particles to give them mass, but it is the particle which we can theoretically observe to verify the existence of the Higgs field. 

So by slamming particles together with sufficient energy (and mass = energy), we have excited the Higgs field enough to verify the existence of the Higgs boson & further prove out hypothesis of why matter has mass. 

Did I say a brief explanation? HA I LIED! But I hope it cleared things up a bit :)

Confirming a 50 year old theory may not be as fun as those other news from LHC back in the day shaking Einstein's theories (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/09/110923-neutrinos-speed-of-light-particles-cern-physics-einstein-science/) - what happened to that by the way? But it does matter either way. Here is the part where I realize that it is 1am, this text is already very long, so I'll instead refer you to another long text for all you reading-lovers where CNN popularly explains WHY this discovery is important. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/07/04/f-god-particle-higgs-boson.html They haven't paid me for this advertisement. 

As for the moniker of "god particle" assigned to the Higgs boson, that probably refers to the importance we assign to matter having mass as something necessary for existance... I guess flying all over the universe in a deconstructed separate-particles state only sounds fun before you start imaging it :/ Oh well. Goodnight everyone :)