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Comment by iwwr | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to explain the Higgs mechanism to a lay computer scientist?

Yeah -- I've seen it described like this before:

Basically, Higgs boson particles are like paparazzi (or fans) around a celebrity (the observable matter that we already know about).

The Higgs boson particles, by affixing onto the celebrity, make their movement slower/harder -- i.e. they give the celebrity mass/substance.

That's the theory, anyway :)

So there's a "Higgs field" that all objects move through and those objects which have inertial mass are affected by this field? And inertial mass is the result of interchanges of the force carriers (higgs particle) between objects with inertial mass?

Inertial mass is ubiquitous. Why does it take so much power to make the Higgs boson detectable? How _do_ you detect it?

Is the Higgs boson one of the hypotheses of Newton's famous phrase "Hypotheses non fingo."?

To make the Higgs detectable means making a sufficiently high concentration of energy to make a Higgs particle. That concentration of energy is dependent on the mass of the particle (and hence energy by e=mc^2). The Higgs boson is theorized to exist at relatively high mass, hence making it difficult to create. This higgs particle will decay into a shower of other particles and these particles will decay, and all these remnant are detected and analyzed to recreate the original event. So no, Higgs is quite well understood and we expect to find it for strong reasons.

But mass is everywhere, so aren't there Higgs bosons everywhere too?

If so, what is the difference between detecting the Higgs boson via the presence of mass (i.e., "These particles have mass so there must be one or more Higgs boson nearby) versus detecting the Higgs boson as a separate particle?

The excitation of the higgs field corresponding to higgs boson's like we are looking for at LHC are 'manifested' so to speak. The higgs that cause mass are virtual carrier particles that exist in a state of quantum in betweenness. Photons, for example are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. They are not the same, however, as the photons transmitted to your eye. So you don't see photons being traded between magnets when you hold them together, but can see the photons bouncing off the magnets from the sun. In the same way we can't see the higgs carrier particles, but can see (hopefully) the higgs bosons at LHC.

What is the Higgs boson and why is it important to science?:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/91482-what-is-the-higgs-b...

Higgs boson, one page explanations: http://www.phy.uct.ac.za/courses/phy400w/particle/higgs.htm

1. The Higgs Mechanism

Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

When a drunk smelly hobo enters the room the members engage a cloaking device, so the hobo is able to accelerate to max speed immediately. The hobo has no higgs boson to attract the members, the prime minister does. The higgs field is the members, the hobo is the photons, the minister is the neutron. The LHC is finds out why the members gather around the minister.

I believe that explanation was created to help William Waldegrave, the UK Science Minister at the time, understand the point of spending money on CERN:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Waldegrave,_Baron_Walde...

The Prime Minister in question was, of course, Thatcher.

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