Mass

OK, buckle in because it's about to get weird. We're going to a place where we measure mass in voltage, where scientists hunt a mysterious particle that has more mass than the particle it makes up and which everyone calls by a name that is pretty much the complete opposite of the name a book author wanted to use. So be vewy, vewy quiet...we'we hunting bosons!

Specifically we're hunting the Higgs boson or Higgs particle, the subatomic particle that gives all other particles mass. Ol' Professor Higgs' elusive namesake has been referred to before in these spaces, here. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have put off creating a black hole that would destroy the world long enough to narrow down the places where they think the Higgs boson could be. And by places, of course, I mean "ranges of mass," because obviously the darn things are everywhere if they exist.

The LHC folks smash things together at immense speeds because, well, why wouldn't you if you could and because the intense energy such collisions create often helps them see things that in normal conditions are pretty tough to see. Most of the time matter is pretty sedate, just rumbling along in a coherent and connected fashion doing whatever it does depending on what it's a part of. But when you increase the amount of energy in the matter in some fashion -- say, by holding a lit match to the seat of its pants -- then it begins to give off energy and act in a much different manner than when it's not energized. Put enough energy into it and you can find out all kinds of things you never could before. Hence the high-speed collisions at the LHC and the hunt for the Higgs boson.

LHC scientists believe that if the Higgs particle really exists, its mass is somewhere between 114.4 and 131 "gigaelectronvolts" or GeV. A gigaelectronvolt is one billion electron volts, and an electron volt is the amount of energy gained by a single electron when its energy is shifted one volt. So although "gigaelectronvolt" sounds like a massive amount of energy, it might be helpful to remember these are very very small things being considered here. A thousand GeV is a "teraelectronvolt" or TeV, and one TeV is the energy released when a mosquito slams into something at full speed.

In fact, these things are so small that their mass has to be measured in voltages. When we talk about the mass of larger objects, we can use the same terms we use to talk about their weight, even though those are not the same things. Mass is always the same while weight depends on gravity. But subatomic particles are so small that the only kinds of instruments that can detect their mass measure energy and so we use terms like GeV and TeV to do so.

Anyway, the LHC scientists figure the Higgs boson has a mass between 114.4 and 131 GeV. A regular proton has a mass of 1 GeV. Yes, this means that the particle which actually gives the proton its mass has more mass than the particle it gives it to, but protons and other particles aren't made up of a bunch of Higgs bosons. Rather, the Higgs boson creates the Higgs effect, which is what does give mass to the others.

Finding this little fella could really change a lot of things, like maybe even allowing near direct creation of energy from mass without all the little pesky details like accelerating it to the speed of light squared. There's really no telling.

But it wouldn't fix everything, which is one reason why scientists -- including Higgs -- get annoyed when people call the Higgs boson the "God particle." The title comes from Leon Lederman's book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? but Lederman had wanted to call it The God***n Particle because physicists like himself had spent so much frustrating time trying to find it.

The nickname also annoys the scientists because finding the Higgs boson would answer plenty of questions but leave plenty more. Highly physicist-sounding things like quantum chromodynamics, electroweak interaction with gravity and so on would remain unaffected by proof of the Higgs boson's presence. In other words, finding the Higgs boson will be something very very cool indeed, but it will not be the same as finding God.

Which means I'm not out of a job yet.