RE: What were you doing on July 4th 2012? - Happy Higgs boson discovery day!
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I was probably playing a chess tournament back then! But I heard the news. I learned it was received with skepticism for a while. The explanation behind the behavior of this bosom is intuitive to me.
By the way, is there any application of the existence of the Higgs Boson? Have physicists derived new theories and made new discoveries based on the Higgs Boson in particular? Please explain it to me in a slightly more simplified way, haha.
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In fact, it was clear (at least to many physicists) that a new particle had been discovered. However, it was less clear that it was a Higgs boson, and even less clear that it was the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. Today, 10 years later, the picture is much clearer. This being said, it is still unclear that the particle that has been discovered is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (with the determiner 'the').
Not at all. At least not yet (although I am quite confident that there will be no application of this discovery before a while).
If we want to stretch it a bit, we can claim that we had to develop new technologies to find it, and those technologies were given for free to society. Moreover, we have also trained hundreds of young fellows to solve hard problems, which is a skill that is in high demand in the industry and the private sector.
As mentioned in the blog, Higgsless theories are now ruled out. Moreover, other theories are more constrained. Is this answer satisfactory? :)
Cheers, and thanks for the engagement!
Yes, I know that the confirmation of the Higgs boson increases our understanding of the workings of nature. My question was more about whether it's a game changer, like we're closer to quantum gravity theory or something. Maybe someday we will be able to envision a technology that exploits the Higgs Boson in particular in the future.
The Higgs boson provides the last missing particle of the Standard Model, and its existence thus confirms several of the conceptual limitations of the Standard Model. Therefore, the fact that we discovered the Higgs boson only confirmed that there is something on the way to new phenomena in particle physics.
At the moment, it is however too early to be allowed to claim whether the Higgs boson is a portal to anything new.
Maybe. This is always something impossible to predict. We can definitely check out general relativity and GPS systems for an existing example along these lines.
Interesting. BTW, I thought the graviton is also part of that model but that hasn't been found yet. It's a coincidence I was talking about it yesterday.
The graviton is not part of the Standard Model, in the same way that gravity is not part of it. There are two reasons behind this.
For the second reason, the direct observation of a graviton is thus not something we could do today.
I hope this clarifies.