Is the Higgs Boson useful?

00:00:05
Speaker 1: It's very natural in physics to describe the unknown in terms of the known, and so we understand like grains of sand and tiny rocks and this stuff. So when we think of particles, we like to think of them as tiny little balls of stuff. But they're not balls of stuff because they have no space to them. So then if they don't have space to them, how can they have stuff to them? Because we think of mass is being stuff. Right, Like, I'm made up of all the particles in me, and I have mass because of all those particles having mass, I'm like the sum of all those particles. I am Jorge, and I'm Daniel. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge. Explained the universe. Explain the universe. The universe. Explain the universe, the whole universe. People. That's the topic of this podcast today. We're gonna be asking the question what is the Higgs boson? What is the Higgs boson? After all? Yeah, it turns out it's a really important particle, right, Daniel, that's right. It cost US ten billion dollars to build the LHC and find the Higgs boson. Good thing, we found it. A good thing. We found it. And actually I was kind of disappointed when we found it, but we can get into that later. Um, But the Higgs boson is a big discovery. Yeah, and it's very important because it's it's like what keeps everything together. We wouldn't be here without the Higgs boson, that's right. We wouldn't be here without photons or ws or z's or Higgs boson. It all comes together in the beautiful symphony of particles that make up our universe. Right. But it's sort of the most recently discovered particle and in lots of ways, the weirdest. So we thought it'd be fun to talk about and actually break it down, like what is the Higgs boson? After all? But before we jump into it, Um, I thought i'd be cool to talk about how this is. The Higgs boson is actually sort of how we started working together. That's right. That was our first date. Right, let's talk about the Higgs boson. That's right. We met on physics. Tender, physics plus cartoonists tender. No, but you're right, it's unusual for physicists and cartoonists to spend this much time talking about science, So let's tell them how that started. Yeah. So I'm a cartoonist. I draw something called PhD comics, and I've been doing that for a long time on the Internet, and then one day I just get this email from this physicist at the University of California at Irvine saying, hey, jor hey, I would like to pay you too and commission you to draw some comics about the Higgs boson. And is that the first time a physicists had ever cold emailed you? That was the first time a physicist has offered to pay me, to be honest, So I was like, what you want to pay me? What is that about? But I thought was that was pretty cool. It seemed like it's kind of something I was needing. And you know, I had been seeing a lot of the buzz about the Higgs boson and the search for the Higgs boson a few years ago, and so I was really intrigued about about what it was. I wanted to learn more about it, and so I said, yeah, let's let's make something that explains what the Higgs boson is. Yeah, and I've been reading all the buzz about the Higgs boson and I thought, man, this is all buzz and no reality. You know, there's so much writing about the Higgs boson. That's just like throws together a bunch of important sounding words, which doesn't actually explain it. And right, I felt like there was this gap where we weren't really digging into it and communicating with the public what it was actually like. And I was hoping, you know, something visual would work. Yeah, it's like people are sort of afraid of getting too far into it, right, Like nobody wanted to touch kind of the serious mechanics and how it was, how it was, how you guys were looking for it. Yeah, and a lot of it was sort of poetic writing. You know, there's things like in the New York Times when they say that scientists have revealed the deepest layer of reality humans have ever probed, and like, I mean, this is my field. I don't even know what that means, Like what like where what is that guy smoking? And where can I get some You're like poetry? So you're actually one of the scientists who worked on Like you're you're like one of the one a couple of thousand physicists that worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. That's right, Yeah, there's several thousand of us all collaborating at this collider and the detectors surrounding the collision points, and we all work together to make this project happen, all right, So you reach out to me, and so we we created this video called the Higgs Boson explained. The Higgs theory starts with this. Imagine a field that for me, it's the entire universe, and every particle UH feels this field is affected by this field in different amounts. So some particles are really slowed down by interaction to this field, like you know, swimming through molasses, and other particles hardly feel it. So the ones that hardly feel it, they have a small mass. The ones that are really affected by the couple strongly to this field are slowed down a lot. They have large mass. So you've turned the question of why do particles have different masses into a different question why do particles feel the Higgs field differently? But there is one manifestation of the field is the existence of this particle. Yeah, that's right. You were at CERN and we sat down to the cafeteria and just talked about physics for hours and hours, and you recorded it, and it recorded like hours of conversation then edited down to a few minutes to make me sound really sharp. Thanks thanks for that, by the way, I was trying to make you sound poltic. Um. So yeah. So then we put it out there and it was super popular, and then they discovered the Higgs boson actually, and then the video went viral, like millions and millions of people saw this video and um, and it was amazing. It was great, and people were saying, like like the New York Times and CBS News, all these places were saying, this is the clearest and easiest to understand explanation of what the Higgs boson was. And so you might ask, since we put out that video, has everybody now just everybody understand the Higgs boson? How well have we succeeded in explaining the Higgs boson people in that short video. Well, I think the video is up to like three million views or something, so we've reached at least three million people, that's right. Well, I went out on campus and asked random people. I walked into what is the Higgs boson? Do you know what it is? Do you care about it? What do you understand about it? And here's what they had to say. Have you heard of the Higgs boson. Yes, it's a particle. I have no idea. No, it's a sub potomic particle. Alright, So it sort of seems like maybe everyone has sort of heard about it. Everyone has heard about the Higgs boson. That's right. The buzz has succeeded in at least convincing people that the Higgs is a thing. Good brand management there, brand exactly if we could only copyright that or something. Yes, so people know the Higgs is a thing. Some people call it, say it's a particle, but that's really about it. That's like the level of knowledge that's penetrated sort of the cultural zeitgeist into people's minds. The Higgs is a particle. People have found it, That's what's the thing, Right, It's a Nobody seemed to know what it was or what it was for. Yeah, nobody said anything about how it's responsible for giving particles mass, or the meaning of the discovery, or why it's significant or anything like that. So from that point of you, I think UM science has done a good job and telling people what they found, But I'm not sure that we've really succeeded in explaining what is the Higgs boson? Why is it interesting? So that's why we thought it would be a good episode for this podcast. So it's like, you've done a good job of telling people that you're doing your job and the job is important, but don't don't really ask is what's going on? That's about as far as we've gone. No, I'm happy to talk to people about it. That's why we're here. Yeah, that's right, that's what so tell us, Uh, well, what is the Higgs boson? What is it for? What is it for? Well, um, the Higgs boson is a particle, right, and we have we're familiar with lots of particles, you know, electrons and corks and other larger particles like protons and neutrons and most of the particles in our everyday world. They're the things that make up matter, you know, electrons and these corks make up the stuff that we're made out of the stuff. We're made of stuff. And one mystery we always wondered about was like, how do these particles have mass? How do these particles weigh anything? You know, how do these particles have any stuff to them? What do you mean, like, why do they have mass? What does that even mean? To just wonder if something has mass? Well, it's interesting because you think about these particles and mathematically we think of these particles as just points in space like dots, like zero volume, Like how big is the electron. People have some fuzzy ways to calculate electron size, you know, the electron radius, using like the photons that's surrounded, but at its core, the electron itself is zero volume point in space. And I always thought that's weird. So it's not like a basketball. Like a basketball, you can put it down and it had it goes from like here to here, and it has a surface to it, right, has an extent exactly, basketball has an extent. One side of it is not the same place as the other side of it. Right this you can measure its length and its width and its height exactly has a volume. But electrons and point particles are not like that. They're not like that. Two different particles can have different masses, but they're both the same side, is right. So if you if you're thinking, oh, are these particles all made it out of some sort of like basic universe stuff and one of them is a bigger spoonful than the other one, will know they're both zero size spoonfuls. So that just can't explain why one has more mass than the other. And but it can't explain why either one has any mass, because there's no room for stuff in there anyway, right, there's no like, um, there's no more of something in one of them and more or less of something in the other. There's just no there's nothing, there's no stuff to it. And so that was a big mystery. That was a big mystery, like how did these particles get mass exactly? Yeah, let's talk about that, but first let's take a quick break. I think it's in the end more natural to think about the mass these particles not as the amount of tiny unit her stuff in them, but just like a label. Right, Like you think about the electron. You know the electron is negative charge, but you don't worry like where in the electron is that negative charge? Is there room to put that charge in the electron? You don't think about that or worry about that, the same way you think about mass. Mass is just a label for particles. We don't understand really what these particles things are. What we think of them as points in space with a set of labels, spin, mass, charge, all sorts of other interactions and that's basically it. And so mass isn't like amount of stuff. It's just another label, um, and it's a label that affects how these particles move. Right, Mass means inertia means it's harder for it to speed up and harder for it to slow down, just like maybe like the electron has negative one electrical charge, and maybe like I want to say a prolem, but I know persons are made out of quarks, but like one of the quarks has plus one third allergical charge. That's just like something that is inherent in it. That's right. In a hundred years, we might have an explanation for that. We might have sub corks which are made out of something else and add up to have the minus one third charge or the plus two thirds charge or whatever. We might someday have an explanation for that, but currently we don't, and so we just think of them as these point particles. And the Higgs boson explains that that was the mystery, Right, how can particles have mass? What is this thing we call mass for a particle? How does that even make sense? And the Higgs boson is part of this larger idea called the Higgs mechanism, which includes also the Higgs field, and the Higgs field is something which permeates all of space. It's just like you know, the way like electromagnetic fields can you know, fill space. Also, they theorize this particle a long time ago, like in the sixties they said, um, well we have this mystery about why some particles have mass, why did they have mass? So we think we have this theory and this was down done in the sixties. Yeah, yeah, and so just to make sure we finished the explanation of what they actually Higgs boson is right, sis field the field space and particles feel this field and if they feel it really strongly, then it prevents them from speeding up and slowing down. And that's the same thing as having mass. That is what having mass means. That means you have inertia. Inertia is the property of things to resist being slowed down and the property to resist being sped up. So interacting with the Higgs field is the same thing as having mass. So what do you mean like a field, Like it's just like this thing, this mathematic is it like a mathematical concept that sucks surrounding us, or it's like actually a thing. It's actually a thing. The field is actually a thing, like the way an electric field is. Right. Electric field is a mathematical concept, but it's also a physical thing. You can measure it um you put an electron and electric field, it'll move, so you can see it. Right. You line up magnetic shavings on a table, you can see magnetic fields, like your compass sees a magnetic field. Right. So Higgs field is just like another field, like a magnetic field or electric field. Right. But usually in a like the mechanic field, there's a source, right, like there's a magnet, or there's like a charge, or there's a battery or something like that. But what is like this Higgs field is just there. Yeah. And that's one of the fascinating things about it is that without any particular localized source, it has some energy to its, some value to it, all the way through the universe. And that's why these particles can get mass. It's called a vacuum expectation value, which is a technical term I Pobily shouldn't have mentioned. But it's a really weird thing about this field is that it fills the universe and without any particular source, it has some strength to it, and the effect of that is to give all particles inertia, which is basically the same as mass. So when you say that like particle A has this much mass, it means that when it tries to move around, it feels the Higgs field that much. Yeah. When if you have particle A and then you give it a push, right, well, acceleration F equals m A right, so a little push should give you acceleration, But the amount of acceleration asian you get from the push depends on the M part of F equals m A. Right. The larger your force, the more your acceleration. But the larger your mass, the less your acceleration. So you need a really big push to accelerate the Earth, for example, and a really little push to accelerate you know, a grain of sand. And so you would say that that's because the Earth is interacting more strongly with the Higgs field, whereas the little grain of salt is like almost ignored by the Higgs field. Yeah, in comparison exactly. And so really massive particles interact with the Higgs field a lot, and and massless particles or particles that have almost no mass hardly interact with the Higgs field at all, there's really easy to accelerate or to slow down. Have almost no inertia. So it's kind of like it's like you're in the ocean. You're underwater, and uh, if you are really massive, then maybe you have kind of like an odd shape and so it's really hard to move in the water. But maybe if you have a sleep shape, and it's really easy for you to move around in the water, and so that sort of shapeness is maybe what mass would be. Yeah, people try really hard to come up with like intuitive analogies for the Higgs field, and almost all of them are roughly right, and that they give you the sense that the Higgs field is the thing that makes it hard to move through space, but they're technically almost all not correct because what the thing you describe, which is like, you know what friction from water is different from inertia, right, Friction from water is always going to slow you down. Inertia makes it hard to slow down. So something that's moving really really fast it's hard to slow down because it has inertia. M So it's just some some sort of field that affects how easily you can change in speed, right, whether it's gleating up or slowing down. So we should just stop at that and not try to make any molasses or politicians in the crowd analogies that's right, exactly, or deep poetic statements about the meaning of the universe exactly, right. Um. But yeah, and you were saying earlier people came on this idea decades ago, right, yeah, and so they took him that long and billion dollars to find it, even more than thirteen billion dollars. But it's it's a cool story because it's an idea that came sort of out of a search for beauty or poetry. Actually, I shouldn't have I shouldn't have dogged poetry or a long this podcast of a huge mistake. I didn't mean poetry in a negative sense of an empty poetry, right, right, right, poetry without mathematical references. That's right. We just lost the huge poetry loving audience segment of this audience. Let's get him back. Let's get him back, prepared turn on poetry now. Okay, So people were thinking about the particles we've seen and how they work, and they were wondering about patterns there and the short version of The story is that they noticed a pattern and the patterns would be missing something. You know. It's like they looked at the list of particles we had in the forces and they said, m hmm, this would be so prettier, this would be so much more elegant if there was one more piece here, one thing that made that that tied it all together, you know, like the rug that tied the Bowski's room together. Like the equation seemed out of balance, right, Like it's we had they had an equation and it just it was just kind of imbalanced. Is that what you mean by beauty? Yeah, And in particular, people were trying to unify forces. There's a long history in physics of trying to bring everything together into a single equation, like can we describe all the physics in a single equation? And you know, for a long time we've had different um we've talked about a different phenomena like magnetism and electricity, and one of some of the great advances in physics have been in unifying those forces, like showing electricity and magnetism are actually part of the same force. It's called electromagnetism. And the things that we think of as as magnetic and I think to think of electric, aren't you just two sides of the same coin. So there's a great tradition there. It's like simplifying things bringing them together. And so people were trying to do that one more time, and they're saying, can we bring the weak force, the thing that's responsible for like radioactive decay. Can we bring that together with electromagnetism. One problem is that the weak force is really really is really really weak is compared to electromagnetism. And the reason the weak force is so weak is because the particles that carry it, the W and the z boson, are really heavy, if huge amounts of mass, whereas the photon for electromagnetism is really light. So one reason that electromagnetism is so powerful, such a strong force, is that the photon, the thing that carries it, can go really far there is no mass, whereas the W n z bosons have so much mass it makes it a very short range force. So the question they were trying to understand is how do we bring these two things together. Why do the W z bosons have mass and the photon doesn't. So obviously, the equation they were trying to make more elegant. So it was weird that some particles would have mass and some others would not. That was like theoretically mathematically weird, and so they came up with this idea of the Higgs field to patch it up. That's right, that's right, the Higgs field and the Higgs particle together in this thing called the Higgs mechanism. And if you add the Higgs mechanism to the theory, then boom, it explains it. It connects the weak force with electromagnetism, and it explains why the W and Z have mass and the photon doesn't. And so that was really beautiful. People are like, wow, that really makes sense. That's pretty. You know, there's like an elegance to that theory, and people were hoping that it's also true. You know, Nature doesn't have to come up with nure, doesn't have to reveal that the universe is beautiful. And sometimes, as as human physicists, we use like like aesthetic sense to like sense what is nature's solution, Like how should things work? And we want things to be pretty. It doesn't always work out that way. This history is littered with like beautiful theories that turned out to be wrong. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. So but back to the story of the Higgs boson. Yeah, after all that, they found it, right, How did they find the Higgs boson? Yeah, well they were looking for it for a long time. Um, and people thought there was a collider in Geneva before the Large John Collider. There was one called the Large Electron Positron Collider that leap l EP and people built that one, and they really were hoping to find the Higgs Boson there because like how their name has the word large in it, you know, like what if you build a bigger one, what is that one going to be called very large? The very largest v l h C is the plan for the next one super large, uber large, hyper large, super duper large. Anyways, Um, so there was one before the large, the LHC UM but that they they didn't find it, so they build the bigger one. They didn't find it, but they thought they did. Actually, so it ran until the early two thousands, and they had a very short window to run it in because they had to turn it off because they were building the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel. One scheme for making the hadron collider. Cheaper was to reuse the existing tunnel so that to turn off the electron positron collider so they could build the hadron collider. But in the last few weeks of running the electron positron collider, people started seeing hints of the Higgs boson. They're smashing these particles together, and they started to see collisions that looked just like what you would expect from a Higgs boson. The thing is, we didn't know how heavy the Higgs boson was. That's one thing the theory didn't predict. Is it really really light, is it kind of heavy, is it medium heavy? Is it's super duper heavy. So we didn't know exactly where to look for it, and right on the edge of where the large electron positron collider could have seen it. It started to pop up just in the last few weeks. But then they said, but no, we just got thirteen billion dollars to make a very one. Don't find it yet exactly exactly. And there was a huge argument in the community, like should we put off building the L A C and keep running this one because we might be like on the verge of a discovery or um should we say, look, we have a plan, let's shut this thing down, build the next one, um and find it there for sure. And the problem was that across the pond outside Chicago, the Americans were working on their collider, which is the Tevatron Fermulab, and it was going to run sort of in the gap there between the large electron positron collider and the Hadron collider at CERN, and the Europeans were really worried that if they gave this opportunity up, if they turned off their collider, that the Americans would discover the Higgs boson while they were busy building the Hadron collider. That was their fear. Suspiciously, the Americans were like, no, yeah, shut it down down UM. So certain decided to shut it down. They were like, we see this evidence. It's interesting. It's not compelling enough for us to cheer age our entire program. You know, like when my son has to go to dinner, but he does want to turn off the video game he's playing, that's right. They were like, So the Europeans saved their game while they're building the next colider, and the the Americans turned on their their collider and they looked for it, and they didn't find it. I mean they saw a few things hints here and there, so they wouldn't haven't even found anything. Then the LP would not have found anything. It turned out that the Higgs was not where they thought it was. Yeah, what they were seeing was just a fluctuation. So that was and he was a little bit heavier than that. So okay, So what does the act what does the large patron collider actually do like and specifically how how does it do that? What does it do to find how what did it do to find the Higgs bloson? So what we do is we smash protons together. And protons really high energy, and protons inside them have little particles called quarks and also particles called gluons. And when we smashed protons together, through the corks and the gluons inside the proteon that do the smashing. Think of protons is like little bags of particles and the cork and the gluons smashed together, and then sometimes like one in a tri zillion times, those quirk and gluons will smash together to make a Higgs boson. We run this thing every twenty five nanoseconds because most of the time. When we smush particles together, boring particles come out, particles we've seen over and over again. So the rare the interesting stuff is really rare, which is why we have to run it really often to spot the rare ones. And so it's like one in the trisilient times the Higgs boson appears, it doesn't live for very long. The thing I think people should understand is that you can don't make a Higgs boson and then you have it. It's not like you can fill a glass jar with Higgs bosons that we've made at the LHC. They exist for like ten to the negative twenty something seconds, and then they decay. They turned into other stuff like evaporate kind. Yeah, they're like heavy and unstable and so they break up. Yeah, they yeah, exactly into other stuff that we can see. Like one of the most common things they do is turn into two bottom quarks for examp able. And so how do we actually see the Higgs boson. Well, one way we do what is we look for events with two bottom corks in them. The problem is there's lots of other ways to make events with two bottom corks in them. Lots of times when we collide protons, we get events with two bottom corks in them that wasn't from the Higgs boson. So you have to figure out which of the stuff that you see might have come from Higgs boson that existed for like a really short amount of time, that's right. And so it's like visiting the scene of a car crash and trying to figure out what happened. Um, all you can see is the debris afterwards. You don't get to see the car crash itself, and you have to be like, all right, I think from the debris that it was two yellow volkswagens that crashed onto each other, that's right. I think the Higgs boson was driving and it veered off the bridge. So then that's why it costs so much. It's you have to like run this thing. It was huge. You needed a lot of energy, that's right, and you had to run for a long time. And so then you found enough observations of the debris to know, Okay, I think in there we can definitely say that there was a Higgs boson that popped into existence for a brief amount of time, that's right. What we do is we take the energy of those two bottom qrks and we add them up and we say how much energy was there? And if it was a Higgs boson, then the energy of the two bottom corks is going to mostly add up to be the mass of that Higgs boson. So you do that a bunch of bunch of times and then you add them all up, and if the Higgs boson was there, you'll see a little bump. You'll see you make a plot for example, yeah, bump at the day. If you make a plot for example of like how much energy was in the two bottom quarks versus how often you see it, you'll see a bunch of collisions that all have the same energy in the two bottom qurks, and that will be at the mass of the Higgs boson. So we were bump hunting. We didn't know where we might see it. Bump hunting. That should be the next show in the Discovery Channel, bump Hunters. I think there's probably some easy, salacious misunderstanding of bump hunting, you know. So they so they found it right, and this was I think to the is in what was it two thousand, thirteen fourteen that they founded it was it was sort of slow like we started to see hints of it. We saw little bumps, and then they would go away, and we saw and then we finally started to see more significant bumps that just grew and grew and grew. And so the actual discovery the Higgs wasn't like an aha moment like one day like boom, here it is, we found it. There it is, you can all see it. It was a slow accumulation of data. It's sort of like you know, the water draining out of a out of the ocean, and you can revealing things on the seafloor, like very gradually we saw this bump rising out of the take he saw a little shadow of it here, a little shadowed it were there, and then suddenly you had the confidence to say, I think all of these things, say that the Higgs boson is a thing. That's right. And it gradually accumulated. So it was sort of a slow burn, and at some point it passes some threshold where statisticians say we were allowed to say we've discovered the Higgs boson, and so huge fanfare, lots of excitement, lots of like news cover rige in the media. Why do you think it was such a like media frenzy dis Higgs boson, Like you know, like scientists discover stuff every day all the time. Why do you think people got so excited about discovery of this particle? That's a great question. I wish I understood how the whole science journalism world worked, why they all get excited about something sometimes and other times you just can't get them interested at all. I don't know. I think that Certain has a great PR team and that they really built their argument about why Certain is exciting based on this um this goal, this let's discover the Higgs boson, and that has positives and negatives, like the positives that are if you spend several years hyping this up, then when you actually are ready to deliver your discovery, people are hyped up. Oh, I see. Part of so part of it was just like the the size of the project. People were really hyped up about it. Yeah, and Certain is organized and they know how to do PR and they have been priming science journalists for a long time. But it's sort of important because it's it's kind of it closed the gap, right, It's sort of like put the little button on this theory of the universe that physics sad, right. It was kind of like this piece that people have been theorizing for a long time and so now here it is. Here, here was the evidence that this theory was right. Yeah, and a lot of people look at that positively. I actually think this it's kind of a negative story. I mean, people's people sold the LHC is like, here's we're going to discover the Higgs boson and that's going to be the answer to this decades long question. And after that the standard model is finished. And it's certainly true that we've been looking for for a long time and that we found it, and it validated this idea of this beautiful mathematical idea which came you know, just from this esthetic sense of mathematical beauty. That's awesome, that's an awesome story. Um. And it was the missing piece of the standard model, the piece we didn't have. So now we have a theory which is complete in the sense that it works right, there's no obvious missing piece. But it doesn't mean that there aren't questions remaining. And I think one downside of saying the late C was about discovering the Higgs is that people think, oh, we're done, Like well, we've finished this theory and now it's over, and like, why are you still running the late c um And the other thing is that some of us were hoping we wouldn't find the Higgs. I mean, the Higgs is sort of like a nice wrap up to that story, but there were other ideas out there, ideas that might have been more exciting. And so in some ways, finding something that wasn't the Higgs, something weird and strange and unexpected, something that wasn't predicted. But the theory is something where we didn't have like a mental slot for it already. That would have been much more exciting, something totally unexpected than I cracked open particle physics and let us understand things about why particles get different masses, or what is dark matter? You know, what are the patterns of the particles. There's a lot of questions we don't have the answers to just because we found the Higgs. I can see a politician being like, all right, guys, so you're telling me that you were totally wrong and you misspent all this money, But it turns out that unluckily it's actually good news. That's right. Well, for me, the most exciting thing is the exploration. Like I want to build that three trillion dollar collider because it lets just explore the universe at a scale we've never seen before. And I'm excited for unexpected discoveries much more than I'm excited for expected discoveries. You know. It's like if somebody told you exactly where to find a special little rock, it'd be cool to go there and see, like, oh, look they found this little rock. Would be much cooler to find something you didn't expecta