Higgs Particle Essay

Submitted By derrick56007
Words: 335
Pages: 2

On October 9, 2013, a Nobel Prize was awarded to 2 physicists on the account of the Higgs boson, aka the “God Particle”, that was discovered last year. The Higgs Boson is the particle that would explain what scientist have been scratching their head over for years, how all matter in the universe gets its mass. In the 1960s, Peter Higgs and other physicists proposed a theory on how particles acquire mass. The theory suggests that everything in the universe is in what’s called a Higgs energy field, in which particles move around and attract Higgs Bosons, giving them their mass. Particles that would attract more Higgs Bosons would have more mass, whereas particles that draw less Higgs Bosons would have less mass. For physicists, finding the Higgs Bosons would explain the mystery of mass that has been existent in the Standard Model of fundamental particles. Located underground in Geneva, Switzerland, the Hadron Collider worth 10 billion dollars, 17 miles in length, and is 328 ft. underground has been smashing together protons at high speed by scientists hoping to find evidence of the Higgs Boson. According to the theory that everything in the universe is in the Higgs field, by smashing protons together the physicists believed that they might be able to knock off a small part of the Higgs field, making the Higgs Boson visible to sensors, before turning into particles due to its instability. The Nobel Prizes awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, the people who