when the universe It was at the beginning of time itself , long before there were physicists Imagine this air hockey table
is the entire universe. When it was born in the big bang,physicists think there were only massless particles of pure energy.
all the particles are moving around at the same speed,at the speed of light.They're all essentially massless in the whole universe.But the universe did not remain that way for very long.
After
only a fraction of a second,something changed. that made many of the particles grind to a halt.At some point,the Higgs field turned on,and that made some of the particles acquire a mass, which meant they stopped traveling at the speed of light.
The photons,the yellow ones,are zipping around at the speed of light,whereas the red and the green have acquired a mass. thanks to the Higgs mechanism
and travel more slowly.Physicists believe that right after the Big Bang,the universe began to cool,and the Higgs field turned on.Some particles began to interact with the field and acquired mass.Other particles remained
massless bundles of energy.
In the decades for which scientists have been smashing together particles to probe the subatomic world,they have found
two basic types of particles.There are fermions,a group of massive particles that carry matter,and there are bosons,massless particles that carry force. Without the existence of the Higgs,all particles would be massless.
So, if there was no Higgs field, you would have had these other force carriers. They would have been massless,
and therefore,
like the particles of light, And without these masses, you can never have atoms or chemistry or
any of the interesting stuff we find in our universe. The things that you and I are made up of wouldn't be able to
clump and coalesce and slow down.
Boredom. Yep. Thanks to the Higgs, our universe hung around long enough for complex structures likes human life to form.
But why did the matter-creating Higgs field turn on? Many scientists, including Dan and Patrick, think the sheer violence
of the Big Bang jostled the field into action.
So, up until now, I've been turning the Higgs mechanism on and off by hand. But of course, in the early universe,it didn't happenthat way.
And just like water freezes all on its own when you cool it, the Higgs mechanism will turn on all by itself
as the universe cools. So, this pool cue is supposed to represent how unstable the Higgs mechanism
was all by itself.
And as you can see...
Voilà.
...It just falls over.
Scientists think the Higgs field, the force thatturned a ball of energy into our physical universe, turned on all by itself.
But some will say that it was no accident, and it must have been turned on by a creator. That mystery of creation may be answered.
if we learn more about the Higgs field. Scientists have been trying to disturb the field enough to make it produce a Higgs boson so they can study it. It's an effort that has made physicists construct the most powerful machine
in the history of science, the Large Hadron Collider, or the LHC.
End of the first part. Thank you for reading