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Surprisingly, on this very same day but

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50 years ago and almost at this very same time

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President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas

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This happened at the beginning of the 60's,

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when some other important events took place in different fields.

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It was, for instance, the moment when the first human spaceflights took place,

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when The Beatles were starting to become famous

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and all of these historic events are related to Politics,

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Science and Technology or Folk Culture.

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Well, what has The Higgs boson to do with all these?

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It is related in two different ways. The first one, like in every other thing,

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is the fact that without The Higgs boson none of these events would have happened.

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In fact, The Earth wouldn't exist, we wouldn't have history, we wouln't be here.

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And there is another (more indirect) relationship,

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which is that Particle physics and all the scientists were puzzled by an enigma,

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precisely  in those years. They wanted to understand

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why the particles had mass, where they got their mass from.

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So it was some months after Kennedy's assassination,

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in June and August of 1964, there appeared two short articles.

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The first one made by Englert and Brout, two Belgian physicists,

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the second by Peter Higgs, in which they established the foundations

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that helped to understand why the particles had mass.

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Well, these articles went unnoticed even for the scientific community,

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but they became more relevant in the next few years.

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One of the consequences of this theory is the well known

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Higgs Boson which was recently discovered.

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The fact is that a theory is only acknowledged as true

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or at least on target, only if it nature agrees. In other words,

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we have to ask nature if the theory is right or not.

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How do we ask nature? Through experiments. In this case,

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the discovery of Higgs boson was key, which is a

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genuine prediction of the mechanism. They had for

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decades been looking for it, being unsuccessfully found.

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It was very recently, the 4th of July, 2012, that the CERN

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announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

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Well, you will probably remember that this happened last year.

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The discovery of the Higgs bosson caused a lot of activity in the media.

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This discovery enlightens several basic concepts.

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These concepts are so fundamental that we don't usually question them

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and maybe that could be the most interesting part.

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For instance, vacuum: what is it? Is it made up by any kind of substance?

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Or the electric and magnetic forces... Why do they exist?

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why do they act like they do? The same happens with other forces

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in nature, like in the weak interaction.

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But overall, Higgs boson enlightens us about the mass of the particles.

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Right. What is mass then? Well everyone has some kind of

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intuitive conception of what it is.  This is one of those concepts

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that are so familiar to us that nobody wonders about them.

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It is just a life fact: things are made up by matter.

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So for instance, everyone knows that a wooden ball is lighter,

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which means that it has less mass, than one made of lead

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with the same size, and that is heavier.

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In any case, why is the lead ball heavier than the wooden ball?

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Excerpt from the conference held

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November 22nd, 2013, at the Residencia de Estudiantes

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during the sessions "La frontera de la Física Fundamental".

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Full video available at: www.eddaddeplata.org