Surprisingly, on this very same day but
50 years ago and almost at this very same time
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas
This happened at the beginning of the 60's,
when some other important events took place in different fields.
It was, for instance, the moment when the first human spaceflights took place,
when The Beatles were starting to become famous
and all of these historic events are related to Politics,
Science and Technology or Folk Culture.
Well, what has The Higgs boson to do with all these?
It is related in two different ways. The first one, like in every other thing,
is the fact that without The Higgs boson none of these events would have happened.
In fact, The Earth wouldn't exist, we wouldn't have history, we wouln't be here.
And there is another (more indirect) relationship,
which is that Particle physics and all the scientists were puzzled by an enigma,
precisely in those years. They wanted to understand
why the particles had mass, where they got their mass from.
So it was some months after Kennedy's assassination,
in June and August of 1964, there appeared two short articles.
The first one made by Englert and Brout, two Belgian physicists,
the second by Peter Higgs, in which they established the foundations
that helped to understand why the particles had mass.
Well, these articles went unnoticed even for the scientific community,
but they became more relevant in the next few years.
One of the consequences of this theory is the well known
Higgs Boson which was recently discovered.
The fact is that a theory is only acknowledged as true
or at least on target, only if it nature agrees. In other words,
we have to ask nature if the theory is right or not.
How do we ask nature? Through experiments. In this case,
the discovery of Higgs boson was key, which is a
genuine prediction of the mechanism. They had for
decades been looking for it, being unsuccessfully found.
It was very recently, the 4th of July, 2012, that the CERN
announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Well, you will probably remember that this happened last year.
The discovery of the Higgs bosson caused a lot of activity in the media.
This discovery enlightens several basic concepts.
These concepts are so fundamental that we don't usually question them
and maybe that could be the most interesting part.
For instance, vacuum: what is it? Is it made up by any kind of substance?
Or the electric and magnetic forces... Why do they exist?
why do they act like they do? The same happens with other forces
in nature, like in the weak interaction.
But overall, Higgs boson enlightens us about the mass of the particles.
Right. What is mass then? Well everyone has some kind of
intuitive conception of what it is. This is one of those concepts
that are so familiar to us that nobody wonders about them.
It is just a life fact: things are made up by matter.
So for instance, everyone knows that a wooden ball is lighter,
which means that it has less mass, than one made of lead
with the same size, and that is heavier.
In any case, why is the lead ball heavier than the wooden ball?
Excerpt from the conference held
November 22nd, 2013, at the Residencia de Estudiantes
during the sessions "La frontera de la Física Fundamental".
Full video available at: www.eddaddeplata.org