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Mahesh

10/04/24 18:36 PM IST

Physicist Peter Higgs passes away

In News
  • The man, after whom the particle is named, Peter Higgs, died recently aged 94.
God particle
  • Much of the hype surrounding the Higgs boson amongst the common people comes from the fact that it got dubbed as the ‘God particle’.
  • The expression was first used by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman, who wrote a book by that title in the 1990s about the continuing search for the Higgs boson.
  • Lederman wanted to call his book ‘The Goddamn Particle’ to describe the elusive nature of the Higgs boson, but was persuaded by the publishers to go in for the God particle, a name that stuck.
  • Many scientists detest that expression, mainly because the particle acquired religious connotations in some circles because of that name.
Significance
  • The big significance of the Higgs boson is that it is the particle that is supposed to account for the mass of every other fundamental particle.
  • It was discovered in the 1950s and 1960s, through the works of several physicists, that the mass is not intrinsic to matter.
  • Strange though it might seem, particles like electrons or protons do not have mass within themselves. Higgs, and these other scientists, came up with the idea of a all-pervasive field, named the Higgs field, just like there is an electric field, or a magnetic field or a gravitational field.
  • It is the interaction of the particles with this field that lends them the mass. Greater the interaction, larger is the mass.
  • Different particles interact with this Higgs field in different ways, and that is what gives them different masses.
  • A photon, which is a light particle, does not interact with this field at all, and is thus massless. There are other particles that are massless as well. But particles like electrons and protons, do interact, and have masses.
  • The Higgs boson itself interacts with this field, and thus has mass.
  • The main fame for the Higgs boson came from its elusive nature. Scientists kept frantically searching for it for more than four decades but could not find it.
  • One of the main science objectives of the LHC, which is the world’s biggest particle accelerator and cost about US$ 9 billion to build, was to find the Higgs boson.
  • It did, within the first four years of its operations, and that remains one of its crowning glories till now.
Source- Indian Express

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