Large Hadron Collider? But I just met her!

First hypothesised in 1964, the Higgs-boson particle is a neat theory for a piece of the puzzle we don’t yet have.

The accepted ‘Standard Model’ of physics (for which we are well short of space to go into here) dictates that universe is made up of twelve fundamental particles governed by four fundamental forces. As a model, it’s become a standard because it’s successfully explained not only the results of many experiments over the years, but also successfully predicted a wide variety of phenomena that were later discovered.

So it works pretty well for us.

However it’s not complete: of the four forces it only successfully describes the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force through their corresponding force carrier particles that have been discovered (particles that transfer force energy between matter, and belong to a group of particles called ‘bosons’).



Gravity, though we know it exists, hasn’t yet been explained by a corresponding force particle. The Standard Model theorises it should exist, but it hasn’t yet been found.

So there’s still more work to be done.

Another missing component, which much of the model depends on, is the Higgs-boson. It’s just a theory, but one that satisfies an inexplicable loophole. It runs something like this:

The Standard Model states that electricity, magnetism, light and some types of radioactivity are all manifestations of a single underlying force called the ‘electroweak force’ – one of the four fundamental forces. Mathematically for this to be true the theory for force particles requires they should have no mass, but this has already been disproven. Which means although the Standard Model seems to accurately describe what we see in the universe, it’s also missing something.

One of numerous physicists working on it, a physicist called Peter Higgs, proposed a theory by which matter gets its mass and which later became known as the Higgs mechanism. The Higgs mechanism defines a gigantic field created in the Big Bang that spreads across all time and space called (not surprisingly) the Higgs field, indistinguishable from empty space, and through which all matter interacts. And it’s the Higgs field that gives matter its mass, with particles that interact with it as they move through it gaining more mass than those that don’t.



A good analogy here is to imagine an object moving through a viscous substance like honey – the honey slows it down, and the bigger the object the more honey it will interact with and the more it will be slowed. The theory goes that some particles, like photons in light, aren’t being affected much at all by the field while others, like the particles that form the building blocks of the atoms in your body, are. And the magic ingredient that endows mass from the Higgs field to the interacting particle is the Higgs-boson.

It may sound like a convinient theory, but it’s the best we have – physicists can’t currently explain, for example, why one particle has a different mass to another, or even why particles have mass at all. There are many characteristics we know about particles, like charge or spin, but none of these dictate or create mass. Said another way: as far as our understanding of particle physics goes, mass doesn’t exist. But you only have to hold your hand in front of your face to see it does – so how does mass get there?

If the Higgs-boson particle exists, the LHC should be able to find it. If it does, it will complete a great void in our understanding of the universe and open up a whole new school of physics. If it doesn’t that’s good too – it means the Higgs field theory is wrong and we can go back to the drawing board and see what else we can come up with. Either way is progress, and why the LHC is so fundamental to the understanding of physics today.