What is the Higgs Boson?

Also known as “The God Particle”, you may think that it’s the basic building block of chocolate.

But no. The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle that gives mass to all other particles. You see, physicists have always been trying to understand and model our world so that they can explain what we are made of and how things work. They make a bunch of hypotheses and mathematical models that fit our observations of the world. They use those models to make predictions of things we haven’t observed yet, and then they build gigantic physics experiments to see if they can reproduce some of their predictions.

One of the particles they hypothesized about but has not been yet proven to exist is called the Higgs Boson. This is why scientists built the Large Hadron Collider (the coolest machine on the planet), and are now analyzing data from recent experiments run on it. They think that some of the results are proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson.

If things pan out, it would be a huge breakthrough in our understanding of the universe. So in order to be better prepared for a possible eventual announcement, watch this video by the good people at Fermilab.

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