Let's suppose that they did, in fact, find this elusive particle. If it does what they claim it does, how come it's not reacting the way they all predicted, contributing to the big bang right now? Is the boson a deadbeat particle? Was it done after the big bang happened? If they keep experimenting, they will find many more particles or energy levels present within the atom.

Alright , I get it now ....

Big pharmaceutical companies are promoting this discovery of the mass producing particle called the "Higgs boson" , to begin the production of a "Higgs boson blocking weight loss supplement" that would be worth billions ....

While I find this and physics in general interesting I'll admit openly that I don't really understand it and am glad that there are really smart people out there who can make these videos for people like me.

Perhaps if the HIggs "completes" the standard model, then one might imagine more practical outcomes from this coherent picture. Heaven know just "chasing the animals around the zoo" all these years hasn't left much room for applications of the theory.

"This particle is a manifestation of the field that "tamed" the big bang ... and continues to keep things in sync"

i am the only one that sees the irnoy here, there was some sort of field in place before the big bang? before matter itself existed...so i guess it is still the god particle. asking who created the field is like asking who created god.

Can this explain why mass becomes more massive as we approach the speed of light? A lot of room for all kinds of interesting new equations? I mean Newton KE = 1/2 mv squared based on KE = integral of Fds, with F being m dv/dt and KE = m dvds/dt = mvdv = 1/2 mv squared. Then Albert came along and he said Mass changes with velocity which made KE = m d(mv)/dt with m = mzero/ square root of (1-v squared/c squared) which gave us E = m c squared - mzero c squared. It seems like the answer to why mass becomes more massive with increasing velocity would really confuse everyone.

Oh I forgot to stick a few integral marks in the above. Maybe this Higgs field gets compressed or something or we're running into more of the Higgs field that causes this increase in mass as we near the velocity of light. I suppose if nothing became something with this Higgs Boson, then maybe time doesn't even exist.

I found Larry Krauss' comments regarding the Higgs-Boson to be disingenuous. He is known in Phoenix, Arizona for demagoguery on a wide-range of topics that he is not an authority. And last year his ASU institute hosted a series of discussions billed as debates, but were little more than a platform for him to disparage people he disagrees with and promote his personal philosophy. Since he has demonstrated a level of intellectual dishonesty in areas in which I am equally expert, how can I trust him with a topic in which so few are expert?

When I read his comments regarding something from nothing, I was reminded of many other scientists who because of their philosophical commitment to naturalism, (or just general ignorance) strove mightily to show how something could come from nothing. Yet, their efforts were all ultimately shown to be in vain.

Krauss is just the latest in a long line of misguided scientists who think they can explain the existence of something by asserting spontaneous generation. (a form of religious dogma)

But, as you know, there is no empirical evidence that something can come from nothing, and no amount of grandstanding, ranting, and browbeating from Krauss will change that.

Also, it is important to highlight that the Higgs-Boson is predicted by the standard model, and so has been a part of modern physics for decades... Its possible discovery doesn't change anything, only confirms what has been known for a long time.

Krauss' real issue is likely based on some personal philosophical struggle. The universe, matter, and life are enormously complex. The interactions between the constituent aspects of matter and life are so incredibly coordinated that more and more scientists are concluding that these are designed artifacts rather than things that popped into existence in some primitive form and somehow "evolved" to their present state.

The appeal of something from nothing IS hard to resist. But, it violates all the known laws of physics.

Look around and try to identify something that came from nothing. Then, think about where all of those things came from. In our experience, things come from other things, and so it is logical to conclude that energy and matter were the product of design, and that the information in DNA was also the product of design. That the designer or designers existed or exist outside the universe only makes sense, as they would have had to precede its existence. Regardless, the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for spontaneous generation.

But, religious fanatics like Krauss won't allow that question to be asked, let alone discussed, unless they are in full control of the "discussion."

With all this, designed to further confuse the ordinary people like myself, the "great minds" did not try to explain why the sun isn't hot or how they deliberately leave out the most important part of why things recur or reproduce in their likenesses. Yes! They conveniently left out DATA which, as it appears to be hitting everyone over the head with no one seeming to notice, is the most important part of man's - heck, the universe's - existence. Yes! Solid, Liquid, Gas and Data! Suck on this one you brilliant scientists!

Ayeyiyi!

I'm stupid and I don't understand.........so that must mean my argument is valid!!

There see, I can debate with the best of you.....

Quantum mechanics is a description of mechanics that presumes algebraic relationships between momentum and location ([p,q]=-i h-bar), both of which are now interpreted as operators on a state function (or vector). In this framework, the mechanics is non-relativistic. If you extend the ideas to quantize the state vector, the state vector takes on quanta that look like #'s of particles. It has the Pauli exclusion principle and bose states built in. The momentum operators are now derivatives of the field operators. And it is possible to talk about relativistically covariant mechanics in this model. The thing that looks like "mass" comes from a term in the Hamiltonian that ultimately measures the inertia that the mass shows. If that term is missing, then the particle is "massless." If you have a field (say electromagnetic) that couples to a conserved current in a particle field (say a Dirac field representing electrons/positrons), then the fact that the field is conserved implies a few things. 1) There is an ambiguity in the specification of the electromagnetic field called a guage (it looks like there is an unconstrained function floating around); 2) that guage doesn't contribute physically to the interaction (anything you compute from it tends to disappear, but not entirely -- Bohm-Aharanov effect). When you wrap the electron-positron and electromagnetic field together, some of the mass that the electron demonstrates carries the effect of the interaction of the electron-positron with the electromagnetic field. These interactions actually diverge. But, being pragmatic, you can say "well, what we *measure* is the interacting 'dressed' electron-positron, so we can take that as the parameter and absorb the divergences into the 'bare' theory coefficients." Only problem is that it doesn't always work out. If you start with theories with masses for more complicated systems (quarks as systems to build nucleons from), you cannot remove those divergences. So you *have* to start with a massless theory. If you transform the non-linear terms in the Hamiltonian about a minimum (things are "cool" enough), you get a quadratic term with mass, and a bunch of massless "Goldstone modes." If you absorb them into the gauge phase, and integrate that out, the other particle "swallows" the Goldstone modes, and acquire mass. So in terms of 'puzzle pieces,' you start with massless theories because you have to (otherwise you cannot compute anything without divergences). If this has any connection to reality, the fields we usually see at low energies that describe quarks in nucleons are those described after symmetry breaking, emergence of the Goldstone modes, and swallowing of the Higgs field. At higher energies, the particles should look massless and you'll see a Higgs particle. That means big accelerators. At the same time, it verifies a description that ties together a lot of disparate particle physics - strong interactions, (electro-)weak nuclear interactions, etc, now called the standard model.

One idea of a big bang is that the universe would have started at high densities of mass-energy, and cooled off. At some point, nucleons would form, electrons and nucleons would still be too hot to bind to each other. There would be close coupling between the electromagnetic field and the electron-proton soup. As things cooled down, the electrons bound to the protons making hydrogen atoms. When that happened, the coupling between the electromagnetic field and massive matter got much weaker; the electromagnetic photon soup cooled on its own ever since as the universe continued to expand. The remnant of that is the 3.2K radiation field. Similar decoupling events, symmetry-breaking condensation (Higgs mechanism) events for the "Standard Model" happened earlier on. In that sense, verifying Higgs in these accelerators implies that there is some understanding of some of the constraints relating to states of matter we see today, and the conditions much closer to the Big Bang.

One field not included in all of this is gravity. Formulation of its symmetries in ways that don't diverge seem to want something like strings. Another facet is that as you probe deeper into the structure, it is possible the quarks & Higgs fields have internal structures not revealed, that have also condensed out at earlier stages... just that there's no evidence seen to probe them effectively yet. To that extent, the quantum fields used to describe Higgs may be just another effective field theory that captures the behavior of the states of matter observed so far. However, this model may need tweaking if the BaBar results turn out to be right: http://techland.time.com/2012/06/21/its-the-end-of-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics-as-we-know-it/.

Some of you people are soooooooo funny.

"Notice that the video makes no mention of the Higgs boson as the "God particle." That's a label that Nobel-winning physicist gave to the god-danged particle decades ago, but since then, scientists have come to loathe the term."

RIGHT ON!

"GOD" is a religious concept, rejected by most thoughtful humans. Keep it out of Science 100% of the time. The so-called discovery didn't even reach it's own level of confidence as proscribed by the "scientists", AKA publicity-seekers, who defined it as a "level 5.0 something-or-other". It failed that measurement. Period. Check it out.

It's not necessarily wrong; it's just not proven Science, as defined by the scientists most involved; and it surely should never have been referred to as the "God" particle, as though there could possible be usch a thing.