{"id":12099,"date":"2012-07-09T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=12099"},"modified":"2013-02-07T14:12:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T20:12:00","slug":"your-crash-course-in-particle-physics-the-higgs-boson-kind-of-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/culture\/your-crash-course-in-particle-physics-the-higgs-boson-kind-of-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Crash Course In Particle Physics: The Higgs Boson (kind of) Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
With the discovery of the Higgs boson<\/a> at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in French) earlier this week, it\u2019s about time you learned a little bit more about particle physics, isn\u2019t it? Before you go celebrating with a bottle of champagne, in the style of physicists currently celebrating all over the globe, here\u2019s a little crash course<\/a> on the Higgs boson and some of the physics they didn\u2019t get into during your introductory college course.<\/p>\n What particle physicists are tentatively calling the Higgs boson was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider<\/a>, a 16.5-mile tunnel over 100 meters beneath the French-Swiss border. Finding the missing Higgs boson was one of the purposes for which 111 countries collaborated to build the Large Hadron Collider. Two different teams of researchers, together comprising a total of about 5,000 people, analyzed over 800 trillion proton-proton collisions done over two years; last winter brought the first hints that a new particle that could be the Higgs boson was on the brink of being found.<\/p>\n