[From Wikipedia] The Higgs boson stands on its own in the updated Standard Model of elementary particles (electrons, protons and neutrons are made up of these and are therefore not elementary particles).Our Saturday night movie fare was ‘Particle Fever’, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The confirmation of the long-postulated Higgs boson particle’s existence gave further credibility to the Standard Model, but the giant experiment’s results were inconclusive in another way. The weight of the Higgs boson is thought to point to one or two completely opposite views of the universe. One the hand the proposal is that there is one cosmos (universe) with a cosmological constant (that indicates the energy density of the vacuum of space – but don’t ask me what energy density of the vacuum of space is!). The other proposal is that there are multiple universes, and that each has a randomly assigned cosmological constant. What the Higgs boson’s mass indicate? Well, it fell right in the middle of the values thought to support the two opposite views! Man! We need more data! (And as it turns out, the LHC is already getting warmed up for another series of atom smashing in early 2015).
On the left is the Standard Model that says there is one universe, underpinned by the Higgs boson that gives mass to all the particles. Its mass is thought to be 125.6 GeV. (Giga electron-volt. Electron-volt measures energy, but at this sub-sub-atomic level, units for mass and energy are interchangeable). Anything significantly heavier than that would have pointed to us living in one of several universes – AND that there is really no such thing as a ‘standard model’ of elementary particles.
