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The higgs boson4/1/2023 Here's where we start to "see" things like the Higgs boson. The energy that's created can allow us to see really, really heavy particles created in the collision. When they do collide, the composite particles spray out into their smaller parts - quarks and leptons. Those protons zip in opposite directions around the nearly 17-mile (27 kilometer) circle and run into each other millions of times a second. The Large Hadron Collider is like a NASCAR track for swarms of racing protons (and some heavy ions, too). In those conditions, we can see how things like quarks and leptons flew about and if something like the Higgs boson also was created to provide the mass that allows them to clump into composite particles like protons. Rather they were searching for particles that might make up a Higgs field, and they thought their search might be successful if they could just recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. Of course, physicists weren't exactly looking for some sort of universal maple syrup that we'd all been swimming in without noticing. So it would be with our particles when they slogged through the Higgs field. Suddenly, our speedy, little fly feels quite heavy. Imagine a fly buzzing through the air it's zipping along just fine until it encounters a strong headwind. Instead of trying to figure out how all these equations could be modified and designed to work with mass-laden particles, why not keep the math and add the assumption that the particles are operating in a field that exerts a drag on them? If that was the case, we might find a substance in this "field" that adds mass to a particle by creating resistance. Peter Higgs and some of his fellow physicists had an idea. They weren't body-shaming the little guys that make up atoms and molecules it was just that their mathematical representations of a symmetrical universe didn't really work unless the particles were massless. So if scientists at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) weren't expecting to see something that resembled a prop in a stage production of "Peter Pan," what were they looking for? For a long time, physicists were puzzled by the fact that particles like electrons and quarks had mass. In other words, there is a one in 3.5 million chance that an experiment to find the Higgs would come up with results that seemed to confirm it, even if no such particle existed. The five-sigma confidence level actually meant that there was a one in 3.5 million chance that even if no Higgs particle existed, CERN staff would have seen the same results. As with a lot of physics news, it's more complicated than that. You might've heard that "5-sigma" indicated there was a one in 3.5 million chance the famed boson didn't exist. As reported, the data collected was at 5-sigma levels of certainty.
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