Higgely Piggely

Physicists in the U.S. and Europe are each spending billions of research dollars in a competitive search for the Higgs boson (named after the physicist, Peter Higgs who first postulated it), the last elementary particle (yet to be discovered) to complete the Standard Model theory of elementary particle physics. The U.S. is using the Fermilab in Batavia, IL and Europe will be using the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the border between France and Switzerland (due to be opened in 2008). Now the Higgs boson is particularly intriguing because it is the elusive elementary particle that is supposed to lend mass to all atomic structures (or matter) – a very meaningful attribute. I have, in the past, speculated on the possibility of gravity existing separately from matter (see this) and this Higgs boson would seem to support this premise … since gravity is proportional to the mass of any two entities. And, without mass, where is the gravity?

But what intrigues me more is why this mass-producing particle is so fleeting (thought to last only a few microseconds in the cloud chambers of these very high energy particle accelerators before it decays into other known subatomic particles)? After all, mass is far from being an elusive physical characteristic … and the converting matter into energy is a fairly complicated process (just ask Mahmoud Ahmabdinejad of Iran.) So why would the Higgs boson be so shy? Perhaps it is because it can only persist in the presence of a specific menu of other subatomic particles (such as those that make up a proton). If this be the case, then it would seem that most if not all Higgs bosons must have been created shortly (within a few hundred million years) after the Big Bang and so bonded to other subatomic particles to create the mass of the universe. And, to expand on my other blog’s speculation, gravity might also have been simultaneously acquired by the universe’s matter that had thusly acquired mass. The excess matter that never acquired the Higgs boson during this period of creation might then have become anti-matter (admittedly, a somewhat loopy speculation but it would explain why there is so much more matter than anti-matter). And the residual gravity that had not been acquired by matter (via something like a graviton) could be, as previously speculated, now represented by what we now call “dark matter.”

Those subatomic particles that are thought not to have any mass, such as photons and neutrinos, may then also be bereft of Higgs bosons (thought to be a relatively large subatomic particle). However, if on the other hand, photons and neutrinos do indeed have a tiny, tiny, miniscule mass (as I have speculated about in past blogs), then this suggests that there might be a spectrum of Higgs boson types (and therefore sizes.) Remember, you read it here first and, I would ask that, this being the case, the smallest of the Higgs bosons be then christened the “Higgs-Potts boson.”