what i find hard to understand is why is it so unstable considering what its job is, is it because it is outside of an atom. i now protons only last for 15 mins outside of a an atom but this thing lasts for a trillionth of a second

 

so what happens now? we can suddenly explain how matter attains its mass? So a particle weighing 125.3 GeV has been discovered. Is it not possible that this is made up of multiple particles/protons (any other matter) being in the same place at the same time?

How does this discovery affect the world? What can we gain?

 

if we are lucky we might get TV remote control devices with "find me" beepers on them

but I am not holding my breath

 

Lots of videos on the Higgs boson here:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...de-simple?lite

 

 

Elusive,as in extremely difficult to observe, is a better description, Higgs illiterate, is a good layman description i think.

This is the standard model below, it says there should be 12 kinds of fields that compose basically everything. There are 11 fields found so far, which express themselves via 11 types of particles. These have all been seen. The 12th is what they are calling the Higgs field.


To attempt to answer it is because it is outside of an atom then no. Quarks join together to make the proton and neutron which make up atoms. The most familiar Leptons to us are electrons and together with quarks make up all the matter we can see and touch. The force carriers are most familiar to us as electricity and light, electromagnetism etc But in this model, nothing requires the particles to have mass, So the Higgs Field is, they think, a universe spanning field that has the exact same strength everywhere across the universe. The strength between one of the 11 original Fields and the Higgs Field determines the particle masses you get. This is why some particles have more mass than others, it is why we have weight, why we have inertia, basically fields that can draw mass, draw their mass from this field.

I realise the above paragraph is overly simplistic and probably not 100% correct, but it gives a general idea. A friend of mine said to me the other night the reason why this stuff is so hard to wrap your head around, is because it is not yet in our language, the example he gave to me was programming languages in regards computers, which can be massively complicated and almost impossible to explain to a layman, even simple programming like this page you are reading, HTML, looks somthing
like the below, now try to explain HTML/CSS in text format to someone, without showing them a webpage.
Human kind will continue a path we’ve been on for hundreds of years, systematically making progress in understanding how our universe works. Scientific discoveries have allowed us to be where we are today, some discoveries more significant than others, but all of them relevent to where we are as a species.

200 years ago we were closer to the stone ages than the modern age. 100 years ago we couldn't fly, 150 years ago we didn't have the combustion motor, cars didn't exist. 200 years ago we didn't even have an electric motor, electricity was brand new.

We are in the future right now, we take it for granted because we were born with it or grew up with it, take a person from 200, 150, and 100 years, and transport them to the present, they wouldn't be able to comprehend our world today, bloody hell, we have had people living in space continuously since 2001 on the ISS and no one bats an eye lid.

The reason you probably won't hear CERN scientists state how this discovery may or may not affect the world is because it is useless to try and predict what sort of world humans might live in 100 years from now. We don't even have the ideas which will allow us to understand the concepts for comprehending the technology which will be at play.

It is all theoretical at the minute, however, if we can understand mass to the same extent that we understand electricity and the electromagnetic field, we could turn off mass and then accelerate to any speed, distances will be achieved instantly, if we could control mass or even influence it, then anything to do with how heavy something is would not be a problem anymore.

Pretty far-fetched right now to think that, but if you told someone from the 40s humans would land on the moon within 30 years, they would of laughed in you face.

This is just the start of things to come and in the thousands of years of human existence, right now is the best time to be alive, that is why it is such big news.