10 Controversial Theories About The Universe's Toughest Questions
7. The Higgs Field: What Makes Matter?
In order to really explain or understand the Big Bang and the formation of our universe we have to understand how energy is converted into matter. Or to put it another way, what gives matter mass.
We know that light is an electromagnetic wave and electromagnetic waves have an ability that other types of wave, such as a sound wave, do not have. They can propagate through empty space at the speed limit of the universe - light speed. If you were a light wave you would experience no time, no space and every journey would appear to be instantaneous. This time dilation is described by Einsteins special relativity and it explains that as we move faster, time slows down.
When you reach the speed of light, time has no meaning. To the photon that hits your eye, it didn't take millions of years to work its way out from the heart of the star plus 8 minutes to travel from the sun and though the atmosphere to your eye, it happened instantly.
So what does this have to do with the Higgs field? Well, what the teams at the LHC and around the world managed to show was that there is something called the Mexican Hat potential in the Higgs field. Massless particles, called Bosons, spin around the lower rim of the hat and don't gain mass. Whereas leptons, or massive particles, travel up and down the hat gaining mass as they do. Think about this like a ball being thrown in a parabola gaining gravitational energy as it climbs but having to put more work into climbing higher.
A massive particle like an electron or a proton, then, is an excitation of the background Higgs field giving it a mass potential. The recent confirmation of the Higgs Boson at the LHC is momentous, but it is by no means the end of the story for the LHC as higher and higher energies will be used to probe further into the early universe.
It is worth covering, briefly, what it is that happens at the LHC. It is not, as some might suspect, smashing two particles together to make them break apart and see what they're made of. That would be akin to smashing two unknown cars together at thousands of miles an hour then trying to determine the exact position of the steering wheel. Rather, it invokes the previously mentioned E=MC^2 to increase the energy of the collisions to such a degree that particles which don't exist naturally anymore are created and their properties probed. The reason we can say that we know what happened up to 10^-14 seconds after the Big Bang is that it is a factor of the level of energy we are able to recreate vs the energy level at a given time in the early universe. The more energetic the collision, the further back in the history of the universe we see, the different particles and properties we can ascertain.
The confirmation of the Higgs field then explains why we have mass, why particles interact with each in the way they do and also helps explain parts of wave/particle duality.