Updated: Readers Take a Stab at Describing the Higgs Boson

According to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) website, the particle accelerator seeks to answer some of the most fundamental questions science has today including the big one: How did our universe come to be the way it is?

We’re one step closer to the answer.

Scientists announced on July 4 from the LHC location in Geneva, Switzerland that they observed a new particle that might be the elusive Higgs boson.

Why is this important and what exactly is a Higgs boson anyway?

“The Standard Model of particle physics has proven to explain correctly the elementary particles and forces of nature through more than four decades of experimental tests,” read a statement released by Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) after the announcement of the potential discovery. “But it cannot, without the Higgs boson, explain how most of these particles acquire their mass, a key ingredient in the formation of our universe.”

Although the results are preliminary, many in the scientific community are excited about the news.

"It's hard not to get excited by these results," said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci in a statement released by the lab. " We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we're seeing in the data."

We asked readers to chime in on what the Higgs boson is and what it means.

On Facebook, Port Jefferson Station resident, Drew Linsalata said he’d take a shot at explaining it.

He said that the universe exists as we know it today because matter has mass and that mass is acted upon by four fundamental forces of nature.

He went on to say:

We've pretty much understood that the four forces are carried by specific subatomic particles (bosons). We also knew (obviously) that matter has mass, but we didn't know why. It was theorized (most famously by a physicist named Higgs), that there was another boson responsible for carrying mass - for imparting the property of mass onto other particles and therefore onto all matter. Thing is, we had no actual evidence to support the existence of this "Higgs boson", so the origin of mass as a physical property was still a mystery.

Scientists at Fermilab in Illinois did gather lots of evidence over the years that strongly suggested the existence of the Higgs boson, but nothing that could actually prove its existence. The collider at Fermilab just didn't have enough juice to produce the required conditions. Enter the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which creates conditions that very closely approximate the environment of the Big Bang. In those conditions, the Higgs boson reveals itself.

So, now we not only know that matter has mass, but we're getting a grip on WHY it has mass. The suddenly famous Higgs boson is responsible for it, and we all owe it a debt of gratitude for so graciously allowing the Universe as we know it to obtain its current configuration.

Robert Piacente said he thinks that the discovery is important to our view of how the world works.

“[Higgs boson] validates man’s ability to envision something like fire before it's found vs. accidental discovery,” he tweeted. “Things like Higgs boson concept and discovery does not answer why we're here but what makes here and how does it work.”

John Feinberg gave a very simple explanation.

“The world's most expensive and elusive particle known to man, aka, the God particle,” he replied.

We also asked BNL physicist Howard Gordon for an explaination. Gordon is one of the many scientists who has been working on discovering the Higgs boson. Here is what he told us:

The Higgs boson was conjectured in the 1960’s by three groups of six physicists trying to understand why some elementary particles have mass. If the particle announced at CERN on July 4 is indeed the Higgs boson, this will validate this conjecture. The Higgs boson has an associated field (analogous to a magnetic field) which fills all space. As particles move in this field, they acquire mass. Without this Higgs “mechanism” we would not have atoms or even life itself in our universe – so it is quite important. It is still possible that this discovery is not the standard Higgs boson and represents yet another more exotic type of new physics. This could be even more exciting if for example this new boson found is a “Supersymmetric” particle. We need to gather more date in the next few years to be sure that this is the standard Higgs or something else.  

Do you have your own description or questions about the Higgs boson announcement? Put them in the comment below to get the discussion going.