Second of two parts (read part 1)
There’s something wrong with the Higgs boson.
It’s like a two-headed snake. Cats playing with dogs. Rabbits without baby bunnies. Voldemort’s nose.
It ain’t natural.
In this case, “natural” does not mean the opposite of artificial, like sweeteners or Christmas trees. “Naturalness” is actually a technical term in physics, although there is some confusion about exactly how to define it.
In any event, the Large Hadron Collider’s discovery of the Higgs boson with the mass that it had (roughly 125 times the mass of a proton) has perplexed some physicists because they can’t articulate a “natural” explanation for it.
To get a just a bit more technical, the issue involves what physicists call the “hierarchy” problem. It has to do with particle masses. (Remember, the Higgs particle is the offspring of a field that gives particles their masses.) Naively, it would be natural to expect particles to have masses at roughly the scale of the fundamental quantum unit of mass, known as the Planck mass. It’s calculated by properly combining Newton’s gravitational constant, Planck’s constant and the speed of light in a formula producing a number with the units of mass. And it turns out to be roughly 10 million billion trillion electron volts, or 20 millionths of a gram. By particle physics standards, that’s enormously heavy — physicists variously compare it to the mass of an eyebrow hair, or a flea’s egg, or millions of bacteria.
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