The Higgs Field (by sarah)

This is a visual joke or pun about the Higgs field. It is in no way correct. I drew it last night and already this morning my little girl asks 'What's a Higgs Field?' so it's purpose has been served.

A Higgs Field is not the type of field where fluffy lambs play but it is thought to 'birth' the particles of the Boson family. These are sub-atomical particles but they are some of the ones that make up the sub-atomics you learnt at school. The Higgs-Boson particles are thought to be what gives all the other particles mass. Mass is what makes matter all clump together.

Matter is everything, so that is the atoms that make the stars, the atoms that make the Earth, the atoms that make you and me and Jeany and little baby Mary. All of it.

Without the Higgs everything would be wizzing around at the speed of light - they think. This was the idea they came up with 50 years ago, well specifically Peter Higgs did and he was told he was wrong but he kept going even though it is scary to be told you are wrong.

Now I'm still abit hazy on what is a field in this case and what is the particle so you may have to look that up yourself. (on that note guys are we talking probability fields and planck equations here? I'm a bit confused as the field is supposed to permeate the universe?)

The picture came from a friends facebook status were he gave his life sciences view on what had happened yesterday. I liked the imagery of a field giving birth to a particle and then I thought about the fact that yesterdays discovery had taken fifty years but like 3 of hard slog and that became the labour in my mind. Then I thought about the fact that they have found a Higgs-Boson and not the Higgs-Boson* and how annoyed anyone would be to have spent that long in labour and be told it wasn't over yet!

It is a shameless personification of something that can only really be visualised with mind bending maths and it is done as a joke! Honest guys don't shoot me 🙂

p.s. I am not saying that the theoretical part before the collider wasn't hard slog but more that the physical aspect of the experiments fit better with the idea of labour!

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