h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of the first things I tried (and evidently failed, miserably) to do at H2G2, was to write a better description of the action of the Higgs Mechanism (actually Higgs, Englert, Brout, etc.) Mechanism that did not involve conversations with folks like the late Margaret Thatcher or other politicos, moving, or otherwise causing commotion across audiences of quarks or whatever.

Those famous one page Waldengrave descriptions are getting a bit old in a world that has actually had its first glimpse of what a Higgs boson can do, isn't it? Where are the words that will inspire the next generation of young physicists to apply this fleeting glimpse of understanding that evidently stands alone in the history of a finite mind trying to grasp just a tiny bit of a design so infinite? Politicians and rumors utterly fail to capture the idea, wouldn't you all say?

As someone who got laughed at for spelling it 'Hick's Boson' - by my sister the phsyicist - I'm all for a good explanation.

Looking forward to yours.

Bosons are not easily thought about in terms of things like clusters of individuals from the press corps, who most definitely cannot all occupy the same space at the same time. Politicians and Angelina Jolie might be good for propagating rumors about themselves or politically charged situations, but likewise, are not boson (or even photon) like.

The Higgs mechanism works even for particles that are not moving across the room. Nonetheless, if it didn't work exactly as Higgs described it, there would be no constituent particles to be able to move at less than the speed of light anyway.

It's really shocking that a piece of garbage conceived and written this badly would win any sort of award for anything other than bad writing. We need something better soon. Higgs is about to move into the centerpiece of mainstream (not just particle) physics quite soon now.