The end of the world Wednesday, the Higgs Boson, the Force, and God

My physicist brother gave me an earful today about all the hoopla. This is only a big deal because finding this thing (probably) was so difficult. Out of billions of events, the computers think that something happened 13 times instead of the 5 times you would expect if there was no Higgs boson shrapnel hitting the sensors. But the theory that posits the Higgs boson correctly predicted all the other particles we found, so this wasn't really much of a surprise for us to find it, nor will finding it change anyone's thinking about anything important. It's like spending hours to search your house for the last piece of the puzzle whose picture you can already see pretty darn well. The disappointing thing was that they found nothing else (not even little black holes).

The Higgs doesn't give give mass to everyday matter. That comes from the interaction between fundamental particles and subatomic forces. The Higgs gives mass to exotic stuff that we humans only see in particle accelerators, and it's what makes them difficult to create and quick to go away in nature.

I reject this. The context of the tale is a discussion of the ship's speed, not maneuverability or whatever quality you need to get near black holes, and certainly not the pilot.

Came across this recently. It's one of the better science popularizer explanations of the Higgs boson.

I tuned out when the Whitecaps jersey made an appearance. It's like trying to listen to some white guy in black face explain physics.