I've had to spend many an hour in a physics classroom, sometimes because I had to and sometimes because I wanted to. When I was an engineering professor at Iowa State University I use to join an electrical engineering professor in graduate classes in the physics department. We only set in on the most incomprehensible courses where I was probably the only one that didn't know what the heck was going on.

I remember during the last quarter of a solid state physics course when our genius instructor stumbled, something that had never occurred. No one could help him so I raised my hand and told him where he had missed a step. After the class my electrical engineer friend said, "Jones, how did you no that!" I told him that he had used perturbation theory dozens of times to solve a problem and all I knew was that he wasn't doing what he did before.

So I have always had an interest in physics and cosmology, the study of the origins of the universe.

There has been a lot of excitement in the physics community worldwide the last few days. Conferences were gathered to hear breaking news from Cern and the Hadron Colllider. Dr. HIggs and his associates were invited to hear the breaking news.

The news was that a particle which would account for the mass of protons and neutrons and all matter called a boson was detected that showed the properties of the HIggs boson with a distinct mass. Higgs and his associates never predicted the mass, which would have cemented things a bit further. But all physicist and a few clowns like me became very excited.

Other than that we blew ten billion dollars on the Cern experiments, what does this all mean? It means that the needed particle is there to keep us from falling apart sending out bits and pieces of ourselves out in to the void of space at the speed of light. Without the particle, matter as we know it would not exist.

Well, if they didn't find the particle with their fantastic detectors, we would still hold together. But there could be other implications. One physicist said that they might figure out what the implications will be in a couple of thousands of years.

Meanwhile: Aren't You Excited!

John

P.S. For those of you who already like this stuff, the collider which is about 18 miles in circumference located on the Swiss/French border uses powerful magnetic fields to send one proton in one direction and another in the opposite direction. When they collide, the three quarks and gluons go a flying along with any other particles that might be lurking inside the protons. The detectors, of which there are different types, determine properties of all the particles and their mass.