What IS the "God particle"?

Yet another unexpected and unplanned post...
But hey, such are the times we live in.

As you may have heard by now, researchers from CERN have announced that they have reached a 99.99995 % (or "at 4.9 sigma significance", as they put it) of certainty that they have found the Higgs boson, also known as "the God particle".

What is the Higgs boson?
And why is it called "the God particle"?

To put it very, very simply - but then, all the greatest things in the world are simple - the Higgs boson (called after Peter Higgs, the British physicist who was among the first physicists to theorise about its existence around 1964) is a mysterious subatomic particle that imparts the components of every atom their mass.
They need mass to stay together and form an atom, in the first place, or they would be dispersed, buzzing around and forming nothing.

In other words, the Higgs boson could be seen as a spark of the cohesive force - the "eros" - that permeates the universe and makes it stick together and BE.
That, I am assuming, is why it is called "the God particle".

It gives an extra meaning to the saying God is love, doesn't it? 

Think about eros.
It's not just porn, you know. :)
In fact, it is the cohesive force of everything that is.

About those magnetic portals...

We weren't going to post anything in the near future (unless some of our readers send us more delightful stories :)), but we've had a few emails yesterday and today, from people asking about the "magnetic portals" that supposedly have been discovered recently.


Magnetic portals connecting the Earth to the Sun - or flux transfer events - are not a new discovery. Their existence had been established by 2008.

What is new is that apparently a NASA-funded researcher from Iowa has found a way to chase them down. (We'll try and find a reliable source of information after sunset, when it cools down a little bit, all right? :))


This story has been making the rounds in the "alternative" media in the past 48 hours or so.
Predictably but irritatingly, most of these stories start with allusions to various science fiction films. Here is a good example, complete with videos.


This is only irritating because there is no logical continuity with what follows next - the description of these magnetic portals. In other words, there is no evident reason to jump to the conclusion that these magnetic portals would do any of those neat tricks we're familiar with from sci-fi films - like wormholing us to other universes, or serve as shortcuts for extraterrestrial holiday-makers to and from Earth.


What DO those magnetic portals do?
Well, for one thing, they form every eight minutes, and that's enough to seriously tickle my mind. Like, why EIGHT? What happens or ceases to happen during those eight minutes?

The implications of their activity, I don't yet understand.
Maybe you will.

Here is the original NASA text from 2008:

During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

Read the rest of it here.