'Higgs boson blues'

If there is anything firm about the Higgs boson, it is that this particle is somewhere between popular science and pop iconography.

In fact, one of Nick Cave's songs is titled

Higgs boson blues.

It is a sad ballad sung with a broken voice, like a

twilight

crooner

, where the search and the journey take on a tone that ceases to be familiar to become sinister.

This gives us an idea of ​​the relevance of the discovery of the Higgs boson at the popular level.

But what is the Higgs boson?

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle that is related to mass, a substantial property without which the universe would not have originated.

Scientific curiosity, applied to the case of the Higgs boson, teaches us that mass expresses the resistance that forms the Higgs quantum field.

This field extends throughout the entire universe, and receives the name Higgs because the physicist Peter Higgs was its discoverer.

But in order not to get confused, let's start at the beginning, which is where all things begin, including songs.

We already know that we are made up of atoms, not just us, but the entire universe

We already know that we are made up of atoms, not just us, but the entire universe. These atoms, in turn, are made up of particles that can be of two types, depending on their relationship with the visible or invisible world. In this way we find fermions and bosons. While fermions constitute solid matter, bosons do so with the forces of nature, that is, with the force of gravity, the electromagnetic force or the nuclear force, whether strong or weak.

Examples of bosons include photons that are particles associated with the electromagnetic field and that lack mass, hence they travel at the speed of light, quite the opposite of the bosons known as W and Z bosons, associated with force. nuclear weak and that, having mass, encounter resistance and travel slower, which raises the question of why some particles have mass and others lack it.

To answer this, it was theorized about a Higgs field whose associated particles meet the property of mass, unlike the photon that lacks it because it is associated with another field, in this case the electromagnetic field.

With this, it was concluded that the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force maintain a set of mirrors whose origin would be the electroweak force.

Ever since Peter Higgs theorized in 1964 about the reason why elementary particles would have obtained their mass, physicists have followed tracks through the invisible world.

Now, to define the Higgs field it is necessary to find the associated particle, the Holy Grail of the quantum world, the God particle as some call it and which was manifested on July 4, 2012, at the LHC facilities (Gran Hadron Collider).

Since Peter Higgs theorized in 1964 about the reason why elementary particles would have obtained their mass, until the day of the discovery of the divine particle, physicists followed tracks through the invisible world, allowing themselves to be carried away by the friction that occurs between the uncertainty and the experience to reach a crossroads where the melody of discouragement is charged by the devil himself, as Nick Cave sings, dragging his voice down a path of dust and other unidentified particles.

With these things, the scope of the reality of the particles goes beyond the field of physics and reaches pop culture, becoming an inspiring material to participate in an artistic act such as a song.

The stone ax

is a section where

Montero Glez

, with the will of prose, exercises his particular siege to scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.

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