MSUM Physics/Astronomy Series presents “Higgs Boson: What’s the big deal?”
Presented by: Dr. Matt Craig
Department of Physics and Astronomy, MSUM
Friday, Oct. 26, 2012
3:00 p.m. to 3:50 p.m.
Hagen 325
The announcement this summer of the potential discovery of the Higgs Boson was big enough news that physicists around the work watched the seminar live on the Internet. Press coverage was extensive but necessarily avoided the details of what the Higgs particle is and why it is important. The story of the Higgs is the story of the modern approach to discovering and thinking about fundamental physical laws. In this talk we discuss the Higgs in the context of the simplest physically realistic gauge theory, Quantum Electrodynamics. Though the discussion will have a technical thread running through it, one of the remarkable things about the topic is that you can grasp the essence of it without extensive mathematics.