Playing the Higgs Field

Keywords: Higgs Field, Quantum Particles, Mass

The Story: I quite enjoy having some mass, now that I know the alternative: to exist as a collection of waves travelling at the speed of light. (Talk about boring! Ak!) When scientists smash up atoms into smaller and smaller pieces, the smallest possible pieces - quantum particles - are supposed to exist without mass. Instead they were found to have relatively tremendous mass. In 1964 Peter Higgs stepped up to solve this important riddle - why do particles have mass? Higgs essentially back-calculated how much of a force, kind of an invisible, ever-reaching thick soup, it would take to slow down quantum particles enough to give them mass. This was named the Higgs Field, and it comes out to be 1 trillion tons per cubic centimeter. Now, before you congratulate your own strength, there is an unknown ad hoc negative field (a.k.a the "cosmological constant") that cancels out most of this force. Why? Because if there weren't, the universe would be expanding exponentially faster than it is right now. Lucky for us, there's just enough positive energy (the Higgs Field) to give us a little mass, and just enough cancelling negative energy (the cosmological constant) to keep the universe from wrecklessly flying apart. Between the two forces, there is only the thinnest margin that makes us possible. Phew.

See for yourself:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5601491934104934085&q=Atoms+to+X-rays

Profess your love for the Higgs Field in comments.