Discussion Board Question

IYSF have invited Professor Steve Lloyd PhD (Lond) FinstP CPhys to pose the fist ever  debate question. 


Professor Lloyd currently works in the Physics department in Queen Mary University of London .
His expertise is in experimental particle physics; the ATLAS collaboration,  studying proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN; data produced by the LHC; development of the 'Grid' - a massive distributed computer system to analyse vast amounts of data that is being produced by the LHC.

Professor Lloyds question :

"Scientists at CERN in Geneva are using the Large Hadron Collider to search for a new fundamental particle called the Higgs particle (or Higgs boson). In the so called Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs particle explains mathematically how all the other fundamental particles like quarks and leptons acquire mass. The theory is that the whole of space is filled with Higgs particles in the form of a Higgs field and that as the other particles pass through space they interact with this field and are slowed down such that they no longer travel at the speed of light, as massless particles would, and hence appear to have mass. How do you explain to a non-scientist what the Higgs particle is ?"