Learn about the explosion that started it all and how the universe grew from the size of an atom to encompass everything in existence today. The most widely accepted explanation is the big bang theory. How old is the universe, and how did it begin? Throughout history, countless myths and scientific theories have tried to explain the universe's origins. This slowdown is what gives those particles mass. Others get ensnared in the field, as if they were swimming through syrup. Some particles, such as photons, zip through this so-called Higgs field as if nothing were there. They theorized that an energy field throughout the universe interacts with particles in two different ways. In the 1960s, physicists including François Englert and Peter Higgs made an update to the Standard Model that explained why some particles, such as the packets of light known as photons, don't have mass, while other particles do. Still, it's remarkably successful at describing our universe's most basic bits and pieces. We know the Standard Model is incomplete it doesn't include dark matter-the elusive substance that makes up 85 percent of mass in the universe-or a description of how gravity works at the quantum level. The Higgs boson is a key particle within the Standard Model, the theory that describes the known elementary particles and the ways they interact. Wondering what a Higgs boson is, what a bottom quark is, and why they matter? We've got you covered. “Many people, in particular those who were in this experiment for a long time, are very, very excited about the results.” “We weren't sure we would ever actually be able to see it,” says CERN physicist Andreas Hoecker, deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS Collaboration, which manages one of the detectors. ( Read more about the Large Hadron Collider in National Geographic magazine.) The studies are also experimental breakthroughs that were decades in the making. The find marks another feather in the cap for theoretical particle physics, which predicted this decay. In two new studies, physicists show that detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) managed to observe Higgs bosons break down into pairs of tiny particles called bottom quarks. In 2012, scientists finally found the elusive particle, and now, they've gained crucial new insights by watching it break apart. For decades, physicists sought the Higgs boson: the theorized “God particle” whose alter ego, a field pervading the entire universe, endows matter with mass.
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