{"id":5022,"date":"2009-03-16T09:21:52","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T13:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=5022"},"modified":"2009-03-16T09:21:52","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T13:21:52","slug":"the-god-particle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=5022","title":{"rendered":"The God Particle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.straightdope.com\/columns\/read\/2850\/what-is-the-god-particle\">The Straight Dope: What is the \"God particle\"?<\/a>, an analogy for our time:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Now for the woolly part. If it exists, the Higgs [God] particle is a part of the Higgs field, which fills the universe but is invisible to our eyes and, so far, to all scientific instruments. Subatomic particles \u2014 everything that makes up matter \u2014 are thought to acquire mass by how they interact with the Higgs field. To explain how this works, I'll paraphrase an explanation floated in 1993 by David Miller, then at the department of physics and astronomy, University College, London. Imagine a convention hall filled with political groupies, a scary thought all by itself. The hall represents the universe; the groupies represent the Higgs field. Now suppose Barack Obama enters the room. (In Miller's telling the political heavyweight was Margaret Thatcher, but that was then.) Obama represents a subatomic particle. The political groupies cluster around the president, seeking to bask in his cool and possibly get a job at the State Department. As Obama tries to make his way through the room, he gathers new hangers-on, while others drop off due to embarrassing questions about unpaid taxes. The cluster of groupies hovering around Obama represents the mass the president gains while he's in the Higgs field.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Straight Dope: What is the \"God particle\"?, an analogy for our time: Now for the woolly part. If it exists, the Higgs [God] particle is a part of the Higgs field, which fills the universe but is invisible to our eyes and, so far, to all scientific instruments. Subatomic particles \u2014 everything that makes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}