What Exactly Is The Higgs Boson?

03:13

October 08, 2013

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. (CERN)

Peter Higgs and Francois Englert will share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory that proposes a mechanism that explains why particles in the universe have mass.

The Higgs boson – the particle they theorized would exist — was subsequently discovered by scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

This is all very technical, and hard to grasp, so theoretical physicist Brian Greene joins Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson to explain what exactly the Higgs boson is, and why it is such a profoundly important concept.

New York Times: An illustrated guide to understanding the Higgs boson

Guest

Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University.

This segment aired on October 8, 2013.