One of my Facebook friends shared this amazing article today. If the excerpt interests you, you can read the full (but long) version at the COSMOS Magazine link below:
The Higgs boson as simulated by one of the detectors at CERN
“Everything you’ve been told about physics is wrong.”
From his opening remarks to his punchline, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll knows how to grab an audience’s attention. And when Carroll talks physics, people listen. The “wrong” that Carroll is referring to is the widely held view that the world is made up of particles. Not so, he says. At the heart of it all, everything is fields – electric, magnetic and beyond. Even the celebrated hunt for the Higgs particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in our universe, is actually a quest to nail down the Higgs field.
Over the past century and a half, field theory has come to dominate our understanding of the universe, from the cosmic to the subatomic. General relativity is a field theory that describes how gravity choreographs the elegant motions of galaxies, stars, planets and moons, while at the other end of the scale quantum field theory describes the chaos of the subatomic world. As physicists now see it, our universe is nothing less, and nothing more, than a collection of fields invisibly filling space with their powerful, generative effects.
