Steven Weinberg discusses Higgs Boson particle advancements

About 1,500 people from all over the world gathered in Texas Hall to listen to Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg’s lecture Wednesday.

The lecture titled "The Standard Model, Higgs Boson: Who Cares?" was part of the annual International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders. This is the first time the conference is being held in Texas.

Jaehoon Yu, physics department associate professor, said the event’s attendance was record-breaking.

Why the Higgs Boson Matters

The July 4 announcement that the “Higgs boson” had been discovered at the CERN laboratory in Geneva made news around the world. Why all the fuss? New discoveries of elementary particles have been made from time to time without attracting all this attention. It is often said that this particle provides the crucial clue to how all the other elementary particles get their masses. True enough, but this takes some explanation.

Glow in the dark

LAST week scientists at CERN, Europe's main particle-physics lab, finally ran the Higgs boson to ground. The discovery of the Higgs, whose existence was first predicted in 1964, is a powerful demonstration of the predictive powers of the Standard Model of particle physics. But other scientists have powerful theories of their own, even if they get less press than particle physicists do. A paper just published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reports another predictive triumph, this time for astronomers.

Time to toast our Boson buddies

YOU MUST understand, someone said once, that there is pure mathematics, and applied mathematics, and a subset of that called physics, the study of the mathematics of matter and motion. And then there is astrophysics. Beyond that, theoretical physics. Beyond that, speculation. And then there is rank speculation. And far beyond that we have cosmology.

Cosmology, boiled down, is the search for order about mass, energy and motion affecting the entire universe, turning mostly around theories of the Big Bang, but also containing amusing diversions such as the Black Hole discovered by John Howard, as well as the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker trilogy in five books, and Stephen Hawking's A short history of time, which no-one has ever had the time (or inclination) to finish.