Got Questions About the Higgs Boson? Ask a Scientist (1/2)

Ask a scientist about the Higgs boson. There's a lot of buzz this week over new data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the final data from Fermilab's Tevatron about the Higgs boson. It raises questions about what scientists have found and what still remains to be found -- and what it all means.

Berkeley Lab's Ian Hinchliffe invites you to send in questions about the Higgs. He'll answer a few of your questions in a follow-up video later this week. Hinchliffe is a theoretical physicist who heads Berkeley Lab's sizable contingent with the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

• Post your questions in the comment box
• E-mail your questions to askascientist@lbl.gov
• Tweet to @BerkeleyLab
• Or post on our facebook page: facebook/berkeleylab

Update on July 5: Ian responds to several of your questions in this video: http://youtu.be/1BkpD1IS62g

Update on 7/04: Here's CERN's press release from earlier today on the latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressR...

And here's a Q&A on what the news tells us: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBul...

CERN will present the new LHC data at a seminar July 4th at 9:00 in the morning Geneva time (3:00 in the morning Eastern Daylight Time, midnight on the Pacific Coast), where the ATLAS collaboration and their rivals in the CMS experiment will announce their results. Tevatron results were announced by Fermilab on Monday morning.

For more background on the LHC's search for the Higgs boson, visit http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-sto....

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[BerkeleyLab]

Hello everyone. I posted links to CERN's press release on the latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle in the video description, as well as a Q&A on what the news tells us.

If you have questions about the Higgs boson, post 'em below and Ian will answer a few in a follow-up video on Friday.

[Mike Peine]

i have been teaching people since 1969 how to build there own FREE ENERGY DEVICE The united nations uses my instructions as a joke 60k hp 24k ft lbs EXAMPLE LINEAR MOTOR #BLDD-06 makes 0to200lbs(24/7)/600lbs peak@10%duty of PUSH&PULL forces @0to12G's/^20G'speak @any stroke FROM ONLY ! 0to4amps/12amps peak i build my own @^2k P&P EXAMPLE taken from Google H2W Technologies online spec's catalog. Scientists are puppets of the cannibalistic government which is corrupt enslaving children & the world

[deedubya286]

I don't think so. I can't think of any time, other than maybe the Manhattan Project, where the cutting edge of scientific research had a specific goal in mind. I could be wrong but I think it's just a case of, as Richard Feynman said, "I'm just trying to find out more about the world."

[antipodeandreason]

How does the Higgs give itself mass? or How can the Higgs give mass to particles that are more massive than it?

If you could answer one of those please.

[Danail Irinkov]

Since CERN is an expensive project, publicly funded and of global importance, why scientists dare delay results in order to write papers for their own good ?

[MsPinecone123]

Also my daughter is a junior studying plant genetics at Berkeley and I was just there two days ago. Just love that campus. That said, really appreciate your work and your being available to answer questions from all of us lay folk.

[Carlos Bueno]

How the Higgs Boson can give the mass to other particles? is it related in any way with the graviton?

[MsPinecone123]

Right - I kind of knew that, but I think what I meant to say was is there anything on the horizon that researchers are hoping to do with their new found "enlightenment"?