A while ago we reported on the discovery of the Higgs particle
at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. On March 14, CNN
and other news outlets reported some new information to coincide
with both pi day (3.14) and Albert Einstein's birthday. So
what's it all about? Back in July of 2012, scientists at the LHC
reported that they'd found a particle that behaves very much
like the Higgs particle. The Higgs particle is not so important
in itself, but it gives us clues about the Higgs field, which is
the field that gives you and me (and the particles that make us
up) mass. They were able to find the Higgs particle ahead of
schedule because of a surprising way in which the particle was
decaying. The best way to think of the Higgs particle is a
disturbance (a wave or a wiggle) in the Higgs field. But this
disturbance is very unstable. The Higgs particle survives in our
world only a tiny fraction of a second, such a short time that
we never see the particle itself – we only see the things it
decays into. One of t