And so this neutral hydrogen has a very special line, which is at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. So collisional excitation of 21-centimeter radiation-- that is electron-hydrogen atom collisions-- is in very important diagnostics of the early universe. So one has to observe.
And that's why every electron is the same. They're all excitations of the same field. Now, you could have several excitations , that would be several electrons, and they can move around too.
They are created, destroyed. They are quantum excitations of a field. They are all these granular things that depend on the way you look at them.
It's made by atoms, whatever you want. Because these particles are actually quantum excitations of a field.
their remedy. Opponents of the bicycle latched onto this perception, arguing that riding would cost women more effort than they could afford. 'The exertion necessary to riding with speed is productive of an excitation of nervous and physical energy that is anything but beneficial,' Charlotte Smith warned. 'If a halt is not called soon, 75% of the cyclists will be an army of invalids within the next 10 years.'
They're all excitations of the same field. Now, you could have several excitations , that would be several electrons, and they can move around too. The only requirement is that they can never overlap exactly.
The only requirement is that they can never overlap exactly. Of course, there is nothing special about this kind of excitation . You could just as well have a mirror opposite.
And you see these theatrical gestures here in Haiti, voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity. Astonishing example of the mind's ability to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in a state of extreme excitation . We think of voodoo as dark, black magic simply because the Marine Corps occupied Haiti in the 1920s, stayed for 20 years.
But little by little, it became one of the most important missing parts of the so-called standard model. And so over 50 years, people tried to find the excitation of that field, which is the Higgs boson, and tried to prove that this theory was correct, or not. And so on the 4th of July, 2012, CERN, in the auditorium, made a big announcement.
And that's where we suffer. An elite athlete or a mindful person knows when that high state of arousal, that excitation could be because we're very excited because something
You could just as well have a mirror opposite. In fact, the equations that describe this field require such excitations to exist. They have the same mass and spin, but with opposite charge.
Now, this meant two things. The first is that most particles must have an antiparticle twin, because they're just mirror excitations in the same field. There are some exceptions though, like the photon and Higgs boson, which are their own antiparticle.
The energy got transferred into a different quantum field, the photon field, and that is what we mean by annihilation. Now, people realize that most fundamental particles could be described using the same approach, where each could be seen as an excitation of their very own quantum field. Now, this meant two things.
- This didn't just explain why there are antiparticles, but it also answered a more fundamental question, which is, why is every electron in the universe exactly the same? The answer began to take shape when people figured out that fundamental particles aren't just particles or waves, but rather excitations of a quantum field. So you'd have an electron field that permeates all of space, and this field can get excited, but only in identical, discrete units,
But watch what happens when they do. Now, I'm simplifying a little here, but because they're each other's mirror images, the opposite charges cancel each other out, the excitations disappear, and the field returns back to its ground state, but that would predict that the particles just disappear.
- And I should say here, going to Perplexity, the big-picture view, the Higgs field is the quantum field that fills all of space and gives many elementary particles, just as you're saying, their mass through their interaction with it. The Higgs boson is the particle associated with ripples or excitations of this field. In modern particle physics, every type of particle corresponds to a field that exists everywhere. The Higgs field is one such scalar field,
It has piezoelectric crystals glued to its surface, which will sense any slight vibration in the cylinder. And the trick is to have two of these cylinders a couple of thousand miles apart and look for co-incident excitations in the two cylinders. And what you see is if this happens, if you've eliminated all sources of vibration in the cylinders--
This one really looks good. And then years later, people found manifestations of this Higgs field, the quanta, the excitations of it.