What Next for Particle Physics?

摘要

The word boson causes no end of trouble when people report on the discovery of the Higgs boson, the master particle that allows the other fundamental paticles to have mass. It regularly gets pronounced "bosun," and once, while being interviewed on TV, I saw it spelled as "bosom." To clarify: Boson is the name for a generic class of particles. The Higgs boson is one, but so are many other particles. In the current Standard Model of particle physics, all the particles that carry forces-gluons (strong nuclear force), the W and the Z (weak nuclear force), photons (electro-magnetism), plus the graviton (gravity), if there is one-are bosons.