03:12
Now, if you followed the news at the time, you'll have seen a lot of physicists getting very excited indeed, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we get that way every time we discover a new particle. Well, that is kind of true, but the Higgs boson is particularly special. We all got so excited because finding the Higgs proves the existence of a cosmic energy field. Now, you may have trouble imagining an energy field, but we've all experienced one. If you've ever held a magnet close to a piece of metal and felt a force pulling across that gap, then you've felt the effect of a field. And the Higgs field is a little bit like a magnetic field, except it has a constant value everywhere. It's all around us right now. We can't see it or touch it, but if it wasn't there, we would not exist. The Higgs field gives mass to the fundamental particles that we're made from. If it wasn't there, those particles would have no mass, and no atoms could form and there would be no us.