It's summer and it's preferable go out, sleep and eat a lot than write an entry in a blog, but I haven't written for a month and my conscience have been asking me for it.
Well, some weeks ago we've listen and read about a great discovery in the field of physics: the Higgs boson, that has been discovered with a high probability of success.
But what's the Higgs boson? What's its relation with the measure units?
As far as I know, the Higgs boson it's a hypothetical/theorical particle that would help to improve the knowledge of the origin of the mass, and, thereby, help to connect three of the four fundamental forces: the "weak interaction" ("weak nuclear force"), the "electromagnetism", and the "strong interaction" ("strong nuclear force").
The explanation is, more or less, that exists a Higgs field everywhere, composed of Higgs bosons (that have a minimal mass that in 31 July 2012 is believed at 125.3 ± 0.4 (stat) ± 0.5 (sys) GeV/c). So that some other elemental particles are "filled" of a quantity of them (because the Higgs field fills everywhere), and then this particles become particles with mass.
I'm not going to write more technical information about this because I would make mistakes because of my ignorance about that.
Only say that nowadays the Higgs boson isn't a measure unit, and its mass value is measured in GeV (Gigaelectronvolt) :
1 GeV = 1x109 eV (electronvolt).
1eV = 1.6×10−19 joule (symbol J)
In high-energy physics, electron-volt is often used as a unit of momentum: 1 eV/c is the momentum (where c is the speed of light in a vacuum):
In particle physics, where mass and energy are often interchanged, it's common to express mass in units of eV/c2, using the Einstein's equation: E = mc2 :
1 eV/c² = 1,783 × 10-36 kg
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