The discovery of the Higgs boson

Transcript for video 1.5

Introduction
Prof Luigi Del Debbio
Hi. I'm Luigi Del Debbio, and I work on theoretical particle physics here at the
University of Edinburgh. OK, this MOOC is about the discovery of the Higgs
boson, which means that, in the coming weeks, we will discuss the
fundamental constituents of matter and the way they interact. Now, we know
enough to describe the dynamics of matter at the subatomic scale, so at the
smallest distances ever explored. We actually need to introduce a number of
sophisticated theories, like quantum mechanics and special relativity.
Now, before we do that, this week we are going to focus on classical
mechanics - that is, Newtonian mechanics - which is hopefully a much more
familiar subject, which describes the behaviour of macroscopic matter as we
experience in everyday life. So we are going to use Newtonian mechanics as
a framework to introduce a number of basic concepts that are actually needed
during this course. And we will provide a few simple examples, where we can
actually discuss these fundamental concepts in a quantitative way, which
means that we are going to consider a number of simplified models where
they can actually perform proper computations to illustrate the concepts that
we want to introduce.


















CC-BY-NC-SA
This transcript is published as Creative Commons under the Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 4.0 license, as outlined at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/