PART 1: We'll first watch a short video that does a great job explaining the Higgs Boson.

The question of mass has been an especially puzzling one, and has left the Higgs Boson as the single missing piece of the Standard Model yet to be spotted. The Standard Model describes three of nature's four forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Electromagnetism has been fairly well understood for many decades. Recently, physicists have learned much more about the strong force, which binds the elements of atomic nuclei together, and the weak force, which governs radioactivity and hydrogen fusion (which generates the sun's energy).  http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/higgs.html

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PART 2: "Back to a Microsecond-The Particle Cascade" video.

The lecturer is Mark Whittle from the University of Virginia and the lecture series is entitled, "Cosmology:  The History and Nature of Our Universe."

The primary feature of the second-old Universe was its enormous "energy density"--literally a ton of energy per cubic centimeter.  In the lecture we move backward in time, encountering ever-higher temperature and density.  At 10 seconds, electrons and antielectrons annihilate to make the photons that become the microwave background.  In a wonderful story of delicate timing, a neutrino fog clears at 1 second, allowing the continued existence of neutrons that ultimately make helium 3 minutes later.  Pushing farther back, before a microsecond, a dense quark-gluon plasma filled the Universe.  As it cooled below a trillion degrees, it condensed into protons and neutrons.  No sooner created, these protons suffered almost total annihilation with antiprotons in a brief moment of carnage.  Amazingly, it's possible to reproduce all these conditions here on Earth by smashing whole atomic nuclei together.  It seems that the Universe's first microsecond may have been liquid.

Cole Morgan [address removed][masked]