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.

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