Higgs Boson Blues

They gave Nobel Prize long ago but I some how did not give it too much thought until this week.

But now it hounds me...

1) on Monday I had Higgs mechanism during tutorial from Astrophysics... 

2) then I have found a lecture that took place at my university some time ago, that one could refer to as a lecture about 'Brout-Englert-Higgs Mechanism for kids'.

3) And now I have some how come about the song "Higgs Boson Blues" on youtube while watching make-up tutorials... I do not even know (?!)... anyway

Here is Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds playing Higgs Boson Blues:

I mean song has nothing to do with physics but it made me think about all that Higgs stuff.

It is just Tuesday... but I am gonna claim that this is 

Higgs week of my life!

...now I better go back to working on my thesis...

H-bar curse

When you start studying physics you get introduced very quickly to h-bar constant.

H-bar is called the reduced Planck constant (Planck constant divided by 2PI) or the Dirac constant.

H-bar is fantastic!

Why? Because it is always with us whenever we work with quantized light or matter.

And who doesn't like that?

If you studied physics long enough you are slowly adjusting to not forget a bar on your h. interestingly enough after few more years in a field it becomes a challenge to not write h-bar in equations wherever h occurs.

I thought it is just me but not it is a curse and most of the students fall in that trap.

There is nothing we can do about it...

We can live proudly with our curse...

There is actually one more stage it is called "natural units stage".

(In natural units h-bar=1)

Once you get there you will never write h-bar again.

I am not there yet but I am getting there...

disappointment

During last lecture from Quantum Mechanics we heard depressing and disappionting news.

When we look at the world classically we can make statements that it has zero energy, in Quantum world there is always some energy. 

Systems always oscillate at least a bit. So now if we have a space and even it seems empty then it will have infinite amount of those small energies. 

We also know that the general relativity implies that all the forms of energy gravitate, and if we have a infinite energy then we have infinite mass which leads to infinite gravity. 

And BOOM! 

If that was true then our universe would collapse in an instant.

This collapse is not a problem, because well it hasn't happened.

The problem is that I am studying a theory that we successfully use in everyday life (all modern technology was possible because we understood quantum mechanics). But yet same theory cannot completely explain why our universe is still around.

I might have got it all wrong but it bothers me a lot.