Higgs Force: We Are Stardust!

We are stardust, we are golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
We are stardust, billion year old carbon,
we are golden.

Woodstock - Joni Mitchell (1969)

In the Victorian era, scientists debated the age of the Earth. The physicists led by Lord Kelvin argued that the Earth and sun could not be more than a few million years old. No known power source could illuminate the sun for any longer than this. But the new sciences of geology and evolutionary biology provided mountains of evidence to suggest that the Earth must be much older than this. The discrepancy was resolved in the 20th century when it was realised that the earlier generation of physicists had been missing a key feature of reality. They had no knowledge of radioactivity or nuclear power.
 

In addition to electromagnetism, two other forces are important in the nucleus of an atom. We know them as the weak force and the strong force. In this chapter we will take a look at the weak force. This force may be extremely weak, but it plays an extremely important role in the functioning of the universe. The immense power output of stars such as the sun is the result of nuclear fusion reactions that gradually convert the star’s mass of hydrogen into helium. The key first step in this reaction is an incredibly slow process that is controlled by the weak force. If the weak force was any stronger, then the sun would have used up its hydrogen fuel much faster and there would not have been sufficient time for the evolution of intelligent life on Earth.