Higgs Boson confirmed

[One Above All]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21785205
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/03/14/wrd-science-higgs-boson-particle-discovery.html

Found at TTA. Read both links before commenting, please.

[Nick]

What are the implications of this?  And is the sun going to come up in the morning?

[One Above All]

What are the implications of this?

Put simply, it's the particle that gives other particles mass. It's a big step forward in understanding our universe.

And is the sun going to come up in the morning?

Depends. Did you pray hard enough?

[Nick]

Well, as long as the particles went to mass.

[jaimehlers]

You know, I can't help but wonder just what exactly mass is.  I mean, it's one of those things that seems obvious until you actually stop and think about it, like time.

Well, take a black hole.  Once something passes the event horizon, it acts exactly the same (from our perspective) as it would if it were going faster than the speed of light.  And it's already theorized that if you go extremely fast, time progresses very slowly for you.  That suggests that time has an inverse relationship to speed.

[Azdgari]

Once something passes the event horizon, it acts exactly the same (from our perspective) as it would if it were going faster than the speed of light.

Not so.  An object travelling at the speed of light would have infinite mass.  Black holes, let alone the objects falling into them, do not appear to have infinite mass.  If they did, any other object would have infinite acceleration toward it regardless of distance.

[jaimehlers]

Not so.  An object travelling at the speed of light would have infinite mass.  Black holes, let alone the objects falling into them, do not appear to have infinite mass.  If they did, any other object would have infinite acceleration toward it regardless of distance.

The problem with the proposition that an object traveling faster than the speed of light would have infinite mass is that black holes, which do not have infinite mass, nonetheless exert sufficient gravity to prevent light from escaping once it crosses a certain point.  Gravitational pull is a force that accelerates an object (a pull rather than a push).  So what that means is that the force of acceleration imparted by a black hole's gravity is equivalent to the speed of light at the event horizon, and at all points beyond it.  In other words, it is not necessary for a black hole to have infinite mass in order to generate sufficient gravitational force to pull something at the speed of light.

That suggests that it may well not be necessary for an object to have infinite mass in order to reach the speed of light.  They aren't sufficient in and of themselves, anymore than we can accurately predict what happens on the other side of a black hole or what happened before the Big Bang.

[Azdgari]

... So what that means is that the force of acceleration imparted by a black hole's gravity is equivalent to the speed of light at the event horizon, and at all points beyond it. ...

This makes no sense.  Acceleration is never equivalent to speed, the two are separate concepts.  Did you mean to say something else?  I want to know before I respond.