I think the real point that should be made about Rush Limbaugh is that he has made his hay on convincing his listeners that he has a vast intellect and that he is an expert on everything. To admit he doesn’t know anything about quantum mechanics would be a blow to the facade that he has built around himself.

At best we would expect Rush to not mention subjects he is unfamiliar with. But it is almost guaranteed that he will spout nonsense about unfamiliar subjects just to keep up his appearance of god-like omniscience.

Thanks for pointing out my error. I should probably study it more before saying anything else that would be a big mistake, but physics isn’t really my field, as you can imagine!

Thanks again, really happy that people put forth this much effort. Haha.

I just went though and read your post and something stood out to me, you normal human explanation of what the higgs particle is and where it comes from. You state the following:

“In normal human terms, the Higgs boson is what keeps all matter in the universe together.”

I am assuming that you derived that from the Wikipedia entry that you referenced. (although I am not sure how) The Higgs boson is not responsible for keeping all the matter in the universe together. It is literally what the Wikipedia article stated it was. In the 1960’s theoretical particle physicists where working on the Standard Model. One of the key aspects of these equations was that they were locally gauge invariant, which basically means that if one performs a gauge transformation on the fields, the form of the original equation stays the same. The issue was that the W and Z, along with other particles did not have mass according to these equations. Many different attempts were made to put mass into the equations, most notably in the form of a mass term. It was however found that the addition of a mass term by hand would break the gauge invariance, and we cant have that. So, that is where the Higgs field came into play. When it was added into the standard model and the machinery worked though, the particles acquired mass terms in the end. The beautiful part is that this was done without violating gauge invariance. So in essence, the Higgs particle would add credence to the theory that a Higgs field, a field with a non zero vacuum expectation value, is responsible for the mass property of matter. It really is a fun topic.