On Thursday (Nov. 8, 2012) I gave a colloquium at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, with my wife, Prof. Jennifer Klay, on the status of the Higgs search at the LHC. It was a joint talk meant to summarize the recent discovery, by CMS and Atlas in July, of a Higgs-like particle with a mass around 125 GeV/c^2. We each had about 23 minutes: me the theory, Dr. Klay the experimental results. The audience was made primarily of undergraduates with a mix of professors and other attendees; almost none had any particle physics background. While constructing the talk, I had to resist the urge to try and summarize all of the detailed theoretical and mathematical machinery that goes with the Standard Model. This would have been rather ineffective. The point of a colloquium is to communicate ideas, not to plow people down and confuse them. Instead, I tried to remain true to the spirit of the colloquium and targeted the audience I knew would be present: physics major undergraduates who had taken their first course in modern physics. I felt that this was the simplest I could make the material while still building a case for the Higgs. It allowed me to draw from accessible analogies that were, although imperfect, basically physically responsible. At some point, I will post a more complete narrative of the talk. But, for now, I simply wanted to make the talk available for any interested parties (note: it is about 50MB, so be patient). To download the Standard Model Lagrangian I used in the talk, visit my old UC Davis site where you can find pdf and tex versions of it for your own use. If you are interested in investigating the hadron spectra I show in the talk, you can download my demonstration available in CDF format from the Wolfram Demonstration Project. Enjoy.

P.S. In the talk, I don’t give a photo credit for my 50s flying car (to represent the “guided tour”), which I got from vintage ad I believe to be in the public domain (e.g. you can get it here, although this isn’t where I downloaded it from). In the talk I did not give credit for the two Feynman diagrams (1 and 2) for the “Golden Channels,” which I got from wikipedia. The photo of John Ellis is by Josh Thompson and was obtained from Flickr.