Amy

I didn't get a terribly long lunch break today, so in an act of foolish optimism decided to understand more about the Higgs boson particle. It's been a long time since I did any physics and my brainpower stopped abruptly at QFT, so no way could I do any of the maths. I just wanted to 'understand' the relationship between gauge invariance and the Higgs boson in a roundabout Wikipedia kind of way. Which can be summarised so far as: gauge invariance -> gauge boson force carrier particle. Higgs mechanism adds a field to break the symmetry in the electroweak interaction, giving mass to the W & Z particles. This Higgs field is in turn quantized as the Higgs boson particle. A similar coupling also adds mass to the fermions. I just hope I'm on the right track, but I know it's hard to be sure without doing the maths.

OK, this portrait was taken on the way home. At first, I thought her hair went really well with the red sandstone wall. But those poses didn't work that well and I ended up with this less wall-centric angle, which I hope does some justice to her looks. Upon establishing her name it took a superhuman effort to resist countering with "As in Amy Pond...?" Like she's not heard that line before :)