Higgs

[shnozzola]

Latest news from the LHC - morning of July 4th

Scientists there are planning to gather that morning to hear the latest about the decades-long search for a subatomic particle that could help explain why objects in our universe actually weigh anything.

The buzz is that they're closing in on the elusive Higgs particle. That would be a major milestone in the quest to understand the most basic nature of the universe.

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/02/155994840/is-the-hunt-for-the-god-particle-finally-over

http://vms-db-srv.fnal.gov/fmi/xsl/VMS_Site_2/000Return/video/r_live.xsl

[jetson]

Waits for the first Christian to tell us we cannot find God unless we believe in him.  Scientists be damned.

[Nick]

But who made the Higgs particle?  See, God did it.

[Backspace]

I really wish the media would stop calling it the "God Particle".  Even in quotes, it seems to cheapens the discovery and the meathods used to discover it.

[jeremy0]

New name proposal: "The Holy Shit I've Found IT!  Particle".   

[BaalServant]

Side note -

It was actually initially referred to as the "goddamn particle" because of its frustrating elusiveness, but the publishers nixed the idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs#Political_and_religious_views

[ParkingPlaces]

Rumor is that tomorrow (the 4th) they will announce that they actually sort of kinda found it probably, which is actually quite an accomplishment.

Here is a cute 7 minute video that explains a few things, including WTF a Higgs Boson is. Even you will be imporessed with how much you know about the subject after watching it.

[IAmFirst]

I hope the believers understand it's sort of a tongue in cheek phrase to call it the "god particle" in the first place. The idea is, if there's something we can't explain, it's 'cause GOD DID IT! Lalllalalalalalala....

What it really means is, that last missing piece of the atomic map isn't a god, it's a particle.

But now we'll probably hear things like, "we can't understand its unique properties because GOD DID IT! Lalalalalal...."

Or even things like, "Come worship god in his true form-- THE PARTICLE! Knew he was always there!"

What's really great about this discovery is how it opens so many doors into understanding matter in all types. This kind of thing leads to new and faster medical cures, better engineering, etc. Just look at what electricity and its study gave us. Everything from street lights, lightbulbs, computers, cars, etc.

Kudos to all women and men at CERN for their hard work and education!

[natlegend]

Or even things like, "Come worship god in his true form-- THE PARTICLE! Knew he was always there!"

Haha I LOLed... "GOD: You can't see him cos he's really, really tiny"

[inveni0]

Or even things like, "Come worship god in his true form-- THE PARTICLE! Knew he was always there!"

Haha I LOLed... "GOD: You can't see him cos he's really, really tiny"

And he only sticks around for a second.


The video posted above is well done, but I'm curious about the part where he says, "You can't have negative mass...you can't have repulsive gravity..."

What is dark energy?  It seems like physicists sometimes get themselves trapped in the same kind of box as Christians (except with good reason), and they wind up trying to fit their understanding into their box, as opposed to trying to expand the box around the new ideas.  Newton was wrong.  Einstein was wrong.  Every idea we have breaks down when we start to look outside of that idea's box.  I wish there was a way that "we" could, as scientists, observe something and say, "Why is it this way?"  And instead of saying, "Well, we know [blah], [blah], and [blah]...and that doesn't allow for [blibidy]."  Mankind has "known" things for years...and we've been correcting ourselves every since.

I hope this new discovery expands the box in a way that we can start to understand the fabric of the universe.

[shnozzola]

Announcement today.

Easier to read at the website than the quote below:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/07/04/156221787/cern-says-its-detected-a-new-particle-likely-the-higgs-boson

As very much a layman, I still do not know how this discovery influences what we will now do - it seems for now, just more testing.  Also it seems the fermilab link I put in at the OP was just politics from the smaller atom smasher in the US trying to get some press.

Because it's complicated material, we turned to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist and a blogger for NPR's 13.7. We asked a him a few questions about why this matters. Here's part of our conversation:

Q: I've heard many metaphors for what this Higgs boson is. A basic explanation is that it's the thing that gives subatomic particles their mass. The best metaphor I've heard is from Fermilab's Don Lincoln, who says the energy field made by the Higgs is like water. Depending on your mass you'll move through the water with ease — like a barracuda — or slowly, like a big, fat man. How would you explain the Higgs to a friend at a bar?

A: In a bar, I'd probably use one of those analogies. The real important thing for me is that fundamental particles are as far as we can tell zero-dimensional particles. They have no radius. You can't think of fundamental particles as being glass marbles. They literally have no extension in space. They can never bump into anything else.

It's all about interactions. It's about them exchanging other particles as forces. With a particle like the electron — what gives the electron mass is really inertia, that's the property that we associate with massive particles. Mass and inertia go together.

So since an electron or a quark has no extension in space, you sort of wonder where did the mass go? Well it's not that the mass resides with the electron or the proton. It's that the mass comes from its interaction with other things. And in this case, it's the Higgs field that gives this point particle — the electron — the appearance of inertia. That is what allows it to act like it's resisting changes in its motion.

Whereas you have other particles like the photon which has no mass, and because of that it can go at the speed of light, whereas a massive particle will never be able to go at light speed.

Q: So, if the Higgs didn't exist, what would the world look like?

A: It would all be photons. Everything would be moving at the speed of light, right. Which means at light speed, you wouldn't be able to have the kinds of structures we see today. You'd never get atoms and chemistry and rocks. So it's really important. The property of mass is really important for getting clumpy structures, essentially, like us.

Q: The particle has been described as the missing piece of the Standard Model. Is that a fair characterization?

A: Yeah, pretty much. So the Standard Model is this beautiful edifice of modern particle physics that's really 40 years old. The pieces were really in place 40 years ago and people have just been going around and discovering them.

The theory — the Standard Model predicted all these different pieces 40 years ago — and the quarks were part of it, the different flavors of neutrinos, some have been discovered and essentially the top quark was the last big thing that needed to be discovered and that was discovered in the mid-90s. And the Higgs boson, which was predicted not just by Peter Higgs but six different physicists at the same time, is the last piece of the Standard Model that needs to be discovered, that needs to be shown to be true.

One of the interesting things about this is that for particle physicists, they're in a bit of a conundrum, where they've been working on the Standard Model for all these years. And the Higgs particle is an enormous achievement, but it's also for them a little bit boring because they've been expecting this for 40 years and they keep looking for ways to go beyond the Standard Model.

Q: Another thing I find interesting, though, is that despite this announcement, scientists have never actually seen the Higgs, right?

A: You're never going to get the Higgs to appear in a laboratory and float. It's very short-lived. What happens in particle physics is that particles decay into other particles, just like with radioactivity. The Higgs does that but in a very, very, very short time scale — so short that you're never going to be able to see the Higgs directly, you're going to see what it turns into.

And there are a lot of different ways it can turn into other things. There are a lot of different channels. What we're looking for is different possible channels. And that's how they're going to tell if it's a Standard Model Higgs. It'll have a certain kind of decay pathways.

Q: Fermilab, the American organization with much smaller version of the LHC, made a similar announcement on Monday, saying they had identified those decay pathways, except they said they had fallen short of a 3-sigma standard, which determines strong evidence. Can you tells us what that means?

A: A definitive discovery is a 5-sigma result. What do we mean by these sigmas? Really it's all about how sure are we that what you're seeing is not noise, is not just a statistical anomaly.

The higher your sigma, the more statistically you're certain what you're seeing is not just something crazy that's happening in the background.

With the Tevatron, which was Fermilab's particle accelerator, in many ways, scientists hoped they would be able to see evidence of the Higgs. With these particle accelerators, you want to have enough particle collisions that you have lots of statistics and the problem with Tevatron is that even though it ran for a long time, it wasn't powerful enough to create lots and lots of collisions so that they could very quickly see if they were getting a high enough sigma result. Unfortunately the government said, OK we're done with the Tevatron.

But they did have 10 years worth of data to play with, so they did this very deep, very powerful statistical analysis and they found — and they of course announced in on Monday to take a little bit of the thunder from the LHC — this signature of the Higgs.

Q: What's next for physics? What's the next frontier?

A: Astronomy. [Laughs] If they discover the Higgs, there's going to be lots of interesting things to do with trying to make lots of them and probe their properties. They're going to learn a lot from that.

And they're still going to hope they're going to find things that break the Standard Model — new physics they often call it. They're going to find something in the LHC that really looks very different than the Standard Model.

If they can't get beyond the Standard Model that will be a problem for them. If everything they find is in line with the Standard Model, it'll feel like a dead end. If nothing they see goes beyond the Standard Model, they're going to say, "Well nature isn't showing us where do we go from here, so where do we go from here?"

Q: Let's back up a bit. You have a vested interest in saying astronomy. But what do you mean by that?

A: Doing physics in this way — of smashing things together with ever larger machines — we are clearly sort of reaching a limit of how big these machines can get, or what people are willing to fund, let me put it that way.

So in order to go to even higher levels of energy, you know colliding things at an even higher level of energy, you have to rely on nature. You have to look to astrophysical conditions. You have to look at the beginning of the universe and the big bang or the environments around black holes to find enviornments where interactions between particles are so violent that you are getting insights to regimes beyond the Standard Model.

A lot of high energy physicists are looking to astronomy and astrophysics as being their next particle accelerator, you know nature's particle accelerator

[Seppuku]

This is fantastic news. I know they're cautious about what they say out it, they know it's a new boson, it's just a question of whether or not it complies with the outlines of a Higg's Boson, they just need to learn of its properties. Like any true scientist does, when they discover something new or learn something new, they try to get all the facts before confirming its accuracy. Unlike say, "OMG the shroud of Turin is Jesus, therefore he must be real".

[Graybeard]

[Nick]

Yahoo news had a post where Steven Hawkings lost $100 because of the discovery.

[ParkingPlaces]

The video posted above is well done, but I'm curious about the part where he says, "You can't have negative mass...you can't have repulsive gravity..."

What is dark energy?  It seems like physicists sometimes get themselves trapped in the same kind of box as Christians (except with good reason), and they wind up trying to fit their understanding into their box, as opposed to trying to expand the box around the new ideas. 

You're in luck, inveni0, at least sort of. The same people who did the video I posted above did another one about dark matter and dark energy. No answers, of course, but at least they give us a good idea of how weird and important and unanswered the questions are.

[Zankuu]

I really wish the media would stop calling it the "God Particle".  Even in quotes, it seems to cheapens the discovery and the meathods used to discover it.

[Turbo SS]

Waits for the first Christian to tell us we cannot find God unless we believe in him.  Scientists be damned.

Checkmate christians!  FSM believers win!

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3pyvo8/

[inveni0]

The video posted above is well done, but I'm curious about the part where he says, "You can't have negative mass...you can't have repulsive gravity..."

What is dark energy?  It seems like physicists sometimes get themselves trapped in the same kind of box as Christians (except with good reason), and they wind up trying to fit their understanding into their box, as opposed to trying to expand the box around the new ideas. 

You're in luck, inveni0, at least sort of. The same people who did the video I posted above did another one about dark matter and dark energy. No answers, of course, but at least they give us a good idea of how weird and important and unanswered the questions are.

[snip]

Right, and I understand that the physicist at Fermi know that the standard model of particle physics doesn't include dark matter/energy.  I'm glad they KNOW it...I just don't understand why they keep pursuing a model that doesn't account for what we can actively observe.  It's strange.

Overall, though, I definitely support the research.  We might not be going down the right road, but we're at least headed in the right direction, and that's good.

[shnozzola]

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan's only Nobel laureate helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week, yet his legacy has been largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.

It's a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in his country.

Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and work that guided the early stages of Pakistan's nuclear program. Now his name is even stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-world-asia/20120708/AS.Pakistan.God.Particle/

As much as this religious extremist news gets old - we must continue to pound away for science sense.

[Tero]

[shnozzola]

The New York Times had an article yesterday.  Latest:


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-higgs-boson-how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searched-for-physics-most-elusive-particle.html?pagewanted=all


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/all-signs-point-to-higgs-boson-but-still-waiting-for-scientific-certainty.html?pagewanted=all

In December 2012, shortly after CERN teams first declared that they had seen signs of the famous boson with a mass of 125 billion electron volts, Gian Giudice, a CERN theorist, and his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future.

The reason lies in the Higgs field, the medium of which the Higgs boson is the messenger and which determines the structure of empty space, i.e., the vacuum.

It works like this. The Higgs field, like everything else in nature, is lazy, and, like water running downhill, always seeks to be in the state of lowest energy. Physicists assume that the Higgs field today is in the lowest state possible, but Dr. Giudice found that was not the case. What counts as rock bottom in today’s universe could turn out to be just a plateau.

Our universe is like a rock perched precariously on a mountaintop, he explained, in what physicists call a metastable state. The Higgs field could drop to a lower value by a process known as quantum tunneling, although it is not imminent.

Dr. Giudice’s calculations suggest that it would take much longer than the age of the universe; the whole Milky Way galaxy could disappear into a black hole long before then. Which is good.

If that should happen — tomorrow or billions of years from now — a bubble would sweep out through the universe at the speed of light, obliterating the laws of nature as we know them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-higgs-boson-how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searched-for-physics-most-elusive-particle.html?view=Game_of_Bumps&ref=higgsboson&_r=0

[screwtape]

good post schnozz.  I found a similar article a week or so ago, but my intertubes access was down:

 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21499765

“One idea that it throws up is the possibility of a cyclical universe, in which every so often all of space is renewed.”

Suck it, godboys.  That blows the crap out of their "the universe is either eternal or created and scientists know it isn't eternal" argument. 

I like the idea of the universe being obliterated at the speed of light.  It would still take 10-12 billion years to complete!