Slashdot Mirror

But my question is, this neutron star collision was detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave interferometers, which don't even point at anything. Do they find the location of the source of the wave by comparing its arrival at different sites, then somehow computing a physical location that must be the origin? Wouldn't you need several of these devices to pinpoint that source accurately? Finally, how do they know that the g wave they observed corresponds with neutron stars colliding, and not any of a variety of other kinds of events?

The time delays between the three observatories are the main way to determine the source of a gravitational wave. More detectors allows for better localizing, with three being the minimum for a decent triangulation. But, there are other properties of the waves that can be used.

Here's a good explanation: https://profmattstrassler.com/...

Today, we learned that [a neutron star merger] has happened. LIGO, with the world’s first two gravitational observatories, detected the waves from two merging neutron stars, 130 million light years from Earth, on August 17th. (Neutron star mergers last much longer than black hole mergers, so the two are easy to distinguish; and this one was so close, relatively speaking, that it was seen for a long while.) VIRGO, with the third detector, allows scientists to triangulate and determine roughly where mergers have occurred. They saw only a very weak signal, but that was extremely important, because it told the scientists that the merger must have occurred in a small region of the sky where VIRGO has a relative blind spot. That told scientists where to look.

Outside your arbitrary definition that says a photon is NOT an object, the term object isn't a technical term so I'm not sure what you complaint is really about. A photon is a particle. Can particles be though of as objects? Yes, they can.

Photons should not be called `energy’, or `pure energy’, or anything similar. All particles are ripples in fields and have energy; photons are not special in this regard. Photons are stuff; energy is not. ...
But for the moment, suffice it to say that energy is not itself an object. An atom is an object; energy is not. Energy is something which objects can have, and groups of objects can have — a property of objects that characterizes their behavior and their relationships to one another. ...
What is meant by “pure energy”? This is almost always used in reference to photons, commonly in the context of an electron and a positron (or some other massive particle and anti-particle) annihilating to make two photons (recall the antiparticle of a photon is also a photon.) But it’s a terrible thing to do. Energy is something that photons have; it is not what photons are. [I have height and weight; that does not mean I am height and weight.]

That's weird, this is what I got. I guess it's a sponsored link? It even showed a blurb from the site above the link as if Google were just answering my question.

No, Strassler's a Real Physicist, and that link does show up, later in the list, in my search.

However, whilst the Higgs field might be a force field (in the sense of something that can change the motion of an object, i.e. can transfer momentum), it's apparently not considered one of the "fundamental" forces; the Standard Model has only four "fundamental" forces. The proposed new force would be a fifth.

That's weird, this is what I got. I guess it's a sponsored link? It even showed a blurb from the site above the link as if Google were just answering my question.

Actually, it depends on how you define "mass."

Physicists used to use the terms "rest mass/invariant mass" and "relativistic mass," but most have since thrown out the term "relativistic mass" because it means the same thing as "energy of motion relative to an observer."

https://profmattstrassler.com/...

Most physicists would define a photon as having no mass, yet it would carry momentum proportional to its energy. Mass is seen as a property of a particle that makes it resist changes in speed, but photons always travel at the speed of light (in a vacuum) -- never speeding up, or slowing down... and never at rest.

The mathematics to arise from accepted Higgs field theory suggests the universe is currently sitting comfortably in a Higgs field energy 'valley.' To get out of this valley and up the adjacent 'hill,' huge quantities of energy would need to be unleashed inside the field.

I have no idea what the 'valley' represents, nor the 'hill' so this explanation tells me nothing.

An article by Matt Strassler that should explain more. In particular, this pic

The story about our vacuum having two 'valleys' depends crucially on no new physics existing beyond the already known fields, which is probably false.

See this. Best explanation on how the higgs particle may vary. http://profmattstrassler.com/a...

See here: http://profmattstrassler.com/2... "a known object in Andromeda that emits X-rays appeared to brighten, as a result of electronic noise in Swift’s instruments"

Empty space isn't that empty. You can get virtual pairs of electrons and positrons appearing and disappearing. They pop into existence because they can, even in empty space, but the have negative energy and a virtual wavelength, so they are almost bound to re-coalesce, and the energy of their recombination will exactly equal the energy of their creation, so they pay back all the energy they 'borrowed' and disappear without trace. However, if a photon turns up at this critical moment and pumps in the energy, then they can get permanently separated. Needless to say, this is pretty rare for single photons or we would not be able to see distant galaxies. We need monster photon energy densities, hence the hohlraum (I used to work on these ages ago).

You can also measure a tiny force between two plates in a vacuum due to these virtual particles. This is called the Casmir effect or the Casmir-Polder force. See... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... for example. So they are real. Well, real-ish.

This is not the same as Compton scattering. That also makes electron-positron pairs from photons but it also requires some mass to be around. This is the dominant absorbtion mode above about 1.5 MeV. So, I can see how they might get a tiny bit of straight pair production in their hohlraum, but they will also have some high-Z gold plasma giving you lots of conventional Compton scattering, which will look pretty similar. I guess they have a plan for that.

Here's a fun site... http://profmattstrassler.com/a...

The survey is crap.

Just take this statement: "A mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain."

Does mental illness affect the brain? Or is it caused by the brain? Is distinguishing the two even sensible? Is it a "medical condition" or a behavioral state? Is asserting that it is a "medical condition" a political statement that someone should take issue with (e.g., PTSD is listed in the DSM--is that a "medical condition"? Is depression following sexual abuse a "medical condition"? Is obesity a "medical condition"?)

Or this statement: "Inside our cells, there is a complex genetic code that helps determine who we are." Does the genetic code "determine" who we are? What does "who we are" even mean?

"Childhood vaccines are safe and effective." *All* vaccines? Even ones I don't even know about?

"The universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang." I can't remember if it was exactly 13.8 billion years ago. Was it a big "bang" or a big "expansion"?

I urge anyone interested in these questions to go to Professor Matt Strassler's blog: http://profmattstrassler.com/ . In particular he goes to some length to describe what BICEP2's data might mean.

But which inflation?

"Cold" inflation "before" the big bang? Or "hot" inflation "after' the big bang? And which "big bang" is being referred to?

I'm not trying to be difficult, it's just an aspect of cosmology that I recently learned about and am trying to understand this finding as best as possible.

Some interesting perspective from Matt Strassler, who's a particle physicist at Harvard.

He points out that this is still an *indirect* observation of gravitational waves (and not the first one) and that the results look sensibly in line with some predictions from inflation. And that while this is a tremendous experiment, it's not any kind of "smoking gun", and we really need to wait for replication to get properly excited.

Not true. Hawking has made a sequence of statements of the form "I speculate that..." leading to "This therefore suggests that...", in a two-page paper, backed up by precisely zero equations. If he wants to "show [it] to be impossible/a contradiction" he has to demonstrate this, within the context of the theories he's working in. There are three major reasons he hasn't done so:

1) He doesn't know how to
2) No-one knows how to
3) This wasn't his intention in the start anyway, since the "paper" was a transcript of a talk given over Skype which consisted of a string of arguments, some of which make sense and others of which are reaching somewhat

For a given definition of "black hole" then I think Hawking is right -- they don't exist. But you have to be very careful with that definition (as Hawking was). A "black hole" is typically taken to be one of a Schwarzschild, a Reisser-Noerdstrom, a Kerr, or a Kerr-Newman solution, consisting of a perfectly uncharged spherical hole, a charged spherical hole, an uncharged rotating hole, or a charged rotating hole respectively. These are stationary solutions: they apply at all times. But a real black hole is *not* stationary. Hawking himself demonstrated that if there is any truth behind a semi-classical approximation (and if there isn't then we're totally fucked) then holes have to radiate... which means they will evaporate. (Hell, even a hole absorbing matter breaks the assumption of stationarity; all calculations of orbits around, say, a Kerr hole calculate the orbits of test particles which don't disrupt the spacetime. But *everything* disrupts spacetime, and since GR is brutally non-linear this may have a catastrophic effect on some finely-tuned regions.) An event horizon is a region beyond which anything traveling will never communicate with the outside universe again - but given the existence of Hawking radiation, all holes must some day evaporate... implying there *are* no event horizons. Therefore, there are no "black holes", merely metastable bound states of the gravitational field, shielded by apparent horizons.

However, to us, to our children, and to a civilisation in a few billion years' time, that thing will look and act precisely as we've always thought black holes act.

Matt Strassler has an interesting post on this topic here.

It's a bit complex to squeeze into a slashdot summary. Here's what has to say about it. This article, written by Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler, does a better job of explaining it in layman's terms, I found it to be an excellent article. I'd had only the vaguest idea what it was about before reading it.

Now I have a much less vague idea, but reading an article by a physicist doesn't magically turn you into one.

People who are interested in these matters should follow Matt Strassler's science blog, Of Particular Significance, which covered these same points back at the beginning of April, and then again two weeks later.

People who are interested in these matters should follow Matt Strassler's science blog, Of Particular Significance, which covered these same points back at the beginning of April, and then again two weeks later.

People who are interested in these matters should follow Matt Strassler's science blog, Of Particular Significance, which covered these same points back at the beginning of April, and then again two weeks later.

How does the Higgs Boson giver mass to other particles?

The theory behind the Higgs mechanism motivated the search for the Higgs particle in the first place. It's well worked out. Check Wikipedia.

How is a Higgs Boson produced?

Practical answer: if you put enough energy in a small enough space you'll get all kinds of particles. Some of those will be Higgs'.
Sciency answer: the Higgs particle is just a manifestation of a perturbation in the Higgs field, just like every other fundamental particle is a perturbation in it's own quantum field in modern quantum field theory. To produce a Higgs you pump enough energy into the Higgs field in a particular location.

Can we produce these particles at will?

If at will you mean by smashing other particles together at high speed and occasionally getting a Higgs out, yes. If you mean specifically producing a Higgs on command, no.

Can we affect gravity with them?

No. The Higgs field doesn't have anything to do with gravity: http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/10/15/why-the-higgs-and-gravity-are-unrelated/

TFA is mainstream butt-hurt-ness that the progress of science isn't appropriately entertaining, and unsurprisingly misses a few key points. Sure an announcement of 'we are making progress and confirming what we expected" isn't as exciting as the original announcement, but is just as important (if not more so) to the scientific process.

When/if this particle is confirmed as the higgs, that does not remotely "[tie] up the Standard Model of physics in a pretty, neat, red quantum bow" (TFA) let alone "[remove] any doubt for more exotic physics beyond the Standard Model" (TFS). Both are patently false. A major reason for looking for the higgs in the first place (beyond confirming that part of the SM) is to being to actively investigate the higgs field, which is moderated by the higgs boson itself. The higgs does not impart mass to particles as is usually claimed (although it's not an unreasonable simplification). The higgs particles are what moderates the higgs field, the presence of which is what brings about mass in particles. (The higgs - and presumably all/most particles - are actually just field fluctuations. What we think of as a discrete particle is really then just the instantaneous average of the fluctuation [wave]).

I can't find my exact sources for this, but at least some of them were from the Higgs section of this site, which I highly recommend. Meanwhile, this article is quite interesting anyway:

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/

I don't think 3 is the case. This is how I would interpret it, although the TFAs are sorely lacking in info. The higgs boson governs the higgs field - the bosons are required for it to opperate and have any effect. The higgs field is CRITICAL to the universe behaving the way it does - if it were not there (or had a different 'value'), physics would look VERY different, to the point where we are dealing with a different set of particles with a different set of fundamental forces. http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/

So my guess would be, that they estimated in 10 billion years (give or take some) a particular local area of space time will experience enough higgs bosons having decayed that the higgs field colapses. It would be the collapse of the higgs field that propergates and 'infects' the rest of space time. In the wake of the collapse, we would be left with a very different universe.

There are some major problems with this, in particular that particles aren't really a "thing" as such, they are just a label we give to ripples in a field that behave in certain ways and can act as a discrete object at times. (This is certainly the case for the virtual particles, I think it also applies to the rest although it is possible they may have their own existance independant of a field.) You could argue that we could still have these field ripples decay (since we know particles DO decay) and therefor have the higgs bosons drop out of existance enough to cause a problem - but as far as I know, they are being constantly emitted and absorbed in the processing of 'managing' the higgs field, and thus are constantly being (re)created and so should not be vulnerable to decaying.

IANAP

A better perspective on LHC non-findings and super symmetry: "...in most of the simplest variants of supersymmetry they should have shown up by now...But there are big caveats to discuss at this point...several assumptions go into the standard searches for superpartner particles..." etc.

A better perspective on LHC non-findings and super symmetry: "...in most of the simplest variants of supersymmetry they should have shown up by now...But there are big caveats to discuss at this point...several assumptions go into the standard searches for superpartner particles..." etc.

Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf

Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more

http://profmattstrassler.com/

Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.

Wow! The list of co-authors is almost as long as the article!

Here is the paper: https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1493302/files/PAPER-2012-043.pdf

Some blogs discussing the significance of the result:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lhcb_evidence_rare_decay_bs_dimuons-96311

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/superstringy-compactifications.html#more

http://profmattstrassler.com/

Particle physics isn't my field, but neither the paper nor the blog posts seem to be interpreting it, as the BBC does, as evidence against supersymmetry.

While I generally agree with you about the esoteric nature of string theory, I should correct the record on supersymmetry and inflation (I know you didn't complain about inflation, but it's there further up the thread).

Supersymmetry is an idea with some fairly strong motivations that has driven the last several decades of experimental work in particle physics - there is not solid evidence for it yet, but it is not ruled out. Some of the simplest variants have, however, been ruled out. Here's someone more representative of the experimental particle physics consensus at the moment: http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/some-speculative-theoretical-ideas-for-the-lhc/supersymmetry/where-stands-supersymmetry-as-of-42012/
(Should we be giving awards for theory that is not yet proved, but has motivated and clarified our understanding of particle physics? Maybe not, but supersymmetry is definitely not ruled out.)

As for inflation, there is a reasonable amount of experimental evidence to support it; I know fewer astro people, but I would not describe inflation as unsupported, or even necessarily that controversial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Observational_status

From what I understand it was only one single experiment that showed us something that we think is where/what the Higgs Boson would look like.

Has it been reproduced or confirmed?

...

That's not very definitive. Can anybody else around well versed in particle physics tell us if the Higgs has really been found or not?

I think that the announcement is based on a couple of years of data collected by two different teams using different methods, so calling it a single experiment seems a bit of an over simplification. See Higgs Discovery: The Data blog entry by Matt Strassler.

I don't read most science journalism anymore. It's too infuriating. Following the exploration of the Higgs particle, I've going to Professor Matt Strassler's blog http://profmattstrassler.com/ where he has gone over a good many of the issues in reasonably easy to follow language. Since he's at CERN, he's well placed to write sensible articles on the matter.

Yes and no.
There was a lot of "that's how science works". Good.
However, I advise you to read: http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/neutrinos/neutrinos-faster-than-light/opera-what-went-wrong/
People resigned. That shouldn't happen if it's just science at works. Also, the dynamics in the authorlist of the Opera articles in question are interesting from the sociological point of view.
Another bad thing in my opinion was the CERN involvement, which I still don't understand. This was not a CERN experiment, nevertheless CERN chose to profusely communicate on the issue.
And, a scientific fuck up or not, that's how it will remain to be perceived by the outside...

What happens next is we study this particle. We want to know if it behaves as is predicted by the standard model, or if it's something different from what we expect. This includes measuring its cross section (the probability of it being created in collision) and its branching ratio (the probability of it decaying to each thing its able to decay to).

Matt Strassler (a theoretical physicist) describes the general roadmap in his blog post here.

Particle physics results are necessarily esoteric. What do we do with experimental knowledge? We use this knowledge to disprove plausible theory and to constrain future theory. Theory is similarly used to give direction for new experiments.

Here's a good introduction to the Higgs boson and why it matters.

A great blog to read about the ongoing research and in depth particle physics articles is Matt Strassler's website: http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/06/27/this-sites-background-articles-on-the-higgs/

Perhaps a better explanation is to say that a proton consists of dozens of quarks and gluons of various flavour, colour, and anti-ness, however it has an excess of two more up quark than up antiquarks, and one more down quark than down antiquarks. The evidence for this is that when the LHC collides protons, the vast majority of observed interactions are gluon-gluon, or low energy quarks (as evinced by the energy of the products).

For more info see http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/ plus followup articles

He did simplify, he did not however make it simple. Complaining however that someone hasn't made it simple enough for you to understand is however part their failing for not being able to explain it well enough, but also part your problem for not having the required background to understand the first attempt at an answer to the question.

Let me try a different answer to the question, try thinking of it like this:
bosons (i.e. photons in the example) do not tend to interact with each other, one laser does not deflect the path of another it intersects with; fermions (i.e. protons & anti-protons, or more fundamentally quarks) do interact.
An anti-particle and a particle are truly opposite, they have opposite charge, when they annihilate their mass is converted into energetic photons. Photons however have nothing opposite to cancel out. A photon has no mass to convert to energy, it is already the force and energy carrier for particle interaction.

If you stop thinking of the proton as a single particle and think of it as a composite structure made of billions of quarks then things might start to make more sense. Only when you have the right number of these particles do you get a stable configuration. All that happens when you get an annihalation is that in one location the stable number gets upset, destabilised and falls apart. In my mind it's analagous to the process that means that electron shells exist in well defined energy zones.
So the question becomes why and how are a certain number of quarks stable and form a proton, neutron etc and other combinations fall apart and annihilate. That I can't claim to know the answer to but I will offer this: It's easy to imagine that a certain number of quark-antiquark pairs are needed to collect enough strong nuclear force to hold the proton together (like you need enough gravity to hold the sun together in the face of the heat forcing it apart*) Too many however and the like an atom with too many protons there is also not enough strong force to hold it together.*
Or you can look at the wikipedia explanation of what proton is says that a proton is just two ups and a down, which is a simpler model and requires none of the above confusion but is incorrect.

I strongly suggest reading:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/particleanti-particle-annihilation/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/why-do-particles-decay/most-particles-decay-why/

* this is a flawed analogy, but i think it will do for now

So let's try again: what of the above made sense and I can try and gauge what to try and explain anything that still does not make sense, but sooner or later you have to stop asking for analogies and explanations and just look at, study and understand the equations; at which point no explanation is needed or useful once you understand how to do that maths.

He did simplify, he did not however make it simple. Complaining however that someone hasn't made it simple enough for you to understand is however part their failing for not being able to explain it well enough, but also part your problem for not having the required background to understand the first attempt at an answer to the question.

Let me try a different answer to the question, try thinking of it like this:
bosons (i.e. photons in the example) do not tend to interact with each other, one laser does not deflect the path of another it intersects with; fermions (i.e. protons & anti-protons, or more fundamentally quarks) do interact.
An anti-particle and a particle are truly opposite, they have opposite charge, when they annihilate their mass is converted into energetic photons. Photons however have nothing opposite to cancel out. A photon has no mass to convert to energy, it is already the force and energy carrier for particle interaction.

If you stop thinking of the proton as a single particle and think of it as a composite structure made of billions of quarks then things might start to make more sense. Only when you have the right number of these particles do you get a stable configuration. All that happens when you get an annihalation is that in one location the stable number gets upset, destabilised and falls apart. In my mind it's analagous to the process that means that electron shells exist in well defined energy zones.
So the question becomes why and how are a certain number of quarks stable and form a proton, neutron etc and other combinations fall apart and annihilate. That I can't claim to know the answer to but I will offer this: It's easy to imagine that a certain number of quark-antiquark pairs are needed to collect enough strong nuclear force to hold the proton together (like you need enough gravity to hold the sun together in the face of the heat forcing it apart*) Too many however and the like an atom with too many protons there is also not enough strong force to hold it together.*
Or you can look at the wikipedia explanation of what proton is says that a proton is just two ups and a down, which is a simpler model and requires none of the above confusion but is incorrect.

I strongly suggest reading:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/particleanti-particle-annihilation/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/why-do-particles-decay/most-particles-decay-why/

* this is a flawed analogy, but i think it will do for now

So let's try again: what of the above made sense and I can try and gauge what to try and explain anything that still does not make sense, but sooner or later you have to stop asking for analogies and explanations and just look at, study and understand the equations; at which point no explanation is needed or useful once you understand how to do that maths.

He did simplify, he did not however make it simple. Complaining however that someone hasn't made it simple enough for you to understand is however part their failing for not being able to explain it well enough, but also part your problem for not having the required background to understand the first attempt at an answer to the question.

Let me try a different answer to the question, try thinking of it like this:
bosons (i.e. photons in the example) do not tend to interact with each other, one laser does not deflect the path of another it intersects with; fermions (i.e. protons & anti-protons, or more fundamentally quarks) do interact.
An anti-particle and a particle are truly opposite, they have opposite charge, when they annihilate their mass is converted into energetic photons. Photons however have nothing opposite to cancel out. A photon has no mass to convert to energy, it is already the force and energy carrier for particle interaction.

If you stop thinking of the proton as a single particle and think of it as a composite structure made of billions of quarks then things might start to make more sense. Only when you have the right number of these particles do you get a stable configuration. All that happens when you get an annihalation is that in one location the stable number gets upset, destabilised and falls apart. In my mind it's analagous to the process that means that electron shells exist in well defined energy zones.
So the question becomes why and how are a certain number of quarks stable and form a proton, neutron etc and other combinations fall apart and annihilate. That I can't claim to know the answer to but I will offer this: It's easy to imagine that a certain number of quark-antiquark pairs are needed to collect enough strong nuclear force to hold the proton together (like you need enough gravity to hold the sun together in the face of the heat forcing it apart*) Too many however and the like an atom with too many protons there is also not enough strong force to hold it together.*
Or you can look at the wikipedia explanation of what proton is says that a proton is just two ups and a down, which is a simpler model and requires none of the above confusion but is incorrect.

I strongly suggest reading:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/particleanti-particle-annihilation/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/why-do-particles-decay/most-particles-decay-why/

* this is a flawed analogy, but i think it will do for now

So let's try again: what of the above made sense and I can try and gauge what to try and explain anything that still does not make sense, but sooner or later you have to stop asking for analogies and explanations and just look at, study and understand the equations; at which point no explanation is needed or useful once you understand how to do that maths.

They get their masses from the Higgs Field. The W Boson is like a ripple in the W-Field. An electron is like a ripple in the electron-field (not the electrical field). Et cetera. So a Higgs Boson is like a ripple in the Higgs Field. But it still gets is mass by interacting with that field, like most other elementary particles with mass. Here's a good article that explains that: If the Higgs field were zero.

Sorry, CERN, but you need to pick up the workmanship before you can be taken seriously.

OPERA isn't a CERN project. CERN sent OPERA the neutrinos, but the detector and timing hardware is OPERA's responsibility. I don't know why CERN stepped in to issue a press release about errors in the results OPERA announced. (Maybe they wanted to dissociate themselves from the FTL claims that were being indirectly attributed to CERN?) More here.

This is the best description I have seen in English of the debacle (see the first comment).

Crucial bit : We do not know how crooked the plug actually was at the time of our measurements last year. Sub-sequentially we do not know the actual time delay. So, they just don't know.

This guy explains things pretty well:
http://profmattstrassler.com/

Unless things have changed since yesterday, the LHC cannot disprove the HB. It can show that it isn't within certain energy ranges, but it does not have the capability of emphatically disproving it's existence over the entire predicted spectrum.

That's literally true but misleading. Here is a paper that explains how non-LHC data constrain the standard-model Higgs to have a mass between 115 and 148 GeV. The LHC can't test whether there's a Higgs with a very high mass, but that's irrelevant because we know it has to be below 148 GeV based on non-LHC data. Based on the combination of non-LHC and LHC data, we know that if there's a standard-model Higgs, then it has a mass of about 115-127 GeV. The LHC is absolutely capable of disproving the existence of a standard-model Higgs within that mass range, if it doesn't actually exist. If there is no SM Higgs, we will know that within a couple of years based on LHC data.

The real reason there may be a lot of uncertainty for years to come is that there are many different ways of making a model with a Higgs in it. The standard model is only one of them. Some of the non-SM Higgses could be very difficult to detect. Here is a nice discussion of that. There are scenarios where the SM Higgs is ruled out by 2014, but by 2022 we still will not have detected or ruled out a non-SM Higgs.

For those of you interested in LHC physics I would highly recommend this blog:

http://profmattstrassler.com/

As far as I can tell the author is an extremely well-respected physicist (disclaimer: I am a theoretical physicist but do not work on LHC physics) and I also find his blog very clear and I like the extra level of detail.

(The author also does not try to sell you his own favorite theory of everything, a thing I've seen happening a few times too many in the blogs out there.)

It's not really Cerenkov radiation; it might better be called Cohen-Glashow emission.

http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/06/is-the-opera-speedy-neutrino-experiment-self-contradictory/
http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/11/another-speed-bump-for-superluminal-neutrinos/

(Which is beautifully QFT focused, which appeals to me, and probably to you too.)

It's not really Cerenkov radiation; it might better be called Cohen-Glashow emission.

http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/06/is-the-opera-speedy-neutrino-experiment-self-contradictory/
http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/11/another-speed-bump-for-superluminal-neutrinos/

(Which is beautifully QFT focused, which appeals to me, and probably to you too.)

I'm also dubious, because it seems highly obvious. Elburg himself notes that OPERA may have accounted for it but did not make that crystal clear in their paper. He only says, "It is likely that this is also done using the baseline reference frame where the clock reference frame should be used", however I do not think that is so much likely as merely possible.

Additionally "Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) happens to be less universal than the name suggests" is well known, and is also not the reference timescale in the OPERA paper

Undoubtedly there will be a response to the letter from the OPERA team, and it is possible that they will answer Elburg's criticism in a way that removes these doubts over the anomalous timing data.

I think that objections to the data like Strassler's ( here: http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/11/another-speed-bump-for-superluminal-neutrinos/ ) are more interesting. They're also more up your alley.

From http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/09/22/what-have-we-here/

"To deduce their speed requires measuring the 730 kilometer straight-line distance, from the point where the neutrino beam pulses are created to the location of the OPERA experiment, to an accuracy of 20 centimeters."

http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/08/19/current-lhc-data-and-supersymmetry-is-supersymmetry-in-trouble/

We also have not found the Higgs yet there is not enough data to distinguish this from a fluctuation in the background.

Right. The Nature article has no quantitative description of the statistics, but this blog does. Note the stuff about the "look elsewhere effect." To understand what this means, imagine that you have a histogram with, say, a thousand channels in it, and let's imagine the null hypothesis, which is that in truth the histogram has nothing in it but a smoothly varying background, no peaks. But there is noise, and statistically a one-in-a-thousand fluctuation is about 3 standard deviations. That means that out of a thousand bins in your histogram, you expect to get roughly one with a +3 sigma fluctuation in it that could look like a peak. So if you run this experiment and get a 3-sigma peak, your result should be published as "we saw nothing." Taking into account the look elsewhere effect, the statistics in this experiment are nowhere near the level you'd want in order to claim detection of the Higgs -- and the collaborations involved are not claiming that.