Slashdot Mirror

our BEST and most widely accepted model, the Standard Model, has problems. The Higgs boson is too light, and in fact the lighter it is the further off the Standard Model is

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/...

WTF do we need another giant particle accelerator for? The Standard Model is good to 9 decimal places yet an entire generation of physicists are lost in the mythology of string theory. Why encourage them? Give it a rest for a generation until other technologies can advance sufficiently to support cheaper high-energy particle experimentation (and possibly string theory can advance sufficiently to suggest some useful experiments) .

Money for this accelerator would be better spent in other areas of physics.

The collider beams go off by a few millimetres. Oceans go up and down by as much as several meters.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/08/222247/how-the-moon-affects-lhc-operations

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/06/07/is-the-moon-full-just-ask-the-lhc-operators/

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/tides.htm
The "tidal trivia" summary below puts things into perspective. The so-called equatorial bulge due to the Earth's axial rotation lifts the equator about 23 kilometer. The moon's gravity gradient lifts water mid-ocean (where the ocean is deep) no more than 1 meter, that's 1.6 x 10-7% of the Earth radius. Why do we fuss about this? Because over an ocean of large area, that represents a very large volume of water. Also, it's the driving mechanism that controls the periods of the much larger tides at shorelines.

This FAQ from FermiLab on the Higgs may be of some use to many here to answer some of the more basic questions that seem to be emerging from this discussion. http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/03/06/frequently-asked-questions-about-the-higgs-boson/

The Quantum Diaries is one of my favorite blogs, it's updated by particle, nuclear and plasma scientists all over the world. They have a great range of topics too, not just about the data coming out of the LHC and the range of theories, but also the life of a scientists, how papers are published, covering conferences, heck even on the day in the life of cleaning a detector. It's a field I'm working to get into, so it's especially of interest to me but I recommend it to anyone interested in the world of high energy physics.

On a side note, there's a write up of what was talked about the the Neutrino Conference that happened last week. Even aside from faster than light travel, they are finding some very weird things

The Quantum Diaries is one of my favorite blogs, it's updated by particle, nuclear and plasma scientists all over the world. They have a great range of topics too, not just about the data coming out of the LHC and the range of theories, but also the life of a scientists, how papers are published, covering conferences, heck even on the day in the life of cleaning a detector. It's a field I'm working to get into, so it's especially of interest to me but I recommend it to anyone interested in the world of high energy physics.

On a side note, there's a write up of what was talked about the the Neutrino Conference that happened last week. Even aside from faster than light travel, they are finding some very weird things

The Quantum Diaries is one of my favorite blogs, it's updated by particle, nuclear and plasma scientists all over the world. They have a great range of topics too, not just about the data coming out of the LHC and the range of theories, but also the life of a scientists, how papers are published, covering conferences, heck even on the day in the life of cleaning a detector. It's a field I'm working to get into, so it's especially of interest to me but I recommend it to anyone interested in the world of high energy physics.

On a side note, there's a write up of what was talked about the the Neutrino Conference that happened last week. Even aside from faster than light travel, they are finding some very weird things

Last years LHC proposed energy "bump" was only five contending events out of several trillion studied.

It's more than 5. For the ATLAS detector by itself, as of Dec 2011 they had 89,760 probable Higgs events. (Whether or not they 'actually are' the Higgs remains to be seen of course.)

Your overall point about the low frequency of events is correct, though. Those 89k events are from 380 trillion proton-proton collisions, which translates to an efficiency of 2.4×10^(-10).

A (relatively) readable Higgs explanation

US LHC Blog
I like this very much. Lots of physics explained for us mere mortals (who still have some scientific background).