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Higgs Boson Discovery Questioned

Posted by Hemos on from the final-jeopardy-on-questions-of-the-universe dept.

Lars Mooseantlers wrote to regarding a recent article in the New York Times (reg. req. *sigh*) that questioned last year's now-under-scrutiny discovery of the particle believed to be the source of mass and weight.

5 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. No, we didn't discover it by mcelrath · · Score: 5
    ...but we saw hints that it might be there. The community never claimed to have discovered it either, so the "discovery" is not in question. See, in physics we require "five sigma" to claim a discovery. What does that mean? If you have a bell curve (gaussian), the data you see has to be five standard deviatiations away from what you would expect in the absence of the higgs. We didn't get there, the latest review of the CERN data puts it around three sigma. It's worth noting that three-sigma statistical fluctuations aren't uncommon in physics. In fact, the search for the Higgs boson has seen three sigma excesses before that turned out to be nothing.

    Compare that to your sociologists and political pollsters who claim that 55% agreement is profoundly important. Five sigma corresponds to a probability of 0.02% that what you saw could have been background (non-higgs) rather than signal (higgs).

    It's just painful to wait because the LEP2 accelerator at CERN was very clean (electron-positron collisions), and extracting the higgs signal was relatively straightforward. At Fermilab, they will be able to see it if the mass is where CERN says it is, but it will be much more difficult (proton-antiproton collisions -- very messy). In any case, it will be several more years before we know for sure. If LEP2 had run just a little bit longer, we would have known.

    At any rate, even if Fermilab doesn't see it, the new accelerator at CERN, the LHC, will see it. But it might be 8 years before we know. And if we don't see it...we theorists have some serious work to do.

    --Bob

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    1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
  2. Just now questioning it? by Scohop · · Score: 5

    Just now questioning the discovery? Hardly! The entire physics community practically considered the "discovery" a joke at the time. I remember a high energy person in our department remarking something to the effect of "people always discover the Higgs Boson when their funding is about out." This experiment being viewed critically is _hardly_ a development.

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    j. scott olsson
  3. No! Not weight! by LionMan · · Score: 5

    This is one of those elementary school mix ups. The Higgs Boson is supposedly the particle which gives matter mass. But weight, on the other hand, is purely a gravitational matter (pardon the pun). In an environment free of all other matter, you would not have a weight since there would be nothing exerting a force of gravity on you. The Boson which cretaes the force of gravity is called the graviton.
    Sorry to burst your bubble.

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    -Leo
  4. Standard No Reg Required Link by Kwil · · Score: 5

    http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/science/phy sical/11PART.html

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    That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze

  5. If you're still interested... by rneches · · Score: 5
    If anyone is still interested in this stuff and wants to learn more about quantum physics and the Higgs Boson, but don't want to go back to school to do it, there is an excellent book called The God Particle by Leon Lederman (the former head of Fermilab).

    Lederman is a very, very good writer, and manages to pack in a great deal of real, "hard" science without making it a labor to read. He includes the math if you're interested, but organizes the book so that you don't have to follow the math too closely to know what's going on.

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    In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.