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Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev
Larry writes "The most important part of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was not found in energies up to 115 GeV, according to this article on New Scientists. This, along with other drawbacks (such as the magnetic moment of the muon) delivers a severe blow to the Standard Model. This, along with yesterdays article on solid state physicists' theory, may call for major restructuring of current viable physics models."
Isn't this the same magazine that published the reports of the unreproducible anti-graviton? The magazine that's fixated on cold-fusion? Have they really disproved the Higgs boson's existence?
Wow! Call Shambala, I think we've discovered some new science here!
Science is wrong
They haven't ruled out the existence of the Higgs by any means.
LEP couldn't probe the entire range of energies where the Higgs might reside, and there wasn't compelling evidence that they would be able to. That's why LEP was shut down; scientists at CERN wanted to begin work on LHC, which will replace LEP by 2005 (IIRC).
Now the search for (and discovery of?) the Higgs will probably take place at Fermilab and LHC.
And this business of requiring a "major restructuring" of current physics models is just exaggeration. People propose extensions to the standard model all the time; it's just that the standard model has described current observations and predicted new (and eventually confirmed) ones very well. There's no need to throw the entire thing out.
-Gabe
Was some heavy shit. Took me damn near an hour just to meta-moderate a bit for it.
everything is proven wrong at some point in time
... in time.
Oh yeah? Well, I'll prove YOU wrong
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
You misspelled "there" HTH
As Richard Feynman said "If it disagress with experiment, no matter who said it, or how elegant it is, if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong."
While the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field are very compelling and I am certainly not advanced enough in that area of physics to judge Higgs and the other creators of the standard model perhaps there is no Higgs Boson!
I have no real other way of explaining but a lot of things would be nice if there were a drag for a "mystery field" like the ether of the 19th century, hopefully 21st century physics and mathematics will be able to tell us where this mass and inertia comes from.
I attended a lecture by a senior researcher at LEP at CERN, and I saw many various collision images. They showed many of the simultanius bottom quark/anti bottom quark decays that you would expect from about 70% of Higgs decays. It looked convincing, but I do suppose that it could be background. As much as I don't want the higgs to exist, it did look good.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
I believe the universe is a simulation.
It's natural that the quantum state of a particle is not known until it's observed. Why would you render all this detail out when nobody's watching? It would be the same as Quake rendering things behind you.
The same situation would explain why sometimes objects behavior only makes sense at a macro-level - objects are only being rendered out that far. Quake doesn't compute motion for each polygon - it moves things in groups.
Only when we're looking at one pixel (I mean particle...) does the universe render itself out that far.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Could someone please link to the English translation of this article? Babelfish didn't seem to recognize many of the words.
the quantum state of a particle is not known until it's observed.
Quantum computing proposes to exploit this property to make computers that are qualitatively faster than what you can build in a non-quantum world. So it would seem that quantum mechanics is actually more expensive to compute than the "fully rendered" alternative.
A deeper philosophical question is "do you really need a simulation running to get a universe?" Maybe just laying out the equations is enough, a simulation only queries something which already exists as soon as it is defined.
Then, you have to wonder, do you really need someone to think of the equation? After all, the mandelbrot set exists even when no one thinks about it.
So probably the truth is that *everything* exists. Conscious beings are just much more likely to be the byproduct of evolution in a universe with simple rules, than to have been produced from scratch by chance (even though both cases exist). So here we are.
Not necessarily true. What the experiments have found is that the Higgs must have an energy over 115 GeV. According to the Standard Model, this is OK. The Standard Model can't predict what the Higgs energy will be - it's an experimental parameter.
So nothing's broken yet. It just seems that if there is a Higgs boson, it's very massive and will require big accelerators to find.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
Oh god since you want to know so badly I'll just clue you in right now. It's the eternal story of how a dimension can fold in upon itself. There are many ways you can look at it and most of them start to get very complicated essentially immediately. It's all the same damn process though, so if you focus on the process you will understand that that is the whole picture. There is really nothing more to see. You can sweat, you can dream, you can notice a whole bunch of other effects, like the experience of listening to music (that's my favorite -- well, not really but you can enjoy it by yourself) but in the end it's all the same. Just a universe looking at itself in so many ways. Well, I'm glad to have been here and I've enjoyed the ride, and since I'm a big egomaniac, I'll call this wonderful discovery the Mamoun Eternal Party Method. But just keep in mind, in case you ever forget, "Mamoun" is just a label. It's the process that counts. So have some fun, because now history can keep folding back in on itself. You are safe knowing this, because it's not like you could blow yourself up anyway. I mean, where would you go? Some other dimension or something? Like yeah. You are already there. Just admit it to yourself. Isn't this whole "consciousness" thing some kind of big joke anyway? It's funny to watch though, and the joke just gets funnier when you realize ITS JUST YOU LOOKING AT YOURSELF. But knowing that fact anyway is kind of fun. I mean, it's kind of like playing with yourself. FOREVER. Then you start to ask all sorts of crazy questions, like DO I REALLY NEED FOOD? I mean, if I don't eat, I guess I will die. But then, where would I go? One funny question is to explore the "patterns." Those are the short-term stable solutions. What, exactly, does "short-term stable solution" mean? Whatever we define it to mean. Get it, Einstein? Well, I think that's all there is to say. Now I just need to find out a way to get it onto the Internet so EVERYONE, JUST EVERYONE will know. Good grief. Is there no end to the madness? In case you are still scared, or maybe just confused, let me just remind you that you are I and I are you. We are all just corners in some silly puzzle. Now let's really have some fun and figure out what this puzzle can do. To give you a starting point, think about all the ways a little dot can talk to itself. Yes, that's right. How can a little dot talk to itself? Because when it "talks" to itself, what it is really doing is "inventing" a new dimension. We can all be little Gausses and figure out a nice limit formula involving e, wonderful e, can't we? If you need another clue, it's the pattern that just keeps right on reinventing itself. In other words, it's the pattern that includes a label, a separator and two add-on pairs. You need two add-on pairs in order to define the concept of a vector space. That concept of a vector space is really all you need. So you can label e as 2.718 (the exact number of digits is just a notional issue, once you admit the idea of Jumping from dimension to dimension). All real patterns lose coherence after some finite number of analytical cycles. Any pattern which does not lose coherence in such a way can be labeled imaginary. Imaginary means that the pattern can only exist if left unobserved and thus undisturbed. The unobserved pattern may exist but not measurably, because any observable solution must exist in a space that admits observation.
The last huge time someone said, "Hold on--it should not be doing this!" was Planck, in 1900, when he found light quanta in black body radiation.
Basically, Planck was expecting the color of the light of a hot body to increase smoothly as the temperature went up...(infrared, visible, UV, Xray, gamma)....Unfortunately, he found that in reality, it did _not_ go up smoothly....It went up in a staircase with billions of teeny tiny steps, meaning light is *quantized*. This effed up our entire model. All of it. Before this discovery, the precession of Mercury (ended up being a relativity thing) was the only thing people were having a tough time with. Then this hit and they had to develop a system of mechanics to deal with these quanta.
Check out the next 15 years:
1901: Max Planck, determination of Planck's constant, Boltzmann's constant, Avogadro's number and the charge on electron
1904: Albert Einstein, energy-frequency relation of light quanta
1905: Albert Einstein, special relativity
1909: Robert Millikan, measured electron charge
1909: Albert Einstein, particle-wave duality of photons
1911: Ernest Rutherford, Infers the nucleus from the weird scattering of alpha particles on gold foil
1913: Niels Bohr, quantum theory of atomic orbits. Same year: radioactivity as nuclear property
1915: Albert Einstein, general relativity
Not bad for fifteen years.
Now, while we have made a lot of progress messing with these basic discoveries in cosmology, particle theory, quantum theory etc, we still have been refining these models. We haven't had to chuck the whole thing in a while.
I want another fifteen years like this. But for this to happen, the thing needs to break. In half.
Of course, I have a bias. I want zero point energy, flying cars and FTL travel. So I am praying for rain.
What you mean is that the Mandelbrot set is something that it's possible for you to think about. That's not the same thing as "exists".
In other words, what I'm saying is that the Mandelbrot set is a byproduct of your mind.
From there we can go a lot of different places. If you think your mind is a byproduct of the physical universe, then Mandelbrot sets and indeed all of mathematics exist because of the existence of the universe.
What is my point? Indeed, I do have one, though it may seem like I don't. My pointis that it's a real possibility that mathematics exists because of the universe. Therefore, applying the mathematical kind of existence to the universe may not be valid. The universe could exist in a different kind of way than mathematical ideas do.
However, Feynman had a -correct- idea about what makes an experiment.
Strict scientific method has VERY VERY limiting ideas about what an experiment is, and just poking at something to see what happens isn't that.
So, unless you have removed all variables EXCEPT the Higgs boson, an experiment can't prove or disprove the existance of the Higgs boson. It can just be misinterpreted.
Physics intrigues me, but I don't have the time to study it properly. I'd appreciate it, thought, if someone would take the time to correct me here when I suggest something I've wondered since high school physics: Why do we differentiate between mass and energy - is there conclusive proof that they are not, in fact, one in the same, and what we conceive as mass is merely the resistence of the energy (or its generated fields) to change? It seems that if this were our basis, the lack of Higgs boson would not be an issue.
Sean R. Baker
CDT, United States Army
"Lead me, follow me,
or get out of my way."
There is an old cartoon, dating from a previous period of uncertainty in particle physics (before the quark theory) showing God adressing a crowd of angles. Caption "OK, they've got up to 1.1GeV. All those in favour of granting them a new particle raise one wing!"
you are wrong, unless you remove all other components, you can only disprove it, because unless everything else is removed it could be something else they end up finding, but if they do not find anything at all it meens that there is nothing even close to it, and considering te range the higgs bosen is in, i would guess that this proves it, you only have another 15GeV to go before you can disprove it, and since it is not a logarithmic scale it is very easy to get.
Physicists were a little different back then, and had a more intuitive feeling for the science involved. These days, the average physics grad student is screwed if he/she can't model it on a computer. It's a failing that is going to end up hurting physics as a whole in the next 100 years.
Maybe quantum computing will be the point the simulation breaks down. Maybe there's nobody watching it - and we'll just always wonder why it didn't work.
I know there's one bug in the simulation - there's way too much lint. What's with all the lint?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Actually you meant to say "they're" all wrong. As in "they are all wrong." Not "their" as in "all wrong" belongs to them.
all your All Wrong belong to us!
the Mandelbrot set is something that it's possible for you to think about. That's not the same thing as "exists".
I guess we need to be very precise by what is meant by "exists". So lets define a little test. Suppose that in a variant of the Mandelbrot set with a time parameter, we discover some coordinates where we see some weird creatures living in a technological society, all in exquisite details.
Are these creatures really living? It sure looks so when you look at them.
When you render the same thing twice, are they living twice? Well, it seems that they're unaffected by how many times you look at them or the speed at which you render things. You don't see them saying "hey, look, we're really living now! cool!" when you compute their universe. Their world is after all deterministic, with their flow of time completely independent from yours, and randomly accessible by you.
mathematics exist because of the existence of the universe.
Imagine you are one of those creatures. Then the opposite is closer to the truth. Your universe exists because of mathematics, and flow of time is of course just an illusion.
If God's adressing a crowd of angles, shouldn't they be raising a vertex instead?
And the brethren went away edified.
I just thought of this. I'm sure it's wrong so someone please enlighten me, I love learning about this stuff, but here goes...
;-)
In quantum mechanics, a true vacuum with "nothing" there does not seem to exist. Instead, they theorize that a soup of virtual particles randomly pop into existence, combine again (particle/antiparticle), and annihalate each other.
Now, what if, when one of these particles were created, something (rather energy, matter, or a field of some sort) collided with one of the particles in the pair? Would this provide the
"drag"? Could the collision every so often knock a particle so significantly off its course that it failed to reunite with its anti-particle and be destroyed? Would this explain dark matter?
No, I'm obviously not a physicist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night
The most important part of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was not found in energies up to 115 GeV, according to this article on New Scientists. This, along with other drawbacks (such as the magnetic moment of the muon) delivers a severe blow to the Standard Model. This, along with yesterdays article on solid state physicists' theory, may call for major restructuring of current viable physics models."
What the hell are you talking about?!
The Standard Model works just fine with a Higgs boson mass greater than 115 GeV? This lacks even a vague resemblance to a "severe blow"! Heck, the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model extensions -- which tend to predict a "lighter" Higgs mass -- are not even close to ruled out by this fact. (You'd need to get above at least 170 GeV.) The only thing this casts any doubt on is the reports from the ALEPH experiment at CERN that they saw evidence for a Higgs at this energy. Even this last bit is hardly a surprise, since ALEPH had fairly poor statistics.
Furthermore, yesterday's "solid state" article should not be taken of evidence of anything, save two facts: (A) physicsts, like anyone else, like to bullshit when they're drinking, and (B) some people like talking to journalists a little too much. If you take even a rudimentary look around, you'll see that none of these people who are criticizing reductionism have actually gone so far as to propose a specific theory, a general framework for theoretical model building, or even a couple of half-assed "principles" to guide people in their work. Face it. This is not science. It's just people getting windy.
ooo, ooo, and unattended system, quick, somebody figure out some shell code and root the universe!
Now you are just being obtuse :-)