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Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev

Posted by chrisd on from the standard-model-in-trouble dept.

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."

1 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Broken models: Cool! by Marsh+Jedi · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I would be extremely happy if our instrumentation had finally become powerful enough to discover experimental evidence that breaks the model.

    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.