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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."
everything is proven wrong at some point in time(heh..some point in an imaganary plain..), it just came sooner for this.
-- Note to self - 'Don't push that button'.
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
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Mot värk och feber en effektiv vän.
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Jag är Ipren, helt enkelt intelligent.
Jag har anti-inflammatoriska egenskaper.
Bra mot muskelvärk, ledvärk och ryggvärk.
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två receptfria tabletter med paracetamol, t.ex. Alvedon.
Vid huvudvärk, mensvärk och tandvärk.
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Was some heavy shit. Took me damn near an hour just to meta-moderate a bit for it.
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.
First, there was a plan: how to bring together the different development groups at work? My boss said there was a sort of tension he thought could be eased by some social interaction. Not easy. Almost all of the different development groups despised each other, each thinking its "art" was more important and eloquent than the others'.
There was the kernel extension developer group, coding mostly in C and some PowerPC and x86 assembler. They worked on making our PCI board work with Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, QNX, and Solaris. They worked "special hours," coming in at one and staying late, supposedly, until seven or eight at night. They enjoyed Jizz cola and had a penchant for ThinkGeek t-shirts and cracking jokes about Win32 API calls and the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
We had XML developers too. They worked on our website, documentation formatting, and simple apps to configure the driver software. They used HTML, XSL, JavaScript, and a bit of Java. They typically dressed casually, drank coffee and tea, and liked to work straight from the spec: no "Learn XSL in 30 Days" books were to be found in their cubicle farm.
Then we had the guys who wrote full-out UNIX apps. These guys and the products they wrote had been acquired from another company, and were the source of most of the tension: they'd never really been integrated into our group except that they were physically present with the rest of us. They all had beards or mullets or long, unwashed hair. Many wore suspenders or the afore-mentioned ThinkGeek clothes; some even had Penguin tatooes or small C app code tattooed on them. Their cubicle farm was known for the bleating laughter that exploded when one of them found a "silly" bug on someone else's code, and for the rotten, fetid stench that could only be compared to three-day-old shit reeking from inside a rotting corpse's abdominal cavity.
So, in order to get the guys to "know each other" my boss had asked me to organize a during-hours, alcohol-friendly party. My ideas ranged from a keg or two to live entertainment, AKA strippers. But as to what to get them to actually talk to each other in a human manner I had no clue. So I let it go til the last minute and decided to let my inherent creativity mull it over in the back of my head.
When the day of the party had arrived, the catering company brought in a few trays of lunch meat, chicken, pizza, and side dishes, I had picked up the kegs (all four) from the local brewery, and the big-screen TV and DVD were set up ready to blast the Matrix into the eyes and ears of my co-workers. The eagerness in the the air was encouraging and I thought that loosening up and smiles going on even now were a good sign. I even saw some of the guys who'd known each other previously begin to bunch up, bringing along the co-workers they knew from everyday work.
The first thing everyone did was hit the food line, loading up their plates and grabbing a cup for beer to wash it down with. A few approached me and thanked me for the food; it seems appeasing the belly really did tame the beast. After a few minutes of silence and eating and a few second and third courses, they guys were ready to sit down and be entertained. After asking if anyone needed anything else before the movie started, the lights went out and the Matrix began playing. I heard a few enthusiastic comments and jokes being told.
About half-way through the movie I noticed a lot of the guys, especially from the UNIX app group, were getting up and presumably going to the restroom. No suprise, as the second keg was history by now and the third was probably half-way gone. I also noticed some of the guys bumping into things and stumbling. Alcohol's the social lubricant, eh? Well, not long after, my bladder beckoned and I answered. As I made my way to the restroom, I had a self-satisfied smile on my face: my little plan was working, my boss would be happy, and it might even a Christmas bonus or a promotion (even if in title only).
Well, as soon as I pushed the restroom door open, I knew something was wrong. The smell of vomit was pretty strong and I hoped that it'd only been the work of one guy. But the smell was so pungent! After standing at the urinal, waiting for the golden flow to commence, I stood in silence. It was then that I heard grunting. Listening intently for a few seconds, I hoped whoever was upchucking their beer and munchies wasn't leaving a huge mess for the cleanup crew. After pissing and still hearing the noise, I approached the stall the that moaning was coming from.
"Hey, you alright in there, man?" I asked cautiously.
I was met by silence for a moment. Then I heard a few grunts and concealed giggles. Something was up in there. It was then that I heard what sounded like crying and more moaning. What the fuck? I decided I needed to see what was going on. I didn't want this party to come crashing down around my ears. I pushed the door open hard and then gasped as I saw the most sordid, disgusting thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Standing on either side of the toilet were two if the UNIX app coders, their beards caked with vomit, their pants in puddles around ankles, with erect penises wagging in the air. Doubled over the toilet, his head nearly dunked in the swill, was one of the XML developers. His pants were also around his ankles and what appeared to be a combination of blood and semen were dripping from his torn, ragged anus. He was covered in vomit from head to toe, and he was crying hard into the toilet bowl, its echo an eerie accompaniment to the awful scene I was seeing but not believing.
They two Linux coders slowly turned and looked me straight in the eye, evil grins smeared across both of their bearded faces.
"What in Fuck's name are you doing!?" was all I could force out of my mouth. I still wasn't believing I was seeing this.
Saying nothing, both of the Linux coders rushed me. Being in such a tense state, I threw both of them off and made a break for the door. And the fucking thing wouldn't open. In the follow two seconds that seemed like an eternity, the door was pushed open my way and two more Linux coders came in. Upon seeing what was happening, they immediately grabbed me and were joined by the first two. I was trapped. Then the one guy, who was a dead-ringer for Rasputin, the mad Russian monk, gazed into my eyes and said in a feminine voice, "Looks like Mr. Party is gonna get a taste of the real action!" and cackled insanely.
Cold sweat spurted from the pores on my foreheads and cheeks as I was dragged by the four stinking, polluted hippies into the same stall their previous victim was in. Rasputin spoke again, excitement in his voice.
"Thanks for the pizza and beer, now it's time for the weeners and buns!"
Immediately the first two slogged their pants off and got down on their knees. The other two put there knees in my back and held me on top of the first victim, who now appeared to be unconscious. I heard their belts coming off and their zippers coming down, and some rustling around told me that their pants were coming down also. Then the first two started sucking off the other two, in what I could only call the most enthusiastic blowjobs I'd ever seen in my life. The moaning and slurping sounds turned my stomach and I retched. I could see why the first guy might have vomited.
Eventually Rasputin and his cohort started moaning more loudly, and one of them said "fifteen seconds." This was followed by a series of rapid-fire belching and burping that shook me up and down on the guy underneath me. After about fifteen seconds, all Hell broke loose. The two guys behind me started vomiting on the two guys fellating them and I saw cumshot shoot and mix with the vomit all over the two cocksuckers' faces. It was then that I almost lost. I finally did refund when the first two vile fluids were followed by streams of piss. I heard swallowing and dripping and I yacked all over their first victim's head.
Rasputin cried out like a little girl in ecstasy. "Oh god, I'd been waiting for that all night! This party fuckin' roxorz my coxor!"
Now it was my turn, it seemed, as all four started tearing my pants down. Chunks of vomit-piss-semen fell on my back and soaked through my t-shirt. It was reviling. I shuddered as I felt their cold, clammy hands in my ass-crack and a very indelicate reacharound on my ball-sack. At this point I had no idea who was doing what, and I was just praying that I'd wake up and realize I was drunk and dreaming a la nightmare.
Just then I heard the door boom open and my boss's voice fill the air. The stall door was open and he saw right away the turgid scene transpiring in front of him. His voice was immediately followed by two others, XML developers I knew, and they flew into the stall as best they could and began a fight to save my asshole. The poor guy underneath me had just woken up and started struggling and the extra weight of eight other bodies in the stall must have been suffocating.
"It'll be all right, buddy," I offered to him.
Within thirty seconds I was to my feet and was delivering the most heart-felt kicks to the guts of the rapist faggot Linux coders. Between me, my boss, and the two XML developers, we had the gang of four knocked out in a sloppy, excrement-filled pile of hairy body.
It's now been a month since this horrible incident and I am in regular therapy with a sexual abuse counselor. In response to the terrible outcome of this party, my boss toyed with the idea of selling the group off to another company, sans the four hippies who'd been fired and arrested. After considerable urging on my part, and very open ear from my boss, the whole group was dissolved and the Linux coders lost their jobs. Their product was delayed by a year as my boss began hiring a new development team. We'd found evidence that the whole group had been involved in the planning of the gang-bangs and that had it not been for us everyone would have had a "turn" in the stalls.
If there's one thing we learned from this tragedy is that Linux coders, users, and advocates are desperate cock-lusting homosexual faggots that can't be trusted in any situation, let alone a restroom setting. You've been warned.
On the positive side, though, the whole incident brought solidarity between the other groups in the company and I am now on schedule to get a huge Christmas package that not only includes a gigantic bonus but a month's worth of paid time off and a real promotion.
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...
it would explain the seeming order..but not the fact we can only see so far...keep trying..
-- Note to self - 'Don't push that button'.
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...
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 :-)