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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."
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
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 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...
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.
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!"