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Search for Higgs "God Particle" Gets Interesing
holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."
or does this sound like the beginning plot to DOOM 3?
GALAHAD: I seek the Grail! I have seen it, here in this castle!
DINGO: Oh, no. Oh, no! Bad, bad Zoot!
GALAHAD: Well, what is it?
DINGO: Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting alight to our
beacon, which, I have just remembered, is grail-shaped. It's not the
first time we've had this problem.
GALAHAD: It's not the real Grail?
DINGO: Oh, wicked, wicked Zoot. Oh, she is a naughty person and she must pay
the penalty, and here in Castle Anthrax, we have but one punishment for
setting alight the grail-shaped beacon: you must tie her down on a bed
and spank her.
GIRLS: A spanking! A spanking!
Because if this particle exists, and behaves as described, that would mean that you'd find enough energy for a "big bang" in, say, a cubic meter of empty space.
...) matter are constantly being created, due to the off chance that a higgs boson would decay into a top and bottom quark and one of the top quarks decays into an electron and a few other things that will combine into a proton and voila ... a hydrogen atom ... out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere.
In short, this particle has enough energy for massive events, and it's omnipresent.
Also it decays, meaning that (minute quantities of
Eventually, gravity (in short : by passing through a black hole, yes through, you read correctly), it will recombine into the original higgs boson.
So basically this will reduce "God"'s role in the creation of the universe further back before the big bang, by essentially verifying another prediction by the standard model, which will probably result in the following "creation" facts :
1) the universe has always existed, it neither came into existance, nor will it "ever" end (which is a bogus question anyway, since time only exists INSIDE the universe, it's pointless to ask what was there before the beginning of time, like it's pointless to ask where the moon is on the surface of the earth : it just isn't a location)
2) there are many, many, many big bangs, ours was neither the first, nor will it be the last, a big bang will occur "spontaneously" every x (trillion trillion) years.
3) the reason we haven't heard from people created in other big bangs is simple : it's not possible due to the massive distances involved, which are uncrossable, even by mere (massless) light.
I've long held (mostly out of sheer amusement) that the reason we haven't been contacted by space aliens is that every intelligent species proceeds through roughly the same sequence of scientific discovery, and they all get to an inevitable point of trying an experiment which invariably wipes out their entire planet & civilization.
We almost had it with the first nuke test, when scientists allegedly acknowledged there was a non-trivial chance that detonating the first fusion bomb would set the planet on fire.
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Looking at this blog linked to from the Slate article, one thing that seems inconsistent with the Slate article's interpretation is that they're saying that the observations aren't consistent with a standard-model Higgs; it would have to be something outside the standard model, like, e.g., a supersymmetric Higgs. (Actually, I'm not really clear on what a "supersymmetric Higgs" means; is it two particles, a Higgs plus its supersymmetric partner?) The Slate article, however, raises the idea that the observations might simply confirm the standard model, and that would be it. Am I misunderstanding something?
Is the Tevatron still running? If so, could it be the sort of thing where the collaboration might just be trying to collect more data, so as to make it an 8-sigma observation instead of a 4-sigma one?
Find free books.
I can't remember if it was specifically mentioned in the Russian "Solyaris" (subtitled movies don't seem to stick as well in my memory) but in the American remake it was suggested by one character that the "visitors" were a result of a "Higgs field". Later a device is constructed based on that assumption that is able to destroy at least one visitor.
You mean the SSC which was to be built in Texas, 54 mile circumference and only 15 miles of tunnel bored built before funding pulled in 1993. I worked on part of the design SSC (haha yeah, me and hundreds of other engineers and physicists, my job at Fermilab was a very very minor) Sure, accelerators can be used by schools (indeed Fermilab for example is run by consortium of universities), but they're very very expensive. If standard model is verified there really isn't much more to be learned in high energy physics by bigger accelerators smaller than say half a million light-years in circumference.
The Higgs boson is basically the last untested facet of the theory - if it shows up in the expected region without any additional fuss, the model is pretty much entirely successful within present experimental limits and particle physicists are back to digging through the last few orders of decimal places to discover new effects.
True, but the biggest reason given by scientist is the possibility of a Higg. If that gets discovered else ware, it becomes difficult to change focus and keep funding.
That might be an easy selling point for fill-in-the-box politicians, but personally I'm much more interested in seeing if there are K-K partners at the LHC, and I don't think a lower-energy collider can find them.
If we do find them, that includes and excludes several competing string theory models, and will tell us something about the dimensionality of the universe.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
However, they are reflections of the original turtle as when you have two mirrors face each other. In other words, self-similarity allows a kind of rolled out recursion that likely resolves your paradox.
But, you are treading on dangerous theological ground. You would equate the creation with the act of creation (logos) and you are not up to comprehending the act. If you take, say, designing and building a house as an analogy, you ultimately find that there is no unique creation that has occured because the idea of an artifical cave is a very old one. Creativity is innate in humans but not comprehended by them. There is something new under the Sun every day but it is unrecognized and not appreciated immediately. The act of creation is diffuse; a tuning in to something larger.
Because of this, perfect physics does not provide explanatory power and cannot sustitute for core theological mysteries. Your question looks to find room for God in a remote place (the physical law originator) but theologically this just flows out as a minor consequence of the original Word and is not some hideaway.
Not only that, but people constantly challenge and check these assumptions as technology progresses. For example, physicists as recently as 2003 (and probably even more recently than that) used an astronomical technique to experimentally determine the weak equivalence principle, an idea originating to Newton way back in 1687 with Principia, to an accuracy of 1 + or - 10^-18. Astonishing!
(The weak equivalence principle is the assumption that when you write F=ma=-G[(M*m)/(r^2)] the little "m" in the middle equals the little "m" on the right.)
These are things that ZombieWomble pointed out when he tried to explain why popular GUTs assume that the Standard Model is true, as I have reproduced below.
ZombieWomble While it's technically true to state that [the Standard Model is] "unproven" (as are all physical theories, pretty much by definition), it is among the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in history, and has been validated to extremely high degrees of precision. This gives most people some degree of confidence in the theory, even if it may not be fully fleshed out yet.
I would like to add to this. The reason that physicists pursuing a GUT (such as string theory) assume that the Standard Model is correct, is because it is, Higgs boson or no*. A GUT must "reduce to" the predictions of the Standard Model in its limit just as The Special Theory of Relativity (relativistic kinetic energy) reduces to (or does not conflict with) the Newtonian formulation in the classical limit. *The predictions made by the Standard Model, to the limits explored thus far by the Tevatron, agree with experiment.
You responded to ZombieWomble with:
morgan_greywolf Einstein once criticized quantum physicists for building unproven theories on top of other unproven theories, and I believe the Standard Model was one of them. To this I just have to ask, what's your point? Remember ZombieWomble talking about how all physical theories are unprovable "pretty much by definition"? Einstein publicly criticized a lot of things. To me this criticism is not very interesting, or insightful. Physics is about building the best model we can to describe the universe. If talking about particles being points, strings, or even tiny little Jesus dolls makes the math work out awesomely, who cares that our awesome new GUT that makes novel and accurate predictions says that a photon is actually a little Jesus doll? I sure don't.
One more thing that might interest you: physics is circular. How do you like that?