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."

Comments

Re:Higgs is the GOD particle

[ZombieWomble]

if we find the higgs it makes the standard model more convincing as far as its predictive power but by no means means it is correct. It makes it rather harder to convince governments to fund massive facility budgets though: "We have this theory which has proven almost exactly right in every test we've thrown at it, and now we're out of ideas. Can we have $80 billion to build a system ten times bigger to see if we can just brute force some new phenomena?"

There is a distinct lack of a focus in the near future for particle physics if the Higgs is found and doesn't raise even a little question. All that's left to do is bigger numbers and hoping something will come out of it, which is going to be a damn hard sell.

Re:Bizarre

[rs79]

"That's just standard human behavior. Nobody wants to spend years or decades working on something that ends up not really accomplishing anything."

It worked for Bill Gates.

Re:god?

[lgw]

He's saying he'd rather see a cure developed using public funds so that anybody can make it for $10 a pop today, vs a privately developed one sold at $10 million a pop with $10 being the hope for fifty years down the line. Wait, wait, do you mean "public funds" or do you mean "$10 dollars a pop"? You'd have the government pay $10 million each for a cure and sell it for $10 each? Yeah, that's a nice sustainable model. Let's give everyone all the health care they want, and while we're at it, $10 Ferraris all around!

The pool of money for medical research is only so large. Who decides what the money is spent on - the people spending the money, of some group of "smart people" chosen by Chris Burke? Somehow I prefer the former.

it should be pretty obvious to any capitalist that one can distort and hide something's value so as to either artificially increase or decrease its price. If I convince you that a given item has little value, but in truth I value it highly, what represents its true value better? Fraud is of course wrong, and an obvious problem with laise faire capitalism is the lack of policing of fraud, but that's just a distraction from the real question. Assuming that people actually know what they're buying, how would you assign a value for that product/service other than "what people will pay for it"? If someone pays a lot for a given pair of shoes "just because" of some ad campaign, are you some higher order of human who gets to tell them that their judgement is flawed?

If you think only "the smart people" know "the real value" then you want an aristocracy to make life's choices for the "ignorant peasants": a view that's becoming all too common these days. Or do you think it's somehow OK if the aristocrats are chosen by vote, as if that's in any possible way a useful mechanism for selecting these "smart people"? How about we just let people each buy what they personally value, instead of restricting freedom and "taking things away from you for the common good"?

Re:god?

[AmiAthena]

It's the Mystery App!