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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."
"God"? What has god got to do with this?
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1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
or does this sound like the beginning plot to DOOM 3?
"the LHC was build to find"
Looks like everyone could use some proof reading. Or is this a quantum leap in tenses?
the higgs particle is one of the last yet undiscovered predictions of the standard model.
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
as interesing (sic) as the search for a Slashdot spellchecker!
Why should any scientist hope that standard model will or will not turn out to be true? Nature doesn't care how many billions was spent on a new particle accelerator. Just be happy that we may have discovered something new and move on to a million things that we still don't understand, including much of what's happening on our own planet.
I'm getting rather bothered by continuously seeing these /. posts implying that scientists are so non-cooperative. The last few stories about LHC have even nearly insinuated that it was somehow Fermilab's fault that there were design issues with the magnet structures, almost as if the mistakes had been intentional.
/. editors become aware of the slant they have continuously put on the LHC setback stories.
Perhaps the men and women working in the more news-worthy branches of accelerator physics have to try and defeat each other. My experiences have only ever been constructive and helpful; contemporaries offering knowledge, insight and advice to help my research succeed, rather than breaking the equipment so they can steal the glory.
I hope that
[/sarcasm]
... are these large hadrons anyway? Couldn't they have built a small prototype machine for colliding tiny hadrons first, then scaled up when they had got it all sorted out? Idiots!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I saw the original Russian version made in the '70s (yeah, queue the "In Soviet Russia, movies make you!", jokes) . It was a very original movie.
Basically, these cosmonauts go to a space station orbiting Jupiter, I think, or one of the outer solar planets. Anyway, on the station, anything their thinking of, will manifest. For instance, the protagonist really misses his wife who died a number years before. She appears. But, she's not completely human: she rips through a metal door with her bare hands. Also, she doesn't remember much. The other station members just kind of live with it for the exception of one who committed suicide.
Anyway, I won't give out too much of the movie, but if you want something along the lines of "2001", this is a movie to see. I haven't seen the American remake with George Clooney.
It's also a good break from most of what passes for SciFi these days, you know: monster in space kills everyone on space station, space ship, or colony except for the hero who just barely escapes with his/her life only to discover that the monster isn't dead - cue sequel. Basically, rip offs of the "Alien" movies.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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?
You must bee knew hear.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
There's a good wrap-up of this at http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/the-higgs-r umor-spreads-again/
He's been following it since the rumor first surfaced. Imagine how the LHC folks will feel if this turns out to be accurate. Billions spent to search for a particle that is found before their collider is even complete.
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.
I think he's also attributed to the wiki-quote...
For some reason I instantly imagine a picture of Cmdr. Taco, captioned in big block letters, "Me can has proof reader?" And a picture of Cowboy Neal captioned, "im in yer posts, mesin up yer speling"
I'm getting rather bothered by continuously seeing these /. posts implying that scientists are so non-cooperative. The last few stories about LHC have even nearly insinuated that it was somehow Fermilab's fault that there were design issues with the magnet structures, almost as if the mistakes had been intentional.
The scientists are not to blame. Fermilab has a herd of bison. We fiddled with the magnet structures. We're not so dumb as we look.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I thought the Higgs-Boson was mass free because of it's nature as the particule responsible for mass...
Upon reading wikipedia, I was wrong: link
The Standard Model does not predict the value of the Higgs boson mass. If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV). Many theorists expect new physics beyond the Standard Model to emerge at the TeV-scale, based on unsatisfactory properties of the Standard Model. The highest possible mass scale allowed for the Higgs boson (or some other electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism) is around one TeV; beyond this point, the Standard Model becomes inconsistent without such a mechanism because unitarity is violated in certain scattering processes. Many models of Supersymmetry predict that the lightest Higgs boson (of several) will have a mass only slightly above the current experimental limits, at around 120 GeV or less.
Sorry.
Pffft! We could build 2 for the money we are pissing away on the 2012 olympics.
Or, more likely, we could build 1 for $80,000,000,000.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
http://asymptotia.com/2007/06/04/hunting-the-higgs -is-not-a-dzero-sum-game/
Exactly. After all, there's a reason why he's named Lucifer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The LHC is not being built for the express purpose of finding the Higgs boson. It's being built to find whatever there is to find at very high energies, and the Higgs boson is simply one of the most anticipated possibilities. There are four main detectors around the acceleration ring, and each contains a bewildering array of instrumentation to detect all sorts of things that might occur. Even if Fermilab beats LHC to this particular confirmation, there is plenty of purpose to continuing LHC, contrary to the /. summary's implication.
What does... God... need... with a particle?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The t is very unstable and quickly decays. Therefore it didn't survive long enough to make it to the front page.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The more we understand the universe around us, the bigger God gets.
Of course the bigger Gods gets, the more the bible becomes a collection of stories by men, and then edited by a council of people, and not the direct word of God. Something some people can not handle.
But the heart of your post is correct-If someone believe Pink Invisible Ponies created the universe, then no amount of logic will change that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Supersymmetric Higgs is the equivalent particle (actually 5 particles, IIRC) to the Standard Model's Higgs boson which is predicted by a Quantum Field Theory which includes supersymmetry and predicts all of the particles that we have already seen.
A few corrections. a SUSY Higgs is NOT the equivalent of adding 5 new particles to the SM but, infact involves doubling the number of particles and then adding 4 new Higgs bosons (since the SM already has one). What you are thinking of is a two Higgs doublet model which does NOT require SUSY i.e. we can have 5 Higgs bosons without Supersymmetry.
But more importantly, within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
Woa! Nobody should expect to see SUSY ANYWHERE! For all we know, although it is a beautiful theory, it may be completely wrong! Even if it does occur in nature it may not occur within reach of the LHC energies. While the solution to the fine tuning problem would require SUSY at a "low" energy (compared to the GUT scale!) the upper limit is very rough. If SUSY occurs at 10TeV it is somewhat unnatural but by no means a huge problem even 100Tev is probably not out of the question - and this is assuming that nature uses SUSY to solve finte tuning - it may well not. Don't get me wrong - I'm someone looking for SUSY - and I hope to see it but it is by no means expected no matter how keen theorists get about it!
oh, and should have mentioned nature has likely built such mega-accelerators for us http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news-print.cfm?art =1509
I really don't want to get into a very theological argument here (I tried to avoid it in my post because i think it goes off-topic), but since people are doing the exact sort of thing i was hoping they wouldn't, I'll say more.
I'd prefer to say it this way: Religious thought won't yield good scientific explanations, and neither will science provide good theological explanations. Religion is properly in the business of describing the natural world, but not in the business of providing scientific and "objective" explanations. In other words, using religious "explanations" to fill gaps in your scientific knowledge is improper, but using religion to increase your understanding of the world is not improper. These two different worlds offer two different types of explanations.
People seem to think that, since there is only one world, there should only be one explanation for that world. However, as the long history of philosophy clearly illustrates, there are many different things that can be said about the same object. If you asked me about a Coke can, I might say it's made of metal, and someone else might say that the same can is cylindrical; we would not be arguing. If that person said, "It's cylindrical" and I said, "No! It's metallic!" then my response wouldn't make sense. The "debate" between religion and science is similar to this-- they're talking about different things, but the debaters often fail to grasp that "science" and "God" conflict with each other no more (in fact less!) than "metal" and "cylinder".
So if we properly understand the religious claim that "God created the universe", then we would all see that no science could ever conflict with this claim. It's simply not a scientific claim, but instead it informs our relationship to the universe. It claims that the universe is planned by the source of all Good, and therefore the universe is itself "good". It's a claim that we properly have a place and a role within the universe, since we were made to be in it, and so therefore we are good too. It doesn't matter whether there was, at some point, a "big bang," because the religious explanation cannot be refuted by empirical facts or scientific theories.
Unfortunately, even the people arguing in favor of the "religious" description sometimes forget the purpose of the explanation. They mistake the explanation for a scientific explanation of the material creation of the universe. And also the scientists forget-- they start to believe that they can discover the goodness and meaning of the universe (or "disprove" the existence of goodness and meaning) if they find just one more particle, smaller than those that have been observed before. All these things are nonsense.
This week is "the Trigger and Physics week" for ATLAS, which is one of the two major experiments at the LHC. The opening talk by the head of the collaboration clearly laid out the LHC schedule, but on slides that are not published on the agenda. The original article that is referred in the /. gist has gotten it wrong!
The LHC schedule can not be publicly released until it is approved by the CERN council, which is meeting on the 18th of June. Presumably, once approved, CERN will make a public statement about the plans.
Currently, the plan is to close the experiments for "bake-out" and readying towards a full LHC cool-down and vacuum test around end of March. "Closing the experiments" means that the beam-pipe is one sealed throughout the 27km ring, which seriously limits the movement, fixing and other assembly tasks of the detector communities, so this is a "deadline" for detectors to be "ready for data-taking".
It takes anywhere between a month or two to ready the ring for insertion of *a* beam. It is looking likely right now, that *a* beam will be inserted into the ring around mid-May. However, that is not enough for the operation of the LHC. The LHC is a Collider, so it needs *two* beams to collide. Colliding two beams within an average design beam spot of 16 microns, is no easy task after having them traveling around 27km. (Before the beams are steered the collide, they are "squeezed" to a smaller radius so that the "density" of collisions are higher. This density of collisions, is what determines the luminosity, or, the number of interactions that happen between two beams, and gives the effective high resolution power of the collider.)
Once "one" beam is commissioned inside the LHC, the other beam, traveling opposite to the first one, will be commissioned. Noone really knows how long it will take to really understand and fine-tune the path (or orbit) of the beams inside the ring, but that is what determines when the LHC will get collisions and the first real data will start flowing, if the detectors, can actually time-in and calibrate, and move/push the data off of the detectors into the Grid for analysis. Now, Lyn Evans, who is the head of the LHC commissioning has repeatedly said that he imagines that is will take at least 3 months to get collisions, once a single-beam is commissioned..
So FALL 2008 is the earliest any realist is expecting to see collisions from the LHC. Then the ball is in the detectors' courtyard to collect data continuously and efficiently, to be able to calibrate all detectors in a timely fashion, to identify and fix detectors problems, and to push the (high bandwidth) data out to the analysis farms...
First physic results out of the LHC will not be before Summer 2009... The first paper will be a boring "foo is the multiplicity of events" and the next will be "bar is the cross-section for Drell-Yan/mininum bias processes" paper. The one after that might be interesting though!!
Tell him we've already got one. It's very nice.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Religious thought won't yield good scientific explanations, and neither will science provide good theological explanations."
Only because the scientific methods doesn't allow made up hogwash to be considered 'facts'.
The debate occurs because people who believe fairy tails want to dictate to every one else how the world works. Science must respond with facts and logic.
If people didn't try to control others to teach their nonsense and push parables as facts then there woudl be no debate, because quite frankly scientist have better things to do. As long as people , many of them have never read the whole bible or even know there own theology, keep trying to push the tooth fairy, we need to show them that they are wrong.
Keep your make believe invisible man crap to yourself, and everybody will be fine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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)
Indeed. But it does occasionally merge with the h and e quarks. Thus the formation of "the" grammartron.
Apparently though, in an electromagnetic field the h and the e quarks can get reveresed forming "teh" anti-grammartron. This has also been noticed with the r and o quarks in the "pron" anti-grammartron and the strange spontaneous phase shift of the o->p quark in the "pwned" anti-grammartron.
~X~
~X~
Religion proffers numerous unprovable, often flatly wrong, assertions about the natural world, and relates these unprovables to a supernatural world. References abound - here's one winner: "It still moves".
Your soda can analogy is faulty, as both participants in the discussion are describing testable observations of said soda can. Religion, on the other hand, offers no testable observations (not unlike certain modern cosmological theories, by the way).
You assert that religion "informs our relationship to the universe"; in fact, religion obscures our relationship with the natural world, by positing thunderbolt-wielding gods, fairies in the forest, and numerous ridiculous stories about reward or punishment in the "next world", or reincarnation as a cat. And noodly appendages, but that's another story.
Unfortunately, where your discussion finally fails is here:
Consistently and steadily, the diligent and careful application of reason and the scientific method have pulled away the veil religion and other superstitions have placed before humanity's sight. In the long run, religious explanations have repeatedly yielded to the supremacy of tolerance, reason and science, and they ever will.
Again, see: "It still moves".
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Actually no, civilization progressed in three stages: 1) How can we eat?, 2) Why do we eat?, and 3) Where shall we have lunch?
The lack of space aliens is owing to the lack of eight star restaurants. They cannot abide hearing "Do you want fries with that?"
SETI requires closing down McDonalds which is why Clinton refused to fund it.
The thing is, there is a good probability that we've already created at least one Higgs boson at Fermilab. The problem with this kind of science isn't making one, it's that you have to make 3000 (or more). The problem then is that you lose 3000 of them because the decay chains of the Higgs boson turns into something you can't separate from background (along with other event selection requirements), this eliminates 99% of the potential Higgs events. In the next stage you then lose another 70% of the remaining events because the kinematics of the ideal decay look like a background (you can still extract some statistical significance from them, however). This leaves you with a handful of events that are 'signal like', seeing these events has to be statistically significant, so you have to know the errors on your models and on the data very well (the error isn't on the data itself, it's on our understanding of the data; i.e.. the calorimeters don't measure energy perfectly, so that error is here).
So if we discover it, it's not because of one Higgs being produced, it's because we've collected enough events that look like Higgs, separated them from the background and understood the errors on our measurements. It's a very difficult task.
I worked with the chair of the Higgs group at CDF last summer, it was rather enlightening. They have a lot of work to do though. What it comes down to is there are two competing experiments/detectors at Fermilab, CDF and D0. They do not cooperate very much to keep them from becoming biased and so they have confirmation of discoveries. Back when LHC was looking to turn on in 2007, the only way Fermilab could possibly have a Higgs discovery is if the two experiments collaborated and released a joint Fermilab Higgs result. Even then, Fermilab would quite possibly need to be (statistically) lucky for the result to be a discovery of the Higgs. Now however, with an extra half year of data, analysis and checking, Fermilab might just discover the Higgs before the LHC even turns on. Even after the LHC turns on, it'll take a while for Physicists working on LHC to analyze the data, so the Fermilab people have a bit of time there as well. Agreed, or at least a "-1 Uninformed".
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.
"God particle" is an affectionate term for the particle use by Actual Scientists. Stop whining about its.
Hard core pendantry can be really ugly, kids.
But if you must: the term was coined by Leon Lederman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988. That scientific enough for you?