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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."
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.
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.
"God"? What has god got to do with this?
It's often referred to as the God particle because of its significance in physics, it would explain why matter has mass.
It probably also has a lot to do with the fact that the existance of the Mass-Free Higgins Boson particle was theoretically predicted, but has never been observed (until now?). This elusiveness to be observed and hence proven it existed is probably the reason why it got this nickname...
"God"? What has god got to do with this?"
Well it could be the use of God in the scientific way meaning that all other particles come from this one particle.
Or it could be using the term God as in the creator of all things which is pretty much the same as the first.
So the real question is are you ask because you are an extreme theist nut case that takes offense at the idea of a God particle because it is an affront to God, or are you an Extreme atheist whack job that takes offense at any use of the word God because it infringes on not having the idea of a supreme being mentioned in your presence?
Notice that is really is hard to tell the nut job from the wack job.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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"
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 problem with most GUTs is that they make assumptions that certain things, like the Standard Model of particle physics, are true. The problem is that the Standard Model is unproven, as the Higgs boson has never directly been observed.. If the Higgs boson can be observed, it goes a long way towards proving the Standard Model, which in turn, helps to support various GUTs that depend on the Standard Model.
My blog
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.
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!
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?