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CERN Scientists Looking for the Force
An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"
"Use the Large Hadron Collider, Luke."
...but shouldn't they be focusing on something much more worthwhile?
Like a working model of a lightsabre. Now that'd be really cool...
The Mothership
The keeps of the force will use the force to stop it form being know and the MIB, SGC, HWS, CIA, NSA, FBI, MI6, M12 and others will cover it up.
I don't believe in the God Particle. ...you knew that was coming.
It's in the Midichlorians reference.
"...and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider..."
Hadron...
Dammit, too much time on Slashdot
May the porn be with you
If there is no Higgs Boson, oh well...the collider has many other uses that can help move our scientific development along.
Christ I sounded like a politician right there...but it's true.
Living With a Nerd
From a linked article:
That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.
and you get to do it with really expensive, shiny toys :)
The Mothership
These are not the particles you are looking for.
hard at work, CERN's scientists are now
the Large Hadron Collider, they are building
brought us the W and Z particles, the fine people did
anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, they brought us as well, they did
to discover something even cooler, they are
the Force, it is
that Force, yes, it is
carries a field, it does, the particle
interacts with every living or inert matter, it does
the Higgs boson, it is
call it so, physicists do
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If they are to find "Grand Unified Theory" I wander if it contains not only "The Function" that explains all interactions in universe but more importantly, why is function evaluated at all and how it is evaluated. Is it possible that any mathematical function can evaluate itself, and if not, is there any other explanation? That would be perhaps more interesting answer then The Function itself.
839*929
Argh, don't these guys watch TV?, the entire planet will be reduced to the size of a pea once the mass of the Higgs boson is known ....
...)
(for the mods, its a reference to the scifi show Lexx
This signature was left intentionally blank.
I want counts for each reasearcher. How strong are they in the Higgs Boson?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Oh dear. This is just increasing the number of people who thing that Star Trek is real. I realise that they're merely out to sell copy, but you'd hope that National Geographic would retain some sense of integrity.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Parent pretty much sums up particle physics, and why people don't get it.
If they don't find a Higgs boson, they're still stepping into a massive new range of collision energy. I think the LHC will produce collisions with a total energy of 14TeV (I haven't read about this for a while).
This step up allows all sorts of other interesting experiments to be run too.
Not to mention, GP smells a little under-the-bridge. But so does every post related to religion on slashdot.
SciAm, Discover and Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log on MSNBC have all covered CERN's history and present project(s; there's two different Higgs experiments being built), and managed to do so without the silly-assed references to God particles, The Force and Star Wars. Is it too much to hope for that /. will someday stop putting out stuff written for adolescent mentalities and tastes? Probably so, since it's getting worse instead of better.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
it's how you get funding.
I could get behind that...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Why would they call it the God particle, they must know they will never find it.
You really can't mention porn and then expect people to read Large Hadron Collider as anything but Large Hardon Collider.
I think we should put a little flag in there with a picture of Hello Kitty on it, and make it a game. The flying politicos have to try to grab it as they go hurtling around.
The flag will be pink, naturally...
Living With a Nerd
The spammers are cashing in on the buzz around this project: I've been getting V!@9r@ spam for "Large Hard-On Provider"
www.eFax.com are spammers
Yes, I know, "their" not "they're". It's friday, it's 5:30 and I have to work this weekend, so grammar nazis can all go swing.
The force was so much more in ep 4,5,6. Why did they have to screw it up with Midichlorians? It's more like an invisible link between all living and intert objects just like the summary says. How do you think Yoda lifted that rock?
I prefer the idea of smashing politicians into each other to see if the resultant collision creates an honest politician (the equivalent of antimatter).
I think you're a little confused. The large hardon collider won't work properly if you're behind it - you want the large black hole collider, next door.
which is totally what she said
...slow news day.
Zen Buddhists "knew", or rather *experienced* such things twenty five centuries ago, and they weren't first either.
But such experience is not considered a valid scientific method, so...
Does anyone want to collide into my large hadron?
The large hardon collider
So that's why the Web (another CERN invention) is used to collect pr0n!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The most incredible thing anyone could hope for is that the higgs boson isn't there.
No higgs boson would be utterly incredible.
No higgs boson would be like the sudden realization that there's no aether. When we had to swallow that one, the result was special relativity and the whole world changed.
After all, the whole concept of the higgs is a scalar field permeating the whole universe giving things inertial mass. That field quantizes into these little happy things called Higgs Bosons, which, if Higgs was right, ought to be producible like any other particle by pumping enough energy into a small enough space enough times for the odds to be in the experimenter's favor. The fact that you ought to be able to make a higgs boson (and, to be cruely explicit, watch it decay in a rather unique way that leaves little doubt that what decayed was a higgs) is a prediction that's almost something of a side-effect of the existence of the higgs.
Higgs seems a lot like the logic of aether applied to the problem of inertia, at a high level. Aether, if you recall, was some stuff permeating the universe through which light travels as waves, giving it its observed properties.
Higgs plugs a hole in the standard model, that of inertia, that happens to also come from the same fundamental something (mass) that results in gravity. Higgs lets us just sort of ignore the whole inertial mass = gravitational mass thing and therefore not worry about annoying things like relativistic quantum gravity, which is enough to give anyone enough of a headache to be unable to apply enough duct tape to make it work (renormalize the infinities away). It also doesn't hurt that the energy levels we're playing with still leave gravity a pretty meaningless force, in terms of the magnitude of its effect on the actual behavior of particles.
If higgs isn't there, there's a lot of work to do in the standard model again. There would be answers we don't have, and some of those answers could very well go to the very nature of inertia and gravity itself. That would mean physicists can stop playing with toy models of 11-dimensional energy spaghetti branes (I'm not a fan of M theory just yet) and get back to some real work that's testable in the real world with a real supercollider, which we just happen to have build, called the Large Hadron Collider.
Right now, to make physicists deal with the holes in the standard model, without going straight to energy spaghetti branes, one has to bring up something annoying like neutrino oscillation. No higgs would be a field day.
No higgs would make the LHC immediately worth every cent, and woth every politician some physicist had to give head to to make it a funded reality.
I hope the Higgs boson isn't real.
Some good SF on when CERN finds the higgs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashforward_(novel)
No experiment that tests a solid theory is a waste. If there's no Higgs Boson, there is no Higgs Boson. But then we have proof that there is none.
We're currently in the "godlike state". We believe there is one. We have some pointers leading us to believe there is one, just like the humans of all times had pointers leading them to think there is a God (or Gods, depending on your faith). The difference is, science has the means to verify or falsify its theories. Whether you can ever proof that there is a God or there is none, well, kinda hard to say. God doesn't offer a test for his existance, so you have to stay in your state of belief.
Science offers you a way to test its theories. You might not be able yet to test them because you need tools that cannot be built yet, but once you build them (and they now did), you have a test, and you can find out whether the theory holds its water or whether you can toss it out and work up something else.
That is what science is about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Photons do attract matter gravitationally. It causes the perihelion shift of Mercury, which is one of the tests that lead to wide acceptance of general relativity.
Under general relativity, "spacetime curvature" replaces the "force of gravity" as a paradigm. Photons make their own little divots in spacetime in accordance with the mass equivalence of E=mc^2.
Even if it doesn't, I'd consider the experiment a success.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But this all has nothing to do with Gravity in the sense of "things attracting each other due to their mass", or rather "mass curving space-time". The Standard Model does not incorporate Gravity in the picture (that's why it's called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, not Physics as a whole). The theory for this force is (still!) called "General Relativity". Despite a lot of really intelligent people (no self-compliments here, I have stopped working in the field as I felt way too stupid for it) trying really hard, we still don't have a generally accepted theory for how Gravity and the other, (quantum) theories can be combined in a principled manner. CERN might help a lot with this but, ultimately, we might have to wait till the big crunch, if it ever comes, to see how all those fields really unite.
But really people, why do we need Star Wars to make this sound cool? This is an amazing universe of ours. It doesn't need George Lucas to make Light and Magic.
Well, it's dyslexic... Or is that a simple misspelling, different from dyslexia?
Maybe they're thinking... "May the FARCE be WITH you"?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
There, fixed it.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Curved spacetime is a mathematical model we use to describe the motion of matter in a gravitational field, it doesn't mean space is physically curved. "Spacetime" doesn't really exist, it's an abstract mathematical concept that combines physical space with the fourth time dimension and that is what physicists use to model gravitational effects.
That's why physicists are so keen on finding a so called "God Particle", because gravity still can't be explained. We can model its effects, but since space doesn't curve some other mechanism must be at work to transfer gravitational force between objects.
IANAP, so if there are any real physicists out there correct me if I'm wrong.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I've never understood something about the Higgs boson. It is supposed to give the massive bosons their mass, right? And yet, at the same time, it is itself supposed to be a massive boson, right? So, where does the Higgs' mass come from? Does every Higgs boson have an infinite trail of other Higgs tagging along behind it?
Ah, the dangers of getting all of your information from Science News. Mod me "idiot", but I'd like someone to explain this to me.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
Don't diss-CERN their language...
All matter is made from the same fundamental particles whether it's "living" or "inert". That is until we discover the lifeform field they use on Star Trek.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I am sorry for my lack of knowledge of physics, but could this experiment reveal one or more of the 20 particles that Lisi (that surfer dude) is missing in his "theory of everything"?
Here be signatures
I have written about the Force and physics in my blog last year. I even spent time to put a nice graphic! http://globalpioneering.com/wp02/did-cavendish-experiment-measure-the-newtonian-force/
Funny, I never found anything about the guy who coined the term "God Particle" being a theist. A top physicist, maybe. Nobel prize winner? No doubt. But a theist?
No, snarky theists are too busy yelling at snarky atheists... who are busy yelling at snarky theists...
No need for religious discussion here.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
When I was in high school I read the book "The God Particle" by Leon Letterman (This is a really good book). I was wondering if the he was the first person to call the higgs boson the "god particle".
> the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles
Third Sunday of every month, April through October, is the M.I.T. Swapmeet, a flea market for computer/audio/ham, etc.
To get to the bathrooms, you walk right past the "J" building, as long as we're talking about "W" and "Z".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Are photons ever at rest? If so, can their rest mass be measured? Is there an indirect way to confirm that photon rest mass is zero? Or is this an untested (and largely theoretical) prediction of relativity?
So basically, gravity?
No, the Higgs is basically a binding energy. Effectively most particles stick to the Higgs field and some are more sticky (higher mass) than others. Obviously the more you stick the harder it is to move yourself to somewhere else and this is what we perceive as mass for fundamental particles. (Note: most of the mass of normal matter has nothing at all to do with the Higgs!).
The particle physics view of gravity is a force which couples to the energy (technically the 4-momentum) of a particle, so any particle with energy will feel it. Since 'mass' is simply the energy of a particle at rest and is typically far greater than the kinetic energy (for most particles) this is why Newton came to the conclusion that only objects will mass feel gravity. However, in reality, any particle with energy will feel gravity.
Written nicely in an entertaining way for the layman such as myself.
I couldn't help noticing this statement though :
"He has long, gray hair and a long, white beard and, with all due respect, looks as if he belongs on a mountaintop in Tibet."
Those physical features are notably absent from the stereotypical mountain top Tibetan dweller - ie the Tibetan monk. Ah, using Google images shows a couple of people with long beards, but not typical, judging from the results.
My guess is that he's talking about the Unix lab named "Tibet" at Berkeley University where you'll undoubtedly find many such specimens.
Yes, I made that up - I've no idea if there's a Unix lab named "Tibet" at Berkeley.
Max.
...but shouldn't they be focusing on something much more worthwhile? Like a working model of a lightsabre. Now that'd be really cool...
Hey - we are still working on your flying car. These things take time!!
How strong are they in the Higgs Boson?
:-)
Well, according to this one's wife, far too strong...at least she's always telling me I need to lose some mass!
"Hah! I'm a Taydarian, Higgs bosons don't work on me!"
I've never understood something about the Higgs boson. It is supposed to give the massive bosons their mass, right? And yet, at the same time, it is itself supposed to be a massive boson, right?
Yes that is correct, the Higgs boson gives itself mass. If you use John Ellis' example of the Higgs field being like mud and the more the mud sticks to an object the heavier, and harder, to move it becomes. Well imagine you try to move a lump of mud. Mud sticks to mud so even just moving a lump of mud will be hard. This is what the Higgs boson is, metaphorically speaking.
... is the most excellent euphemistic allusion to a metaphor that I've seen in a while.
OK, serious physics question to follow up.
Photons are affected by gravity (they follow the curvature of space caused by massive objects). But, they don't "cause" gravity, because they do not attract other objects. My understanding is that gravity is relational, which is to say, objects exert a "pull" on each other proportional to their mass. So... how can photons be pulled without also pulling? (I'm going on the assumption their pull is exactly zero, and not just infitessimally small.)
Follow-up: does this have to do with the curvature of space being a mental model, and not a literal fact?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I browse with a +6 bias on troll (for the comedy), so your comment was near the top :)
About a year ago I was lucky enough to attend an informal talk given by Dr Helen Heath of Bristol University, who is involved in the LHC project. At the talk, somebody asked pretty much the same question; what if it finds nothing? Isn't it an awful waste of money that could be spent on $GOOD_CAUSE?
The answer was this: While it certainly is an expensive great big hole in the ground, the project has been funded by taxes on European citizens, and there's quite a lot of them. The grand total came out at something like 2 pounds sterling (~$4) per taxpayer. It has already advanced our technology to the point where pretty much anybody would be happy with the cost.
The saddest thing here isn't the trolling asshat who thinks that the God Particle's properties are determined by its name, but the fact that somewhere, for some reason, some moderator thinks that innane comment is interesting
First IAAP (just not a PhD Physicist, so if that is your definition of a real Physicist, well then I guess I don't qualify).
Secondly, it is not necessarily true to say Space doesn't curve. We are three-dimensional beings and thus cannot perceive anything in the fourth dimension. That is not to say that space-time is a physical dimension. It is a handy mathematical model which may or may not have an actual physical representation. The simple fact is, that if there is a fourth physical dimension to space, and there are many who believe there may be, and it doesn't violate any laws, so it is possible. Thus it is possible that Space is truly curved and we in like manner to Flatlanders cannot directly perceive higher dimensions. So the answer, as in many advanced Physics problems is that we really just don't know whether Space is curved or not, although you'll get all kinds of science speak that makes you think we do know.
Lastly, it is common to refer to space as curved when dealing with many problems, and there are real reasons to consider the possiblility that space is truly curved, due to the properties of space around massively heavy objects, such as blackholes and our own Sun, which is massive enough to "bend" light. Or perhaps space-time is curved by the mass of the Sun.
...hoverboard.
I am going to predict here that the Higgs boson will not be found. It doesn't exist.
Nope, don't have data to back up my theory, but I'm sticking with it.
</useless opinion>
The large hardon is looking for Higg's bosoms? I can relate to that.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Sounds a lot like frog baseball.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
...hacking the Higgs Boson? Too much of a stretch?
The average taxpayer gets a lot of benefit per tax dollar spent on pure research. While it may seem our fancy-ass supercolliders cost millions and millions of dollars (they do!), there just really isn't that much federal funding spent on pure research... relative to the rest of the federal budget!
You wanna knock off the fat jokes!
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
A mastery of the force is required to responsably and effectively handle a lightsaber. We need the force first so we can use our lightsabers to their full potential.
"Use the Force!" does sound much better than "Use the Higgs boson!" though. Although, surprisingly, slightly less geeky.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I believe I've said this before, but the question of where the Higg's field comes from could be answered if the experiment produces a big bang, followed by an inflationary event which wipes out the current universe in creating the next one ( I call it the Piehole universe as opposed to the time before when the same experiment created this universe, which I called the Snakeoil universe, out of the preceding one.) All trace of this universe will be destroyed, including it's spacetime; not only will we cease to exist, we will never have existed. I'm maxing out my VISA!
The first thread here devolve into a discussion of the "large hard on collider", and you want the editors to stop catering for adolescent mentalities?
/. to do the same. Quite the opposite, it is argument that that market is already well covered, and /. should continue to do what it does best.
Being professional means knowing your audience.
And listing four other fora that does avoid pop culture references is not an argument for
supercooled magnets, linked like sausages.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
If they don't find the Higgs, and the LHC is capable of exploring the region where the lightest Higgs is supposed to be, then the standard model needs revision. In many ways that's MORE exciting than if the LHC finds the Higgs and just confirms what we already think we know.
In his book Lederman estimates that a third of the world's GNP is somehow related to quantum mechanics. Seems a pretty good return on investment so far.
Stochastic electrodynamics, also known as Planck's second theory, is gaining ground, and even Einstein duplicated everything in classical dynamics. The Higgs isn't a 'god particle' it is a fudge factor particle, just like dark matter and dark energy. Epicycles upon epicycles.
Since you seem to know a little about it - how does the Higg's model explain the fact that gravitational mass == inertial mass ? Is there some link between the Higgs particle and the graviton ?
What is also often forgotten in this discussion is that as long as the LHC works at all it will get us at least one huge step forward in particle physics. It is poised to reveal which of the competing theories of the day is right, but if none of them are right (i.e., no Higgs particle, no extra dimensions, no black holes), that would be the biggest surprise of all - The physicists would have to go back to the drawing board and come up with completely different theories.
Newton kept absolute time separate from absolute space. Einstein allowed time to mix with space for inertial observers with special relativity. In 1915, he opened the door for time to mix with space in any situation using general relativity. Unfortunately, the math is too hard to apply.
I do all my physics with quaternions, a kind of 4D math designed to let time play with space. The smallest act of physics involves time and space playing together. To have time play with space quickly becomes confusing, but that is part of the fun. I have developed software to do this sort of thing using the command line at http://quaternions.sourceforge.net/
In a unified field theory, mass breaks the gauge symmetry EM, so no Higgs mechanism is needed.
Doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
LOL
Do you notice the tag here is "Large Hard-on Collider" instead of "large HADRON collider"? This is my favorite malapropism. I have a website devoted to tracking the mistake at http://www.largehardoncollider.com/
And what other answer would you expect from her. Nothing like blithely taking four bucks from each taxpayer to satisfy your personal curiosity and then claiming they'd be satisfied with dubious technological advances.
...there is no gravity; it is space-time that bends.
Deus est fatalis