Slashdot Mirror
The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News
David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.
We have three separate subjects crammed together in one article. So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried. How about three separate articles?
Or is this a new trend? Are we going to see twenty subjects crammed into the one daily article tommorow?
Insightful comments are *always* buried under senseless meme-tossing and political (or other off-topic) ranting.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The LHC will probably switch on this year, but it won't generate very much luminosity at first. Perhaps by the end of 2009 it will have made a couple of inverse femtobarns which would be enough, but it will be another year or so after that before the data are processed and analyzed. It takes quite a bit of time to understand and interpret the detector readout. The Tevatron does have a chance if the Higgs is around 160 GeV, but only with about one-in-a-thousand level statistical significance, and so far we are not seeing any excess of events there, but in fact somewhat fewer events than expected.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
The bump in the CDF two-tau decay channel went away with more data, which wasn't too surprising. I'm not sure how all that got so blown up in the science press, the original blog post that started it at Cosmic Variance surely didn't make any discovery claim. Having said that, the other half of the story, the rumored huge excess in the D0 three-b-quark channel, is still unresolved as they have not released any results for over a year. We'll probably see something within a few weeks I guess, I have heard that it is close to ready.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
I know right? And what about that sensationalist headline: "Breaking Physics News"??? If they had actually broken physics, I probably would have heard it on the news...
End transmission.
I read a discussion somewhere that many spacecraft pick up a sizable electric charge and keep it (they are after all in a vacuum), and that electrostatic forces from the Sun and the solar wind are enough to account for course deviations. It's certainly true that gravity is not the only force operating out there.
The Higgs field is supposedly responsible for mass generation -- and that's it. Nothing else. Maybe something about "spontaneous symmetry breaking...mumble... big bang.. mumble... inflationary expansion... mumble", but hardly anything "God-like".
This nickname comes across as something dumb invented by the popular press in a half-assed attempt to communicate to regular folk how exciting the LHC is to us physicists.
Maybe /. could lead the charge to kill this nickname?
I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com?
Rumors? About me? *sigh* I'm always the last to hear of them.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
It's going to be a race, really, to see what happens first - the Tevatron squeaking out enough events to confirm detection, or the LHC operating smoothly enough to get all the calibration and background processes established, then finding the Higgs.
It's going to be a close race. On one hand, the LHC will ramp up to have a huge advantage over the Tevatron. On the other hand, the Tevatron folks are at the top of their game.
I would post that sort of nonsense as an AC, too. For those that are unaware, the theory of a luminiferous aether posits that there exists some sort of medium in interstellar space which conducts light. It was completely superseded around the beginning of the last century, mostly by the theories of a man named Einstein. Which explain quite well our observations of the universe on a large scale. Dark matter is an entirely unrelated question related to the amount of matter in the universe. Dark energy, zero-point field...you're just throwing around terms. What we know about the forces in the universe is not exhaustive, but to invent a completely new one just to account for a minor anomaly is not good science. What you are doing here is the equivalent of fighting for the Flat Earth theory, and it disturbs me to see that modded informative here...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.