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Race For the "God Particle" Heats Up
SpuriousLogic writes "CERN is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims. Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. CERN's Lyn Evans admitted the accident which will halt the $7B Large Hadron Collider until September may cost them one of the biggest prizes in physics."
I see nothing wrong here. As they say - it's 50-50: they either find it, or not.
Also, what are the odds the particle doesn't exist AND they find it?
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Why is there a race? Why aren't they working together to find it?
Races are good. I don't think we would have gone to the moon so fast if it wasn't a race between usa and russia.
1/0
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Yeah, but can the tevatron create black holes or rip the fabric of the time/space continuum? GO CERN!
The great thing about scientific theory - real scientific theory - is that is has predictive capabilities. Theory predicts that the Higgs exists. If the theory is correct, they feel that their experiment has a 50% to 96% chance of finding it.
And if they don't find it, it would actually be a bigger deal than if they do. It means something was off either in the experiment or the theory, and that means it's back to square one!
=Smidge=
It's a very friendly "competition". While it *may* be possible for the Tevatron to locate the Higgs before LHC turn-on, it doesn't negate the fact that the LHC will use energies an order of magnitude higher than the Tevatron.
Fermilab - which is where the Tevatron is located - also has a huge number of people working on CMS - one of the LHC detectors.
Most of the "US vs Europe" mentality and the "OMG we're losing our physics crown to some other lab" is a sidebar injected by the media and politicians. Otherwise, it can be very dry (aka, non-newsworthy) work punctuated by moments of "Eureka!"
Giving odds for finding a theoretical particle is like giving odds on finding life in the solar system.
So it's one, then?
It was referred jokingly to as "that goddamn particle" ... but the relevant newspaper wasn't allowed to print such obscenties. Hence they went with 'God particle' and the nickname stuck, in the media at least.
As true as the outcome may be, that still doesn't validate the necessity of a race to procure a speedier advancement.
You don't think that if the USA And the USSR had worked together that we wouldn't have gotten there just as quick, if not quicker?
No if we had worked together things would still be tied up in a international comittee and at best we would have a non-binding resolution to send a strongly worded letter to the moon stating our intentions to visit it someday.
To discover the Higgs, we must show that given a theory without the Higgs, our data would only occur 1 in 2 million times we did an experiment like this, (5 sigma significance, standard for particle discovery) and of course the the difference in the data is consistent with a Higgs.
To exclude the Higgs in a certain mass range, we must show the opposite: if there were a Higgs, our data would only occur some very small percentage of the time (I can't remember the exact significance, but it is less stringent than discovery, again standard).
LEP already excluded masses below 114 GeV/c^2, and the Tevatron has excluded a small mass range around 160 or 170 GeV/c^2.
However, all that said, I disagree with the apparently official Fermilab line (50/50). We have a small chance of excluding all the available mass ranges, but the amount of data needed to go from excluding it if its not there to discovering it if it is there is huge. We would need several times as much data as we will have unless we keep running for quite a bit longer. Maybe we can get a chunk of the gov't stimulus package?
Without any data to base your odds on, you're just making some shit up. Not only is their level of precision low, but there is zero confidence.
Quite the contrary, sir, and I do somewhat resent remarks like these, although I understand they were made in haste in your frenzy to get first post. We have a tremendous amount of data, and we have theories that describe exactly what we're looking for. It's almost just a statistical game now. Our level of precision is in fact quite high (although not as high as is achievable at a lepton collider), and as I said above, we have excluded some potential Higgs masses to a high level of confidence.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.