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New Bounds On the Higgs Boson Mass
As the LHC continues to run at half power for the next year+, the US-based Tevatron continues to crank out results. Reader hweimer writes "Three new papers in Physical Review Letters present the latest results for the Higgs boson mass coming from Fermilab's Tevatron. The new data mandates that the Higgs boson mass within the standard model lies between 115 and 150 GeV." A year back we discussed the Tevatron's previous shrinking of the search space for the Higgs "God particle."
I didn't preview my previous comment and so it came out all wrong.
These are bounds for the mass of the Higgs boson assuming it exists. If it doesn't exist, this data is meaningless. What will presumably eventually happen is that we'll narrow the mass down to a very tiny bound (if it exists) which would be strong evidence for its existence. Or we might detect the Higgs boson using some other methods and higher energies, such as those at the LHC. Alternatively, if the Higgs boson doesn't exist then we may end up narrowing the upper and lower bounds until they cross each other. In that case the Standard Model will be wrong and we'll have an interesting day.
wasteful science at it's worst. trying to detect something we can't see, 99.999% (at least) of the worlds population wouldn't care if it was found and finding it would have zero impact on the worlds population. the world of physics and physicists needs to take a good long hard look at itself... and try and work out what it's going to do when the funding runs out... next year
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about electromagnetic waves either, until we made radios and wireless and microwaves and cell phones
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about electrons either, until we made TVs and computer monitors (and electricity itself)
I'm sure nobody technically gives a fuck about photons either, until we made lasers and optical fibers to be the backbone of the Internet
They're literally trying to understand what creates mass. If you don't think anything useful or cool can come out of that, you seriously lack imagination. But since you're ACing I assume you're trolling and I just bought it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Guess What - Your perfect world doesn't exist. whilst 99% of the population may not care (I disagree with this statistic also, by the way) the discoveries made will be beneficial to the future populations of this planet.
You may not care about that; however you would not be on the internet, you would not have electric power, you would not have a motor vehicle, you would not have a large market full of goods from around the globe, you would actually have a pretty terrible life if it wasn't for early greek mathematicians Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, to name a (very small) few.
You owe your current lifestyle to these men; and our future generations will owe their lifestyle to our mathematicians and physists - only if they get the funding they need, ney the funding the DESERVE.
Note that they didn't find the Higgs boson, just got narrower upper and lower bounds on the rest mass. In any event, even if the Tevatron had found the Higgs boson, that wouldn't make the LHC useless. The LHC is going to be used for many things other than the search for Higgs boson. For example, the LHC will be useful for finding supersymmetric particles. If we are to progress at all beyond the Standard Model, such particles almost certainly need to exist. Even given the minimal supersymmetric model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_Supersymmetric_Standard_Model, we still get a lot of other particles. Those particles will be much more easily detectable and analyzable with the LHC than with the Tevatron or any other lower energy collider.
Seriously, what planet are you fucking on? You reckon (laughing to myself) that nobody gave a fuck about electrons until 'we made TVs' ?!?
He's posting on slashdot. Chances are, he's not fucking on *any* planet.
From the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, April 17, 1969, regarding the justification for funding the then-unbuilt Fermilab:
Senator John Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
Stop using these arbitrary units of measure. Just tell me how many station wagons of backup tapes this is..
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
You should consider cosmology. That's the only field I know of where errors at the 10^54 level might be acceptable.
The banking sector aren't that dissimilar from quantum physicists ... they deal with gigantic magnitudes of imaginary "wealth" that ceases to exists as soon as someone actually scrutinizes the figures and collapses the waveform, causing it all to disappear.
Still at least we've managed to capture the Madoff Particle.
The higgs is sort of the measureable side effect of the physics that 'give' particles mass.
Think of it this way. The Electro Magnetic field "gives" particles charge. (or the charge in a particle interacts with other charges through the EM field).
There are some particles that sorta 'show up' in the equations when you're dealing with the EM fields (photon, W & Z bosons).
The same sort of things happens with mass. Some physicists came up with an addendum to the current equations that would explain how the mass of particles interacts. These equations have in them (depending on version) 1 or more particles (Higgs bosons).
So it's not so much that the Higgs gives particles mass, but by detecting the Higgs, we prove the existence of the Higgs field which allows mass in particles to interact.
2 sigma means a 95% certainty, and 3sigma means a 99.7% certainty.
So at just 2 sigma, 1 in 20 times you will get it wrong/fail. I would hope that in medicine and biochemistry, where it matters, that they do use 3 sigma certainty.
In particle physics, a 5 or 6 sigma certainty is usually used for confirming a new particle, which means that you're wrong only once in a couple of million times (although guessing at the errors is probably itself the most significant error.
particle physics for dummies
ALL (anti)matter, ALL forces, fields and waves and everything you can think of consists of particles. I'm not talking about neutrons and protons and the such, but even smaller particles known as subatomic particles or elementary particles. Most of us know the group of particles called quarks, but there are more groups of particle with cool names like leptons (an electron is a lepton) and bosons (a photon is a boson).
We know that a LOT of nature shows some kind of symmetry; this is the same in elementary particle physics. From this, it has been deduced that several particles not yet detected must exist in order to fill in the gaps in the symmetry. It is those particles we are looking for and they are predicted by the Standard Model, which is an enourmous collection of theories that together attempt to describe our entire universe (with the exception of gravity) (and to unify the newtonian and einsteinian physics).
Such particles have many hard-to-understand properties like spin, charge, mass etc. What we are looking for, however, is their specific energy. We do this by accelerating matter (protons typically) to incredible speed and then colliding it. In such a collision, enormous energies occur that cause elementary particles to cease to exist and create new elementary particles. All kinds of particles can sort of randomly be created during such a collision, but obviously the collision itself has to be powerful enough to reach at least the energy the particle we're looking for has. So we keep building more and more powerful particle accelerators in order to find these things. What we call the energy of such a particle is a bit complex; it sort of comparable to mass*speed, but that's not all there is to say about this; for example many particles have a fixed speed, namely the speed of light. Therefore, their mass is equivalent to their energy. That's the GeV number we're talking about here. Note that this is incredibly simplified; for example we don't really know the mass of the photon (except that it is 0 in rest, but photons don't exist in rest) but we DO know its' energy since we can measure that. Also, the charge is not factored into this equation. But, in general, elementary particle physicists think in "energy", not in "mass" or "speed".
Anyway, around the point of collision, enormous detectors have been built that attempt to trap the particles created in the collision. These detectors generate a small electric current comparable to the energy of the particle that collided, which is measured. Think about them as antenna's. After millions and millions of such collisions, patterns start to emerge and we can deduce a specific particle has been created in our collisions. For example, you see a lot of collisions with this energy and a lot with that energy, but none with energy such and so. The result is sort of like a spectrogram (but again, it's way more complex than that).
So in the case of the Higgs Boson, in this "spectrogram", we're looking for a peak somewhere between 115 and 150 GeV. This is obviously an incredibly simplified explanation, but I think this should make you understand just a bit more.
0x or or snor perron?!
Except that the phrase was coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat