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Fermilab Experiment Hints At Multiple Higgs Particles
krou writes "Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges. Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.'" There's more detail in this writeup from Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of SLAC and Fermilab. Here's the paper on the arXiv.
We can all go Sliding to parallel universes, now!
Right?
And people were questioning why we should build such big machines...
This is great and all, but does this mean we'll finally get some great new technologies like artificial gravity, FTL propulsion or communication, quantum-fluctuation energy, or interdimensional travel?
So if the Higgs particle is the 'God particle', does this mean that polytheism is the way to go? Yay Hinduism?
My other comment is funny
you gotta love nature. just when you think you figured out what is behind the curtain, nature reveals yet another curtain.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I recall when being an "elementary particle" meant that there would be only a very small number of different types. Now a passe' notion, i understand. ...wait, actually I don't understand.
They built the LHC at Cern for something that was found out at the place they were trying to make obsolete.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
Anybody else think this is modern-day snake oil?
No.
Have you ever considered what technologies we wouldn't have today if people hadn't concerned themselves with the surprising spectrum of black body radiation over a century ago?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
nope
like being able to build ZPM's?
Okay, but this doesn't tell me where my gravity gun is-- Yeah sure I'm getting along great with this crowbar, but seriously give me my gravity gun.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
Anybody else think this is modern-day snake oil?
No. And on the other hand, no.
"Excuse me, did you say 'Trekker'? The word is 'Trekkie.' I should know; I created them." -- Gene Roddenberry
not the portentious/pretentious "God Particle".
Leon Lederman called it The Goddamn Particle because finding it---or them---is so vexatious.
His editor changed the title of the book, removing the -damn, to make it more commercially successful.
quoth Peter Higgs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern
Shall y'all moderate this "Informative" or "Funny"?
This is great and all, but does this mean we'll finally get some great new technologies like artificial gravity, FTL propulsion or communication, quantum-fluctuation energy, or interdimensional travel?
In 1917 Einstein published a theoretical paper about the absorption, spontaneous emission, and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. In 1928, Rudolf W. Ladenburg confirmed the existences of the phenomena; in 1947, Willis E. Lamb and R. C. Retherford found apparent stimulated emission in hydrogen spectra and effected the first demonstration of stimulated emission; on 16 May 1960, Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first functional laser.
We now have fibre optics transmitting data around the world instead of giant copper bundles, and it only took 43 years (of course it took another 15+ before it went from the first prototype to the "real world"):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser
We don't know what the results will be, that's why it's called research.
(I'm pretty sure he hasn't ever considered that)
there is this interesting feature of human nature where if you don't have tangible experience with something yourself the concept must either be wrong or not exist in the first place. "I don't understand the science behind quantum physics / global warmning / whatever and haven't heard a plausible car analogy to explain it, therefore all the scientists have made a big mistake and doesn't exist." the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
I'm not a historian of science, but my understanding is that it was purely mathematical -- invented before the relevant quantum mechanics was known. As my undergrad QM text (Griffiths, p 356) says, "Einstein was forced to 'invent' stimulated emission in order to reproduce Plank's formula." I believe he justified it with a fairly abstract thermodynamics argument (he didn't identify a mechanism, he just showed it had to be true or else thermodynamics would be violated). Sorry that I can't cite sources -- I don't have them handy.
the arrogance of introspective existence or something. or maybe just a lack of empathy.
Or maybe just the lack of science education. I took a college-level chemistry class recently. It kicked my ass, but it was worth it. When you can sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and predict the results of some experiment mathematically, then go into a lab, perform the experiment, and see your results proven correct, you really get a feeling for, "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Unfortunately, not many people today are given this experience/forced to have this experience.
Breakfast served all day!
ok, what with genetics, medicine, computer, cell, and other technological discoveries and advances being dominated by the US, we're supposed to think physics might be in that group too? But what about all the slashdot articles that say science in the US is dead? Obviously there has been a mistake. If the US isn't dominating everything, then there is cause for alarm and we must all get upset and stuff. And obviously the US is just failing in science and technology. Raise our fists in anger! America, Fark Yeah! //grumbles about inconsistent /. editors, walks off
then they found the higgs boson and it shrank the planet to the size of a pea
OK, so now all that's left is to learn how to manipulate these particles, and thus transmute atoms. Or disintegrate them...
Beautiful. Never read a more perfect summary of the necessity of doing pure science.
Whenever you look more closely, the universe is immediately replaces by something more complex and even more bizzare...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If there are a plethora of god particles. We may have to rethink more than just physics models.
I wonder if this would help out Lisi's theory that the organization, and expression, of particles lines up with the mathematical E8 Lie group?
Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything | Video on TED.com
It's fun to observe from the periphery - this result, the recent confirmation (maybe) that neutrinos have mass (otherwise they couldn't interconvert among their three types)...more and more cracks are appearing in the Standard Model. It's exciting. And probably the answer is 42.
If you have antimatter, interstellar travel becomes somewhat possible. Since nothing else can do that, you'd be stupid to use antimatter for military applications. Nuclear weapons will be MUCH cheaper.
You know, I fucking hate these sort of stories. As usual I click through to arxiv.org and view the paper, and invariably I come away feeling like a goldfish trying to fathom a microwave oven.
I like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy, but these papers make me feel like a moron.
Though we must admit this problem is not as... problematic as the one that the physics community termed the "ultraviolet catastrophe". Further, Plank solved the blackbody radiation problem with a research budget that accounted primarily for his salary, pens, and paper (not billions of dollars). I'm not saying that the research isn't worth doing, just that trying to argue that the experiments today are comparable to those at the birth of quantum physics strikes me as incorrect.
It's great that it worked for you, but lots of people aren't receptive to even that.
Richard Dawkins did a documentary where he went into a poor school where the majority of students believed the world was just 6000 years old etc. He took a class to the beach to look for fossils. He thought that if he could just get the kids to find a real fossil for themselves, and actually hold it, then it might give them (as you put it) a feeling for "Hey, maybe they really aren't just making all this shit up."
Did it work? Hell no. The documentary tries to hide that, but what they don't say seems to be as revealing as what they do say. The whole class managed to find only 2 fossils (This is abysmal - it was a beach where you could find dozens by yourself in a day). And they only showed interviews afterwards of two of the classmates, and all they would say was pretty much "it was durrr okay"
(Link http://www.secularism.org.uk/whydawkinsisrightandhiscriticsar.html )
Didn't that have a number of 5? 5 "differing" equations to describe everything?
WHAT A TWEEEEST. The rabbit hole gets deeper.
Hopefully Douglas won't be correct on infinite complexity...
First thing I thought of when I read this is that there are five fundamental forces in the universe:
1. Electricity
2. Magnetism
3. Gravity
4. Weak Nuclear
5. Strong Nuclear
Considering that the Higgs boson was, in part, supposed to help explain how mass worked, it makes me wonder if this is the reason for the number they're arriving at.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
These idiots just keep finding more things to investigate, it is almost like they don't care that textbooks will need to be reprinted.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
When you sit down with a pencil and a bunch of papers and you can predict the result of an experiment to 20 decimal places... all proven right. You get that feeling pumped. QED (the quantum theory of the electromagnetic field) has been incredibly tested experimentally. It's no modern snake oil.
Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit.
they just haven't spotted them yet
...last time we ended up with a particle zoo, we found that they were made out of a few smaller particles (quarks) that never really revealed being separate particles, but where you could find it out indirectly.
What if that’s also, in a way, the case here?
Or something else that is not a direct property of the Higgs particle, but only of the situation/position/forcefields/... it is in.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I always found it odd that they called it the 'God particle' as it had nothing to do with God in any sense that I could figure out.
That it is just a modification of 'goddamn particle' make infinitely more sense.
Was interesting to see a Fermilab article from slashdot go across my RSS feed when I logged into my work system this morning. But I'm just an applications developer for the lab, so I'm not scientific enough to make any good comments on the article itself. All I can say, is there has definitely seemed to be more excitement than normal among the 'scientist types' this past week or two..
You'll never see my work on the preprint server (wrong email address). You can buy it on a t-shirt, watch it on YouTube, or look at non-peer reviewed papers.
Doug
TheStandUpPhysicist
http://bit.ly/GEMtshirt the t-shirt
http://bit.ly/GEMpdf Close as I can do to a paper
http://bit.ly/GEMnb Transformed paper into a Mathematica notebook to check the math
http://bit.ly/GEMnbpdf The notebook as a pdf file
Lots of stuff on YouTube
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
It dismays me that whenever I (in other circumstances) also claim that the US is the only country to have used a nuke on an enemy, someone says something along the lines of "it wasn't really a nuke". It doesn't matter that they were small yield. They still pretty much wiped out a large part of both cities and irradiated the surrounding areas in a single blast.
But they were only small nukes, so I guess they don't count?
The only saving grace of this mentality is that it reveals people are still ashamed that this ever occurred. So ashamed they're trying to twist the logic so it appears it never happened.
I think you are jumping the gun more than just a little. An extra Higgs doublet (which is where the extra Higgs bosons come from) is just one possible explanation. A far more likely explanation, IMHO, is that there is some systematic error which D0 has not accounted for. However even if it is a real effect there are certainly other explanations that simple extra Higgs bosons. For example I'm sure some SUSY models could explain it (although these do come with extra Higgs bosons as well!).
A far more interesting result is the recent data from MINOS which suggests that the mass splitting between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos might be different. While, again, it may well be (in fact some would say very likely) that the effect will disappear with better data if it is proven then this would violate CPT which is a core symmetry of relativity i.e. special relativity would be broken if the result is confirmed. So if you want to get excited about a still-not-yet-confirmed result I'd suggest you go after that one since the implications are far wider reaching.
At this point in time, I'd question whether they would fund anti matter weapons research. Tactically, do we really need a bigger boom than a nuke?
How else are they going to blow up the moon?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The easiest way to teach peopel this is with electronics.
Make the math, assemble. Change the math, change a piece of the design.
It's a cheap way to go becasue it can be done with a VOhm meter, to resisters and a battery.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
An thus shall we name the Bosons: Larry Moe Curly Shemp Joe
Why Dawkins Is Right and His Critics ARRRR!!
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I believe CDF said they did not see this CP violation and its quite possible that the D0 result will no longer be significant as statistics are increased.
We already have time travel. It goes with space travel; or moving. That's where all the (special or general) relativity stuff comes in - spacetime and all that (I prefer timespace, personally).
The tricks to travelling through time at a different rate would be:
a) travelling through time at a different rate without having to bother travelling in space;
b) managing to go faster than the speed of light and hence travel back in time (my understanding is that light sort of.. stays stopped in time)
c) managing to slow down the relative speed you are travelling at so as to travel relatively faster through time.
The other way involves wormholes; or tunnelling directly from one part of spacetime to another; but that would possibly be rather hit-and-miss and you would likely want some sort of gates at the endpoints; if anything, that is more likely to come out of the Higgs-particle experiments, due to being around bending spacetime via gravity. Personally, the most likely sort of technologies I hope to see come out of this research is the ability to manipulate gravity, but that could be decades, if not centuries away - what we really need is a good power source first.
Since this is been nicknamed the GOD Particle is it possible that the first three could be called The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost? Now what shall we call the other two?