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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.
I'm guessing that this won't reassure them. "So, our big machine discovered some weird stuff, that we'll need to build two bigger machines to investigate in proper detail. I'm sure that neither of those will repeat this process..."
Outside of people informed enough to oppose particular scientific projects as being ill-conceived compared to other ones, support for, or opposition to, research projects is pretty much an ideological matter. People who support science as an end will be dissuaded only by the most grindingly uninteresting streaks of purely negative results. People who oppose it(or who rank it very low compared to other ends) will be appeased by only results that are trivially applicable to whatever they do care about. If, for example, one of these Higgs particles could be commercialized as a cure for male-pattern baldness or a source of HDTVs within the next two years...
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
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!
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
Clearly I missed the news report of Iran, Afghanistan or Democratic People's Republic of Korea launching nukes at anyone?
I had a similar experience when I visited CERN. Granted it wasn't a spontaneous trip (was arranged as part of a particle physics course), but when being shown around it was repeated over and over that we can go anywhere we want (but that it's not a good idea to enter radioactive or cryogenically frozen areas, of course), we can take photos of anything, etc. This is because 1) it's a place of research, so nobody should be discouraged from researching CERN itself 2) due to the politics involved, no participating country has authority to stop people from any other participating country from doing anything they want 3) it's publicly funded, so should be available to the public and 4) it lowers worries about clandestine weaponisation of the technology they have (especially since the word Nuclear crops up a lot).
It was a fascinating trip and I would recommend it to anyone :)