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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.
But can we really trust these people? They seem like a bunch of bosons.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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...
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?
We're still getting new technologies out of the strange sub-atomic stuff others started discovering c. 120 years ago.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
I apologize in advance for my ignorant questions, but you seem like you might know the answers and be able to break it down for a layman like myself.
First, how did Einstein postulate the existence of stimulated emission of light? Did he have some type of lab where he did experiments leading him to this conclusion, or is it all purely mathematical?
Second, who figured out how to produce it, and how?
As an engineer, this is the part I'm most interested in in this subject area: getting from some theorized effect in physics to being able to create and control this effect at will, and then coming up with useful applications for it. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like schools gloss over all this stuff; they talk about Einstein coming up with E=mc^2, briefly mention some guys working on the Manhattan Project, and boom, next thing you know there's atomic bombs exploding.
I wonder what other interesting properties in physics have been written about, perhaps even verified experimentally, but no one's yet devised a way to harness them.
Not stupid at all. The whole idea of a "particle" is kind of misleading. What is really going on at this scale (quantum field theory) is far more terrifying and mind bending that basic quantum mechanics (which is by itself very disturbing).
To simplify it slightly (or a whole lot actually), there are fundamental fields (like the electric and magnetic fields, for instance) which which have some associated energy density. Fields can also interact, (that is, if the fields are both nonzero at some point, there is additional energy due to them both being nonzero).
This is all fine and dandy (no particles yet). What we have described is classical field theory. Once we quantize these fields (i.e.,
bring in the quantum in QFT) the discrete steps these fields can take on become the "particles." The interactions between the fields become the force carriers, etc. These notions of "charge" correspond to how the fields couple.
Physics is hard. :(
I'm not sure that the people with cash would really want an even more nuclear than nuclear option floating around...
Being the only kid on the block with nukes has its perks; but that state lasted for about 20 minutes, back in the late 40's. Since then, anybody who has them has to contend with the fact that, if they actually do anything, pretty much everybody else will freak out and glass them. This has virtually obviated the theoretical killing potential. From their invention to the present, nukes probably trail machetes(never mind Kalashnikovs and assorted knockoffs) in terms of body count. You still have to have a collection of them on the mantle, kept polished and dusted, if you want to be part of the great powers club; but you don't actually get to use them, and you can't really stop uncouth little upstarts from collecting their own. Worse, you have to deal with the fact that, although you cannot use them, non-state, covert, or just plain nihilistic actors can. Back when you could be pretty certain that only real countries had nukes, you could rely on MAD. If some nutjob, or untraceable tool of somebody's intelligence apparatus goes and blows up something expensive, the incumbents lose, and don't have any good way of retaliating.
Some sort of uber-nuke super-superweapon would, at best, bring you back to the late 40's situation(minus the enviable economic position of being the only major industrialized nation not squatting in a pile of its own rubble). At worst, it would just antagonize the other nuclear powers.
There will certainly always be money to keep the existing stock dusted and polished, and react to any threats to its efficacy; but I suspect that, if you want military money, you'd do much better by developing weapons that they will be able to use without excessive diplomatic trouble. Drones, precision munitions, vehicles that can't be destroyed by explosively formed penetrators that can be fabricated by anybody with a supply of ammonium nitrate and metal forming skills somewhere between "early modern blacksmith" and "1850's machine shop", etc.
Anyway, from the Symmetry write up:
While the Tevatron can perform these indirect searches, it is too early to tell yet if the Higgs bosons would have masses the Tevatron can detect or would only be within reach of the higher-energy LHC.
Einstein was purely a theoretical physicist. He knew the state of the current experiments (Young's, various astronomical observations), and the state of the current math (specifically Maxwell and Boltzman). Beyond that, he managed to figure out brilliant thought experiments that pointed his math in the right direction, and was able to work with new interpretations of existing phenomena (such as his statistical interpretation of light phenomena). Actual lasers were first demonstrated in 1960.
The reasons schools gloss over the engineering aspect are that it takes a very long time, a lot of people and a lot of tedious, small increments to go from a new physical effect to a working application. There's very little to be consistently learned about the engineering process that isn't already known.
As for an interesting property that hasn't found an application: quantum entanglement. Yeah, we're kinda seeing baby steps, but consider how long people have been working on it, and how many supposed breakthroughs we've had. There isn't a gadget you can buy at radioshack that uses this.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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"?
Mods: granted this is off-topic, but I'd like to indulge the parent post's questions. I am a biophysicist.
Let me have a stab at explaining the history of stimulated emission and lasers.
Einstein predicted stimulated emission based just on two things: the fact that atoms can absorb light and the fact that thermodynamically, as you approach infinite temperature all possible arrangements of particles become equally likely. Consider a collection of atoms that have a ground and an excited state. As temperature (and black-body radiation) increases, more and more photons will pump atoms into the excited state. Excited states naturally decay after a certain lifetime, but without stimulated emission, at higher temperatures more and more atoms would get pumped into the excited state, until an arbitrarily large fraction of atoms would be in the excited state at arbitrarily high temperature. However, from thermodynamics we know that as you approach arbitrarily high temperature there will be a 50/50 mix of ground state and excited atoms, since high temperature favors disorder (entropy) and 50/50 mixes are maximally disordered. Therefore, there must be a process whose rate is proportional to the intensity of the thermal radiation in the system that takes an atom from the excited to the ground state; this is stimulated emission.
Different people give credit to different inventors of the laser, but you can make a good case for Charles Townes' input being timely and critical. He figured out that putting a gain medium (a material with population inversion - more atoms in the excited than the ground state) in an optical resonator would produce coherent light through stimulated emission. He turns 95 next month, and is still going strong last I heard.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
What would be the point of that? People in the future would already know the outcome.
I am an Australian so I already know the outcome of games involving my team but that wouldn't stop me from watching the game.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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!
These particular scientists (or rather all the employees there) let us motorcycle riders cruise around the facility surrounding the Tevatron whenever we want, and never greet us with anything but smiles and friendly conversation. Even when a bunch of biker looking guys decide to stop in and press our faces to the glass at the Fermi+CERN room or pull off on one of the access roads to take photographs of their small herd of bison, the many tanker trucks marked "Liquid Nitrogen" in big letters, or one of their many bizarre looking buildings (even the ones with the little radioactive signs on them). It's particularly amazing how open they are with unsupervised visitors given the ridiculous "fear of teh turrorists" mentality that's so prevalent now. In my mind, they really can do no wrong. I hope the ridiculously smart people there find whatever it is they're looking for... it's just a shame I'm too dumb to understand their work.
To give you an idea...
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Fermi+National+Lab+Library,+Batavia,+IL&sll=41.846547,-88.248367&sspn=0.07225,0.154324&ie=UTF8&hq=Fermi+National+Lab+Library,&hnear=Batavia,+Kane,+Illinois&ll=41.840856,-88.253002&spn=0.036128,0.077162&t=h&z=14&iwloc=A