Rumors of Higgs Boson Discovery At LHC

Magnifico writes "LiveScience is reporting that scientists are abuzz over a controversial rumor that the 'God particle' has been detected by a particle-detection experiment at LHC at CERN. The Higgs boson rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic... The buzz started when an anonymous commenter recently posted an abstract of the note on Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit's blog, Not Even Wrong. This could be a flat-out hoax or a statistical anomaly or... confirmation of the particle that bestows mass on all the other particles."

Comments

Higgs boson has arisen?

[3seas]

It is easter..... and it is a rumor too!

Re:Higgs boson has arisen?

[Arancaytar]

An Easter higg, in other words?

Re:Higgs boson has arisen?

[AJWM]

Happy Zombie Jesus day to you too...

Not zombie, vampire.

Consider: a good reason to dislike crosses, drinking from the Holy Grail (which contained Christ's blood) confers immortality, and the very phrase "this is my blood you drink".

I mean, it's obvious.

That and the whole Romans vs Christians thing. Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf. It's clearly the whole werewolves vs vampires feud.

Re:Higgs boson has arisen?

[geminidomino]

Oh dear gods... As if it wasn't bad enough, you've just connected Christianity with Twilight. You just halved my IQ and I'll never forgive you.

Re:Higgs boson has arisen?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Jesus even sparkles in the sunlight.

time to get the crowbars out!

[Joe The Dragon]

crowbar

is it ok...

[underqualified]

to make hard-on jokes again?

Can't be

[The_Wilschon]

If this is what I was hearing about at work on Friday (I'm a particle physicist), then it can't be the Higgs. The rate of production is too high by a factor of 40.

Re:Can't be

[Mikkeles]

It's a miracle!

Re:Can't be

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow it's Obama's fault...

Re:Can't be

[TheDarkPassenger]

Does it weigh more than a duck?

Re:Can't be

[rubycodez]

it has one duck-mass, neutral buoyancy, comprised of three quacks which break echo symmetry, and decays by moulting.

It's little more than speculation

[ndogg]

This isn't the first time this has happened. I don't know why this particular event is getting so much attention.

That said, one of the things that's exciting about this is that they are detecting it at higher energies than were expected by the Standard Model, which would mean that a few laws of physics might have to be rewritten. I love it when that happens. It's so boring when everything just falls into place where expected.

Oh, by the way, the new season of Doctor Who. There was something I wanted to mention about it. I just can't remember what it was. It's like on the tip of my tongue.

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Bloody Peasant]

Meh, she's at best a 7.

... of 9?

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Maury Markowitz]

This isn't the first time this has happened. I don't know why this particular event is getting so much attention.

Because the LHC has been created, and funded, largely by "selling" the Higgs as a super-special "God particle".

In fact it's nothing at all different than any one of the other particles in the standard model that were predicted and later found. Well, one difference, there are no other particles left in the SM, so if you want to have a job, you have to make sure someone thinks it's worth spending a few billion on.

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Candid88]

If you have a better idea for determining the structure of the universe then please let us hear it.

Re:It's little more than speculation

[newcastlejon]

We are Boorg, Ye cannae resist!

It just doesn't sound right...

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Rising Ape]

The LHC isn't intended to specifically investigate the standard model, though.

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

This numbered rating shit by men needs to stop.

Next you'll be asking us to come over for a pyjama party to criticised her looks in detail.

There's only one rating system that's right and proper for men to use:

[ ] Would

[ ] Would not

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Livius]

"heavy BSM" makes me think "Bowling Spaghetti Monster", but I'm guessing it's actually some physicist jargon.

Re:It's little more than speculation

[icebraining]

Because the LHC has been created, and funded, largely by "selling" the Higgs as a super-special "God particle".

Was it? From what I can tell that's only how the media presented the LHC after it was almost/already built. As far as I could find, the news about the budget approvals in '97 don't even mention the Higgs, but other experiments.

Re:It's little more than speculation

[Werthless5]

It's the first time that such a clear Higgs result has been found. This case is interesting for a few reasons

1) It's in the mass-range that was excluded by LEP and Fermilab
2) The cross section is ~30x higher than the Standard Model prediction
3) It was produced as an internal communication (ie it was posted Wednesday so that the ATLAS Higgs group could look at it), but then ATLAS physicists posted and talked about by ATLAS physicists in departments around the country and on blogs around the internet. This indicates that all of the secrecy and careful step-by-step approval processes in order to prevent embarrassing false-positives is meaningless; if there's a really exciting bump in the data, then physicists will want to talk about it before all of the details have been checked over by other experts. This is both good and bad; it's good because these are scientists who are clearly very interested in their craft, but it's bad because now if the paper turns out to be wrong then it's going to make the entire ATLAS Collaboration look bad because the information was not meant to be shown publicly yet (ie if there's a mistake in some code somewhere and it gets caught during the coming weeks of review before the paper is even approved for internal ATLAS distribution, and months before it's approved for public consumption, then the ATLAS conveners will look stupid simply because a lot of scientists got a little too excited and jumped the gun)

Nah it's just

[goombah99]

It's just a "Budgeton". these things appear whenever funding gets shaky.

Re:Nah it's just

[Angostura]

... most of those scientists could afford their own labs. Not because they had a lab, then discovered something, but because they discovered something, then bought a lab with the proceeds from that discovery.

Actually, I think you'll find that many, perhaps most of those scientists were actually either independently wealthy gentry who pursued science as a gentlemanly hobby, or were lucky enough to have wealthy patrons.

More detail for non-scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

The Higgs-Boson is a predicted but until now unobserved particle (entity smaller than an atom) that is expected to have high mass.

The problem is that detection of this particle is very costly, involving a particle accelerator the length of nearly 35 football fields and a matching scale beneath it. Other particles are crammed together with great force many times per second using this accelerator, and if a heavy Higgs-Boson particle is created, the building weighs a little more than normally expected for a short time.

As you might have guessed, any sort of event that causes things to weigh slightly more or less, such as tectonic plate movement, tidal forces, or the rising of the sun must be anticipated and corrected for lest the system produces a false positive. A false positive is an ion (or particle) that looks positive at first, but is actually not. This leads to the occasional and premature celebration of the discovery of the Higgs-Boson, which is why this story is currently considered a rumor.

Re:More detail for non-scientists

[FeepingCreature]

Beautiful. They should have hired you for Look Around You S2.

Wired article

[philj]

Here's a Wired article about the rumoured Higgs sighting: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/higgs-rumor/

Higgs discovery is the long awaited blockbuster.

[JoeThoughtful]

Strange how such a small rumor has so quickly acquired such large mass.

Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[Nailer235]

Discovering the Higgs Boson would be a huge confirmation of the Standard Model, but it seems like the only reason popular culture cares about it is because of its stupid nickname. Can we just agree to stop calling it "The God Particle?"

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[heptapod]

Indeed, it's just the Jesus Particle. It decayed for your sins and on the third day became Americanium 237.

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[Kreigaffe]

Holy fuck, settle down. Get the stick out of your ass.

It's not that god is an offensive label, it's simply that it's a misleading label. There's nothing godly about the higgs-boson. Calling it the god particle is really little different than calling coffee the god drink. Yeah, not a whole lot of justification for it, is there? Go crawl back under your rock. You don't even understand why it was mislabeled the god particle in the first place, nor why the label is misleading, not even what any of this even means. You just heard someone say something less than positive about something labeled "god" and got fucking self-righteously offended. Fucking pathetic.

I'm going to start calling my car the God Vehicle, AND IF YOU DISAGREE YOU ARE NAUGHT BUT A GODLESS WRETCH AND I WILL SMITE YOU WITH MY HOLY CONVEYANCE.

Please. Get the fuck out.

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[Sein]

Leon Lederman started out calling it "The goddamned particle" but his editor wouldn't let him so it got shortened to the "god particle" : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern and the media then ran with it ;)

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[modmans2ndcoming]

But it is proof of the existence of an un-seen all powerful being who cares enough about our individual ant like lives to bestow special dispensations upon us just for asking... and he tests our faith in him by repeatedly ignoring our righteous worship and punishing us with natural disasters.

The scientists said so... it is called the God Particle after all.

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[Kilrah_il]

It's even worse: some religious nuts are against the LHC, because they think that the point of finding the Higgs boson is to prove/disprove the existence of God (hence, "The God particle"). It's stupid and shifts the spotlight from the actual cool science they are doing.

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[JamesP]

Let's call it the HFCS particle, since it makes everything heavy...

Re:Stop Calling it "The God Particle"

[Daniel Phillips]

Calling it the god particle is really little different than calling coffee the god drink.

It's not?

I've read the internal note

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone left a copy of the note on the printer in my office building. (I work on CDF at Fermilab, but there are others in the building who work on ATLAS at CERN.) The gist of the article is that they found a bump in the diphoton mass spectrum at a mass of ~115 GeV. If the Higgs exists, it is expected to produce a bump in that spectrum, and 115 GeV is a very probable value for the mass of the Higgs. (Experiments at LEP ruled out masses up to 114 GeV, but a mass as low as possible above that fits best with other measurements.)

Now, the inconsistencies: The bump that they found is ~30 times as large as the Higgs mass peak is expected to be. However, due to field theory that I don't want to get into here, the Higgs peak in this spectrum could be larger than expected if there exist new, heavy particles that we haven't discovered yet. The latest published result from CDF sets a limit of about 30 times the expected rate at 115 GeV in the diphoton channel. (Yes, this means that, if you're optimistic enough, there's just enough wiggle room to fit a Higgs in there while accommodating both measurements.)

The internal note is very preliminary and uses a crude background estimate; I'll have to see a more thorough analysis before I make any judgment on it. We shouldn't have to wait very long; I expect that after this leak, they'll be working overtime to push out a full published result as soon as possible.

Re:I've read the internal note

[bmuon]

Yup, further analysis is needed to confirm it is the Higgs or something completely new. The Resonaances blog has good speculation cover as usual.

Re:I've read the internal note

[BitterOak]

I have a question for CDF folks:

If this does indeed turn out to be a viable Higgs candidate, is its mass sufficiently low that the result could someday be duplicated/confirmed at Fermilab? Would it require more running time than is currently planned for the Tevatron? Would it possibly lead to an extension in order to confirm the LHC result?

Higgs-Boson particle walks into a church...

[rueger]

Priest says "Hey! You're not allowed in here!"

HB says "Oh yeah? Without me you've got no mass!"

Buh-duh_boomph... I'm here all week...