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Data Review Brings Major Setback In Higgs Boson Hunt
Velcroman1 writes "The quest for the elusive Higgs boson seemed over in April, when an unexpected result from an atom smasher seemed to herald the discovery of the famous particle — the last unproven piece of the physics puzzle and one of the great mysteries scientists face today.
Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermilab facility just released the results of a months-long effort by the lab's brightest minds to confirm the finding. What did they find? Nothing. 'We do not see the signal,' said Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab. 'If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing.'"
What are the implications of such a particle not really existing in the first place? In terms of how we think our universe works?
Sometimes not seeing what you expected is worth seeing in itself...
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
No, you don't. Finding nothing in specific conditions is different than finding nothing in your backyard. I doubt you can collide subatomic particles in a controlled environment in your backyard.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I disagree. Sometimes math fails (root: because we fail at math) and the only recourse is to smash things together to see what falls out.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
And of course you can provide evidence to back your assertion that the entire thing needs a rethink? Just from your comment, I'd rather give these scientists billions of dollars for the LHC than give you $10 for lunch.
At the TeV scale anyway.
You can pretty easily get a particle accelerator that will fit in your yard, it's just not going to be powerful enough to see anything new.
When something touches even the air, it's particles are colliding with something..
So there you are..
Nothing here... So... SHOOO!!!
If anything, this just shows me the way science should work. An assertion is taken, tested impartially and if found wanting it's discarded without a second thought. No emotion, no hysterics. Just science.
Your worries about a huge conspiracy are shall we say...a tad loony?
For sure --- I've been reading Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia for years and yet no publicly funded research money has ever gone to this cause. It is beyond a crying shame.
I don't think the Higgs exists either. But it's the best candidate explanation for observed phenomena. There is an upper limit on the mass of a standard model Higgs, and testing in the relevant range is reasonable; even if we don't find the Higgs, we'll likely find something interesting. Of course, if you have a better candidate model, then by all means make the predictions, publish them, and see whether they match what the LHC comes up with.
I am trolling
> I doubt you can collide subatomic particles in a controlled environment in your backyard.
Of course I can. That's where I keep my old dryer. I have long hypothesized that the Higgs Boson is responsible for the disappearance of my socks... it is an interesting particle, ineffective against sock/antisock pairs, leaving unpaired socks in its wake, explaining the unaccounted for shortage of antisocks in the universe.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
"I'm pretty confident that towards the end of 2012 we will have an answer to the Shakespeare question for the Higgs boson, to be, or not to be?" Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, said at Britain's Royal Society."
Id be perfectly okay if you wait until 2013 to get your answers. Its not that I believe all these December 22,2012 things its just that
some idiot who forgot to carry their zero might be stupid enough to rush something and accidentally cause some sort of catastrophe. Lets all just
shut down all the accelerators on December 14th,2012 and give everyone a holiday until January 7th, 2013.
Sorry, the summary and title is just plain incorrect. This announcement has nothing to do with the Higgs.
A few months ago, CDF claimed that they detected a new particle which could not be the higgs, but was speculated to be a new particle. As explained here, it wasn't possible for the new particle to be the Higgs.
Today DZERO announced that they did not see any signal where CDF claimed to see one. So one of the two projects has an error in their analysis.
More info orig, new announcement, DZERO refutes, another source, even another source
Actually not. Naively explained so you can understand it, the Higgs mechanism to work needs a Higgs mass between 114 GeV upwards to ~170 GeV. Outside of that region things don't work and it's safe to say you have to look for better ideas.
The reason why physicist think the Higgs boson is there it's because 3/4th of the idea has already been discovered, the W^+ , W^- and Z bosons. What is left of the picture is that 1/4 which correspondes to the Higgs in the electroweak theory. If there is supersymmetry there might be 5 Higgs bosons which would make the discovery of each of them a little bit more difficult. But hopefuly feasable in the LHC.
If you let me, I would give an analogy*. Think of you trying to solve a puzzle, a very complicated one indeed. After years of work you manage to assambly a consistent arrangement of all the pieces that not only fits, also gives a pretty picture. All there's to find a piece that you lost somewhere in the room to put it in it's place. At this point you are pretty confident that the chances of it not fitting are small, and that you got it right. But physicist don't take this for granted, they wan't to find the piece and prove it. And if it doesn't fit, don't worry, we will work on the puzzle again.
*NOTE: If needed the image of the puzzle can be that of a car.
Translation: I have blinders on, can only see in one direction and would, if in charge, starve key areas of basic research whose benefits we cannot guess at this time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Let's get things straightened out. About a month ago the CDF experiment at the Tevatron at Fermilab found a "bump" in their data. It was statistically significant and was unexplained. This "bump" cannot be the Higgs boson from The Standard Model because it has the completely wrong cross-section. This was a fully public result from the CDF experiment.
About the same time there was a "leaked" abstract from an internal note from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC which claimed to have a signal for a Higgs boson. This was never a public or published result.
Now today we have an announcement from the D0 experiment at the Tevatron that they looked into the CDF bump and see nothing. This isn't a set back for the Higgs since it was never about the Higgs. The ATLAS leaked abstract has never been confirmed even by ATLAS so lets not get our underpants in a knot. Lets also not conflate the two since they don't have anything to do with each other.
What would count as good evidence that the standard model has a big flaw in it? When people started thinking the epicycle model was wrong, it happened for several reasons (paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn for much of this):
By Copernicus' time, 1) there were a lot of accumulated observations that no one had during the first few hundred years, and new tools made those latter observations more accurate. 2) The formulas to calculate epicycles grew more and more complex to account for those observations, and people could point to the history of the model to show what that trend implied for its future. People lost confidence that the next tweak would be the last. 3) the epicycle model still didn't predict some basic things, such as the exact start time of some planets appearing to precess, accurately enough.
So, for 1), the standard model hasn't been around for hundreds of years. In the time it has been around, we have developed much more powerful accelerators, but we haven't invented a significantly new class of tools (such as the Galilean or Newtonian telescope, or reasonably accurate to a few seconds a day clocks, all of which came in as epicycle models were being rejected). Progress on the observational side has all been evolutionary, not revolutionary, so progress on the theoretical side will tend to mirror that, rightly or wrongly.
For 2), The Higgs is one of a very few testable predictions which could add some math to the rest of the standard model. It makes the math a little more complex to include it, but by itself, it doesn't suggest that every 20 years or so, we will again have to add some more complexity. Evidence for condition 2) would have to come from more than just Higgs Boson research, i.e. finding some other unexplained particle that definitely isn't the Higgs to suggest we are seeing ever mounting complexity. A possible Higgs candidate slightly outside the projected ranges, or something which seemed mostly Higgslike but for some odd property (say, a cluster of related particles all with no spin or color, but slightly varying energies), wouldn't make most theoreticians rethink the whole model so much as try to tweak it a little.
3) We could argue that 3) is being met, in the form of the gravity related incompatibilities of QM and General Relativity. If we still face that question in 100 or 200 years, more and more working scientists will regard it as a situation like 1), and arguments that the change needed is major will gradually gain traction.
Who is John Cabal?