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Review: Captain America
If you have been living under a rock, you might not be aware that the next in the ongoing series of Avengers prequel movies came out this weekend: Captain America follows Steve Rogers origin, and sets him up for next summer's kajillion dollar Whedonesque mega blockbuster. But how is it as a movie in its own right? Hit the link to read my 2 cents. Standard spoiler warnings apply.
Researchers might be catching a glimpse of the elusive Higgs Boson particle -- dubbed the "God particle" -- which is thought to hold the key to solving a basic question in nature.
Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) fire streams of protons through the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, and found something unusual.
The bumps in data could be the first signs of the particle, researchers said. Physicists stressed that it was too early to know whether the signals were due to the missing particle, but it does mark the latest step in the mystery.
At the same time, researchers have been analyzing data from the Tevatron machine near Chicago. The hints seen at the Tevatron are weaker than those reported at the LHC, but occur in the same "search region".
"We cannot say anything today, but clearly it's intriguing," Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for Atlas team, said.
The picture would become clearer as the groups gathered more data and combined results in the next few months, she explained.
The view was shared by the CMS group, which said more data was needed to understand whether the bumps were due to "statistical fluctuations or possible hints of a signal".
The results are being presented and discussed at the Europhysics conference in Grenoble, France.
If scientists find the Higgs boson, it will prove that the Standard Model, which has been a cornerstone of particle physics for decades, is correct.
The standard model says that the Higgs boson is the reason that some particles -- and the atoms of which they are made -- have any mass at all, and why photons do not.
No experiment has directly observed the Higgs boson yet. The Higgs is called the God particle after the title of a book by American physicist Leon Lederman, in part because it would help unify several branches of physics by proving the Standard Model.
The LHC will keep running experiments through the end of 2012. By that time enough collisions will have happened that it should be clear if the Higgs exists or not.
Mod parent up please, this is far more interesting...