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LHC To Narrow Search For Higgs Boson
New submitter mraudigy sends this quote from Physorg:
"CERN scientists say their data from two main experiments using CERN's $10-billion Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border will be made public next Tuesday, but any firm discovery will have to wait until next year. They say the data helps narrow the region of the search because it excludes some of the higher energy ranges where the Higgs boson might be found, and shows some intriguing possibilities involving a small number of 'events' at the lower energy ranges."
You know what, it's pretty damn cool.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
It's been awhile since I've checked. hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com Looks like we're still safe.
the LHC is a great idea, and is giving us insight to how the universe works.
IT's not a waste of money.
Sciecen is not a religion.
to Quote Tim Minchin:
Science adjusts its views
Based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation,
so that belief can be preserved.
That why science can not be a religion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
Until you can grasp that, please don't think you can sit at the adult table.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It means there are now tight limits on where it could possibly be. No-one is claiming it's been found (well, other than the tabloid press you mention who've been doing the damndest to do exactly that), but that now there are only narrow ranges where it could lie. The nice thing is that they *are* ranges. I'm old enough to remember when all we could say about the mass of the Higg's boson was that it was above something like 100GeV, and now we know that if it does exist, it's in increasingly narrow sections of parameter space.
What I'd like is that it isn't there. Partly because I've never been entirely comfortable with the Higg's (or in some respects the direction of particle theory since about 1970 or so), but mainly because if it is there I'm liable to lose a bet I'd much rather have won.
I presume at the magic energy level you'll see an increase in particles detected. These would be decay particles of new particle created. Then these decay particles would have to be of the right kind that could decay from a Higgs, deduced by charge, energy, direction, lifetime ... They record trillions of candidate collisions which will have to be sifted for various hypotheses.
I read recently they are still studying an energy bump in the final runs of the Tevatrron. Whether it really exists and possibly a new particle.
coming up with wacky ideas to collect & consume HUGE sums of money, at least science comes up with something good on occasion but the LHC is not one of them
Wacky ideas to collect & consume huge sums of money? I take it you've never encountered a collection plate. The Higgs field is not just something pulled out of a hat, it is a heavily studied and well developed theory that fits well into the standard model as we know it. The LHC is one of the best, if not the best, possible chance for humanity to verify the correctness of our understandings of the universe insofar as we've developed it. Like Sagan said, stardust thinking about stardust. Sentient intelligence forming theories and models of the nature of our own existence. While it can be claimed that religion attempts to do the same thing, scientific endeavors such as the LHC push the limits of understanding in ways that religion will never, ever do by its very nature.
Some scientist can have an almost religio-fanatical belief in unproven theories, but equating the collective sum of brilliant minds at LHC to fringe theorist is a travesty and misleading to those who abide by the scientific method.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Have gnu, will travel.
"can be" != "are", and you know what? Religion can be as bad as science. The Vatican does some fairly important astro work.
... science comes up with something good on occasion but the LHC is not one of them
And you can explain definitively why that's so? I'll make popcorn.
No really. I'm making popcorn.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Both CMS and ATLAS are seeing bumps in certain Higgs channels around 125 GeV. While the bumps aren't big enough to be press-release worthy (2-3 sigma), a lot of particle physicists think that this is it. There will be an announcement on Dec 13th, and from now on it'll just be a matter of waiting till the bumps are 5 sigma and we can say for sure sure.
There are some "unoficial and unconfirmed" anouncements that some 3 sigma events were found... Well, and there are some anouncements that the Sun will raise tomorrow.
Why people would consider any of those news, I can't explain. (Except, of course the people that want and have the means to test the 3 sigma events. For them, that information is usefull.)
Rethinking email
Totally with you on the "not a religion". That's a dumb meme.
As for "not of waste of money", I'd call that "not proven", at least in the case of the LHC. Maybe yes, maybe no. Worth the gamble, in my opinion, though it's close. $9 billion buys an awful lot of research into, say, batteries or cancer treatment.
The Guardian and the BBC are hardly tabloid-class but they're still hyping the announcement. Both feel something important is going to be said, though both also say that no physicist actually believes so.
The news is likely of some sort of signal that doesn't meet the 5 sigma requirement of a discovery but which does look promising. As The Guardian notes, most of the other announcements of the "excluded range" kind have been given by junior staffers and not the top brass, which means it has to be something bigger -- but, as the physicists interviewed have pointed out, the energies are much too low right now to have discovered the Higgs boson.
The "best guess" outside of the "promising signal" department is that they've found something that doesn't match the Standard Model, that they've made an observation they can't explain without new physics. This would be the absolutely ideal case, since new science is far more exciting than merely confirming old theory.
The "next best guess" after that is that they've found data that backs up one of the GUT models. Being able to conduct "real science" on physics that has been more philosophical than experimental would be major news indeed.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Been done and the consensus is that Nobel-winning physicists like ponies and limericks but not Higgs bosons.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Page where the Dec 13th talk material will appear:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890
So what's the news here? If you exclude it from range X, doesn't that still leave ranges Y and Z and the potential for not finding it at all? What's new?
Well, consider the problem of where can planets be with respect to their star and still sustain life as we know it. It's narrow: too close, too hot; too far, too cold.
The fact that there is a range left can gives you big insights into what the physical world has to look like just because the Higgs cannot be in a given range (or we would have seen it).
More generally, this is the only thing science can actually do: reject hypothesis. We are always left with some possibilities. But we progress by discarding possibilities that are not realized in Nature.
The humility is there. If a result is wrong it is rejected and life goes on. I don't really know what you're referring to by old theories and old math. It it were not for the old theories and old math, when commeth the new theories and new math? After trying the old ones out first, that's when.
My point was that in general, hard-line religion does not participate in the 'discard the old and wrong and in with the new and less wrong' philosophy. Sure there are religious scientist and spiritual physicist and blah blah blah, but if we are going to paint in large generalizations, I think it is safe to say that when it comes to fact and fiction, the progression of science, the progression of, well, civilization to that effect, I think a line can be pretty distinctly drawn between science and religion. Both science and religion are composed of things that are not and cannot be fully certified 100% genuine fact. But I think we can agree that between the two there are vast differences in how they handle the gaps in their powers of rational explanatory abilities.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Last I "heard", gravity was caused by the bending of the fabric of space time. In other words, there IS no gravity - you just move through space according to Newton's first law of motion...it's just that space is curved.
But nice try.
The next generation's advances can't come out of nowhere. They build on the progress of previous generations. Every scientist who has ever discovered anything realizes this.
Ah, a philosopher. Who quotes dead Greeks and can't spell "cite."
A little less "adult table" and a little more listening and you might learn something.
I think a survey should be taken if we really believe that a Higgs particle exists.
That's not how science works. Science is about collectively investigating different models in the quest for one that fits with experimental data. Ideally a single scientist with a better model ought to be able to overthrown the consensus of the global community. In practice that sort of thing often takes a long time. Einstein famously won his Nobel prize for his down to earth discoveries about the photoelectric effect, not for relativity, because back then a lot of the science community hadn't had time to absorb it.
What if a Higgs effect is made up of hundreds of particles that when considered in whole look like Higgs?
That means that the Higgs boson exists. Just like you exist, despite the fact that you consist of smaller parts...
Because our anthropomorphic models predict the particle does not mean we will find it in nature.
That's actually true.
Gravity is a similar concept, but very useful despite not knowing what gravity is.
We know that gravity, at least on a macroscopic level, is a sort of warping in space-time, caused by the presence of mass. That's a good enough description that we can say that we know what gravity is in terms of space-time and mass. It's probably not the ultimate explanation for gravity, but it is an explanation. Ask yourself this: do we have the ultimate explanation for anything?
I was more commenting on the assertion about the collective sum of brilliant minds. My point was that they may be the most brilliant minds of what we "know" today. But it is entirely possible we have exhausted the models we have produced based on this current state knowledge. These minds might be fruitlessly spinning their wheels in the mud without some sort of breakthrough that throws away old assumptions and theories. But because they are brilliant means nothing is what I am saying.
I agree that science, or the scientific method, is quite humble.
I am also not sure of the assertion that knowledge only comes through trying out old knowledge. New knowledge that comes from old knowledge is probably a tweak of old knowledge to accommodate the hypothesis that broke the old conclusion. Also, all knowledge is not empirical if I interpret what you are saying directly. This may be more of an eeking out of knowledge than a fundamental shift in thinking. Were the theories of Einstein built on old knowledge?
Who questioned God? Why is even God being brought to this discussion?
the energies are much too low right now to have discovered the Higgs boson.
Please make that: "the amount of data is much too low [...]". The energies are fine.
Have you touched x-rays? Have you felt them? How do you know they're not a mad made model that is coincidental with nature? Geez, I guess that means they don't exist. Just anthropomorphic fantasies after all. Omg, my world view just fell to pieces...
Um, just because we do not know reality, does not mean that our models are not useful. Is that what I said?
I am seriously attributing more value and wisdom to one Greek than the mass of human knowledge. I actually think that this one Greek is the grandfather of modern philosophy of which the scientific method sprung from.
... the difference between a mathematical model of how some scenario behaves, and a religion, is enormous. Can I check - is that actually your point? Because physics is, ultimately, a collection of algorithms that tell us how we expect a given situation to evolve. Nothing more, and nothing less. The interpretation of gravity as the "bending" of the "fabric" of spacetime comes from an extremely successful (and, when applied outside of its range of validity, inaccurate) set of algorithms. [Total aside: it's extremely persuasive, given that it follows almost directly from pointing out that acceleration cancels gravity and that gravity imparts the same acceleration on objects of wildly different masses, which is the hallmark of fictional forces such as coriolis or centrifugal forces -- they *definitely* exist, and don't let some high-school graduate tell you different, but they only exist when you view them from a weird reference frame. Change the reference frame and the force vanishes. This is a way of approaching the "weak equivalence principle", and is a major underlying philosophy of general relativity. But while it may be extremely persuasive, it's also inaccurate when you apply it outside of its realm of validity, such as in volumes of the order of 10^-40m across.]
So GR gives a good example of physics as a collection of algorithms - and then it's your choice whether you believe the interpretation or not. Personally I find it very convenient to believe the interpretation, at least when I'm working within the theory since it doesn't exactly impact on my everyday life otherwise. But that's a choice and I know of eminent physicists (and Weinberg is a good example, or at least used to be; I don't know if he's changed his viewpoint in the last 35 years though) who don't really entertain the curvature interpretation as anything more than a mathematical convenience.
In that sense, maybe you could judge it as "religion" - but I'd still suggest that that's pushing the definition of "religion" somewhat.
Actually there are models that do that, and it would be called a "composite Higgs". If there's a composite Higgs I pay out less in my bet than if it's a single Higgs. It's still a Higgs though.
I don't know what universe you live in, but I'm touching the space-time fabric constantly. In fact, I happen to be a part of the space-time fabric.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
pffffft! I'M warping the space-time fabric all the way out to infinity.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Forgive me. I didn't know you were going down that path. This isn't philosophy where you argue about whether or not reality is "exists". We don't assume we're in the Matrix where every sensory input is treated only as a sensory input. How do you know there's a computing device in front of you? Have you touched it? Actually no - your skin just senses inputs from your fingers and your eyes are receiving light signals. You have no way of knowing whether or not you're really touching your computer. You also don't really know if you're wearing clothes or not. All you have is sensory inputs and no insight into "reality".
Pretending and playing with philosophy is fun. But no one really cares about academic epistemological problems here.
It is religion if we say that science produces knowledge that is reality.
As I see it, science is a technology that produces higher qualities of usable knowledge. Religion does not produce knowledge. It is apples and oranges when arguing one against the other.
My other argument is that if science is BS, as Socrates may say, it is very effective knowledge. Do we care if it is reality so long as my plane can create lift or that I can power my computer with electricity? No, so long as the algorithms that create the effect are always valid. I think this is a more humble approach that science asks us to consider so that it can continue creating new knowledge.
Were the theories of Einstein built on old knowledge?
Quite so. The mathematics of non-euclidian geometry. Differential equations. Integral calculus. All The Prior Physics Knowledge Before Him. Newtonian physics. The key takeaway I present is that yes, while Newtonian physics is not 100% an explanation, it does a damn good well job within certain experimental limits. Not to mention that all of these topics existed before Einstein, but all of these topics were used as springboards in his miracle year to further develop photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. Of course new ideas and theories are needed. The affixing of the speed of light and assuming the malleability of space and time in the presence of mass-energy was a breakthrough in thinking, but the crucial dependency was that this was done while 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.
Continual incremental developments, even if not 100% correct, are almost always beneficial to the collective sum of science. It isn't that humans are evolving 'smarter' as time goes on, its mostly science that sheds the worthless and keeps that of value insofar that the knowledge and experience gained has a use to somebody, somewhere, or at least will eventually at some time. And if it doesn't, throw it away, modify your current theories, expand them, ad inifinitum.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
It can be. Just declare the all encompassing laws that govern the universe as your god. A god that has commanded you to swell upon its meaning.
Let me ask you, are MRIs something you consider useful? The work done by scientists to get the superconducting magnets setup and working on the tevatron resulted in knowledge and skills needed to make the superconducting magnets used in MRI systems. The work at the LHC provides cutting edge experience working with superconducting magnets and power systems, ultrahigh speed electronics, distributed storage and computing systems, high bandwidth networking and that's aside from the purely scientific benefits. If you design and build something that requires cutting edge electronics, and cryogenics to work and produces a few petabytes of data each year that needs to be distributed internationally and processed, you'll get a lot of experience and new technologies that probably come in handy for non-science related things as well.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ehm...they can be credited for have gotten the ball going on philosophy, but that ball has grown much bigger since then.
The scientific method we have now we can attribute to much more recent philosophers....which used the reflections from philosophers past that, and on and on and on.
The scientific method we have today we can thank Karl Popper for, and its more then just testing, its about how you use the results to come to conclusion...and quite often, making sure you don't.
http://xkcd.com/683/
Such epistemology would be quite useful before they came up with the "four elements" silliness.
Not an Ex-phil but I've but I have been lectured on this from a friend who majored in this, and groans every time someone recomends the Republic as a beginners course in Philosophy for laymen.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Yeah, those "huge" sums of money to fund the entire LHC project. $10 billion eh?
Let's put it another way - would you prefer to have the whole LHC project in its entirety, or 2 weeks of the Iraq War?
Have the troops come home a couple of weeks sooner than planned and you get the LHC for free!
We don't "believe" a Higgs particle exists any more then we "believe" oxygen is a bi-radical molecule with two unpaired electrons that occupy a pair of orbitals...
As scientists, we form theories and models to explain the observations we make and find the ones that fit. When we found that G = H -TS we didn't set it as immutable fact, merely that the equation has stood the test of time over many repeated experiments and observations of real world experiments.
I say "I believe" in an imprecise manner - it's merely shorthand for "our current theory for thermodynamics fits this model, but that does not mean the model can't change in the presence of new evidence.
It's not a religious statement to say "we believe the Higgs exists" because what is actually meant is "all of our models and observations to this point fit the existence of the Higgs, but as yet it has not been observed directly". If the data changes, then so will the models.
When Mendeleev laid out the Periodic Table for the first time he didn't just shove the elements together so they were all adjacent - he saw that there were patterns in the properties of the known elements and that there were gaps (undiscovered elements) in his table. Using the known elements he predicted the physical properties of several undiscovered elements (very accurately as it turns out) by looking at where the gaps were in the table. He used his model to predict something he had yet to observe directly but that he inferred existed.
What do you know, his predictions using his model were very accurate, and we still use his Table every day - we're still adding to it in fact. The experimental measurements of the new discovered elements matched up perfectly with the predictions. If they had not, he would have revised the model, not just "left off" the inconvenient new elements that didn't fit.
The Higgs is no different. We have extensive modelling and other fields of science that suggest that something exists. We just haven't seen it yet, but are getting closer. If we don't find it, we'll look at possible alternatives for the physical observations we have made.
Science: it works.
They say the data helps narrow the region of the search because it excludes some of the higher energy ranges where the Higgs boson might be found
"We haven't failed a thousands times. We've just found a thousand ways NOT to make a Higgs Boson"
The Internet has given stupid people the resources of intelligent people.
What makes you think that what we learn from the LHC won't have an application in batteries and cancer treatment? If it weren't for seemingly pointless study of quantum mechanics, none of us would have computers or electronics, and batteries and cancer treatments would be feeble in comparison to what we have now. Understanding fundamental physics underpins absolutely everything we do. I would say that it's impossible for the LHC to be a waste of money, and further that anything else you chose to spend that $9billion on would return a pittance in comparison to the rewards we'll reap from what we're certain to learn with this thing, Higgs boson or none.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
What makes you think that what we learn from the LHC won't have an application in batteries and cancer treatment?
What makes you think that my intensive study of my navel lint won't have applications in batteries and cancer treatment? Worth at least a billion, don't you think?
I'm all for basic research, but there's a vast ton of basic research that could be funded. The LHC puts nine billion eggs in one basket. Maybe it'll pay off in the biggest, most amazing new technology of all time. Maybe it'll tick off a box on the Standard Model that we can hang on our wall and gaze at proudly.
What makes you think that my intensive study of my navel lint won't have applications in batteries and cancer treatment?
What aspect of your naval lint are you studying and could you give me a budget breakdown?
Maybe it'll tick off a box on the Standard Model that we can hang on our wall and gaze at proudly.
Just like all those other useless aspects of the standard model that we never really needed to know.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
It is almost as boring as a huge discovery that shapes an entire area of knowledge can be. The only except is that we'll know the actual mass.
Rethinking email