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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."
It's been awhile since I've checked. hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com Looks like we're still safe.
actually at the energies involved it is pretty damn hot.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Yes, but I think this announcement is that "we haven't found anything." The positive spin is that "this is exciting because now there are fewer places to look."
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.
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.
Maybe we haven't identified all the places to look in our limited understanding of nature. So, sure we have axed a few "known" anthropomorphic places, but maybe we don't know WTF anyway. Socrates would say that we know nothing and this is really a search for nothing. For instance, what if the effect we attribute to a particle is responsible when hundreds of particles interact in aggregate? Maybe this is all being handled, but one particle to rule them all seems like it is an idea out of fantasy.
Not finding the higgs may be the most exciting thing the LHC does. Finding it will be boring.
Rethinking email
I dunno. An electronvolt is about 1.6 x 10^-19 J, which means a teraelectronvolt is still only 1.6 x 10^-7 J, which Wikipedia helpfully says is the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito (the bug kind, not the WW2 aircraft). The energy of a mosquito, distributed over the entire collision chamber, doesn't seem to be a lot.
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)
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)
Page where the Dec 13th talk material will appear:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890
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.
That's the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito per proton. The whole beam is supposed to have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier.
But you're thinking heat. Temperature is different. According to the conversion on Wikipedia, 1 TeV is just over one thousand trillion degrees. That's pretty hot.
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?
For instance, what if the effect we attribute to a particle is responsible when hundreds of particles interact in aggregate? Maybe this is all being handled, but one particle to rule them all seems like it is an idea out of fantasy.
We understand different things at different levels. And when we do not have some fundamental understanding, we build what we call effective theories. It may very well be that the Higgs boson is composed of other particles. Even if it is, this entity has a role in interactions, which is not diminished whether it is composite or fundamental.
Take the atom. It was indivisible for a long long time. Then we figured out there was a nucleus, 99.9% empty space and electrons. Then the nucleus turned out to have protons and neutrons. And then it turned out that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons.
At each level, we can have a working tool that explains to a good level of accuracy what is happening at that level. Take the example of gravity: Newton's laws work for 99% of what we do. There is no need to go for Special or General Relativity until you really consider gravity in scales which are not human: galaxies, etc.
So, no one is looking for a particle to rule them all. And no one is claiming that we have finally reached a final understanding of matter. Or energy.
In fact, finding the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model would fill in a piece in the puzzle, but not finish all puzzles.
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.
It's like comparing a truck and a mosquito sitting on the road in front if it.
Yeah except then we'll have to re-design physics. That would be a huge pain in the ass! It mostly worked for us, except for that ONE THING those guys couldn't find. But nope, going to have to throw it all out and re-design it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, the LHC is currently 27 km in circumference and uses something like 120 MW, all in. So there is some work to do on miniaturization and battery technology before the hand held model is available.
Maybe we haven't identified all the places to look in our limited understanding of nature. So, sure we have axed a few "known" anthropomorphic places, but maybe we don't know WTF anyway. Socrates would say that we know nothing and this is really a search for nothing. For instance, what if the effect we attribute to a particle is responsible when hundreds of particles interact in aggregate? Maybe this is all being handled, but one particle to rule them all seems like it is an idea out of fantasy.
I'm sorry, but blindly applying the zeroth order concept of epistemology and then namedropping Socrates really doesn't give you the pass to blindly comment on something that you can't remotely grasp...
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.