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Higgs Signal Gains Strength
ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."
Personally I wish if the higgs didn't exist, it would make things exciting ( from a scientific point of view). But if it doesn't, it would be a huge setback for particle physicist.
Dear editors,
The slashdot readership have mentally degenerated over the years, probably because of all the iRadiation from their mactard devices.
Dumbing down the summaries and removing the links would be a start, but I think we should move to the final evolution of the medium, and just post sensationalist headlines so we can all attempt to get a first post with some retarded reactionary remark.
That's what todays slashbot wants. Please oblige them for maximum page views.
Thanks
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology. The public still hasn't received a return on investment in the study of quarks decades ago, and now we are chasing some other particle that doesn't promise any benefit. How many millions of euro of taxpayer money have gone into this project, which will interest only a handful of scientists?
If a private company wants to sink money into this, it's their right. But the publicly-funded LHC should have never have happened.
Full blown Higgs signal. And the world will turn inside out and we will become Mole People and mocked by a future human and his 2 robot friends.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Apparently, the superbowl coin toss "experiment" has generated nearly as large a statistical anomaly... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/02/04/a-3-8-sigma-anomaly/
Right now they are sorting through the math on old experimental data.
I'm sure they are waiting for at least 6 sigma to acutally claim anything...
This is only the first step. What the data suggests is that there's probably a particle there -- however, the higgs has several important properties that are impossible to measure with this dataset yet -- like its spin0 property. Chances are though, that because of how this data fits in with the higgs predicted mass, it really is the higgs.
So, we can detect Higgs but we can't detect multiple typos in the damn summary? Really?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This "sigma" terminology still sounds half-cocked to me.
Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
Clearly, this was originally
In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, physicists have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
and someone sloppily tried to change it to
Physicists working on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
but failed.
Just fucking CTRL+C, CTRL+V - no one believes you're writing up your own summary anyway. Just plagiarise in full.
I'll be standing at the gates of the Playboy Mansion waiting for an avalanche of apocalypse sex
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Forget all that sigma stuff. We want Las Vegas bookmaker's odds.
Have gnu, will travel.
That article selected 14 out of 45 coin tosses and then calculated odds but because of the selection the odds calculation is in error.
My wife, the family's particle physicist (PhD in the field and staff physicist at one of those big boffin-filled accelerator labs) goes to CERN a couple of times a year to confer, and last year brought back one of my favorite Tee shirts, a black shirt with the math that postulates the existence of the Higgs in big white symbols! So, just call me Higgs Boy! :-) FWIW, my father was also a physicist and studied mesons (elementary particles) in the generation before FermiLab and CERN. Because of his friendship with many luminaries in physics and astronomy, I had the opportunity to meet Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, the co-inventor of the modern particle accelerator that was the grand-father of the LHC, when he was in the USA on a visit back in the late 1950's or early 1960's.
Anyway, my wife CAN do the math (I am limited to elementary calculus) and she thinks the proof of the Higgs is not far off. Over half of the problem is knowing where (in terms of energy) to look. After all, they will probably never see the particle itself - just the decay products. It's kind of like seeing the debris flying out of where a house stood after a gas explosion, and from the patterns of flying bricks and timbers, being able to determine what the house looked like, as well as what make of toaster caused the explosion! So, the math is the key to this stuff. As the Buddha said, "May you live in interesting times!"... :-)
Research physicists are probably the most innovative people on the planet, and for the most part don't give a fig about the commercial uses of their inventions! Why do you ask? Well, they are doing stuff that has never been done before that requires equipment that has never existed before. So, they have to invent it and then build it.
What have they given us you ask?
1. Superconducting magnets that are necessary for MRI scanners.
2. Lasers (Gordon Gould) - can you spell Xerox?
3. High intensity synchrotron (x-ray) radiation that has enabled major advances in medicine (Cornell University, Wilson Lab in cooperation with the NIH)
.
.
.
The list is too long to fit here, I think.
High-energy physics research has created extremely beneficial spin-off of technology, without being the primary purpose of that research.
Reading some of the papers, it is clear that the data is being selectively interpreted to yield a desired conclusion. This is yet another case of continued government funding depending on making progress in proving a particular result, in this case, the existence of the Higgs particle.
It's a shame that human society has come to this, and it is no wonder our technological progress has become stunted. We are not honest enough as a society to be able to make any further progress.
Does ANYONE proofread these articles before posting them? The grammar in the summary made me vomit stuff I never even ate.
... I'd hardly call any of those companies lean.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How are you going to toss a coin if NFC payments are going to replace coins? Throw up an iPhone and if the screen brakes, it's tails?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I was up to 4-sigma on the Higgs boson... until I took an arrow to the knee.
To respond to this so late, but...
Normally, when dotters take to correcting a post en mass, there isn't a reason to cover anything; however, the logic of, "We got these things 25-50 years later from a theory, but anything that doesn't contribute this quarter is a waste of money," would be sufficient to kill the theory of economic value versus investment. We got lots of things from the money dumped on the Space Race and the succeeding era, but from a dollar in to dollar out that month, year or even decade perspective, it wouldn't have appeared to be that affordable, even though those technologies, from fuel cells (more than just one type), to photovoltaics, to advanced ceramics and plastics, account for more economic profit today than the most expensive year of the US Independent Space Exploration Era.
I, however, wanted to plug, in a non-spammy way, a couple of places on YouTube that shows current payoff. While it doesn't focus on the LHC, it's a follow up on technologies that are otherwise related to what is being done at the LHC.
http://www.youtube.com/user/BackstageScience?feature=g-all-s#p/u/43/12KaFItjgl0
This is YT Channel BackstageScience, with a feature call for the video titled, "Lap of a Synchotron". In this video (as well as the many in that list), you will find discussion about many of the assists to, primarily, materials science that comes from the many research activities in the beamline branches.
http://www.youtube.com/user/DiamondLightSource
This is the same facility, but these videos are more on the individual research projects going on at that facility.
Synchotrons are relatively expensive, and when they were the new thing, they were more expensive to construct, maintain and run than many infrastructure projects; they were the LHC of their time. Now, we have safer planes, improved medicine and more advanced super- and semi-conductors. Intentionally producing nanoparticles has been a relatively new thing for commercial industries, but that new economy is entirely dependent on technology like the synchotron.
BackstageScience has a video titled, :"Muon Man", which is an interview with one of the scientists in general. If you asked someone 25 years ago what practical applications existed for muons, you would have been told they can be used to detect time dilation in accordance to Special relativity or changes in a protons charge field. Today, we use the to detect restricted radio-active materials and peer into the inner workings of large-scale geological activities, which will eventually allows us to detect volcanic eruptions and, quite possibly, earth quakes.
With regard to this specific project, the LHC's job is to understand the fundamental structures of energy at very small scales. The idea it's stuck on the Higgs boson research shows a lot of ignorance, but the kind one might expect from the limited understanding that comes from someone who would say, "[A]nything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon," is exotic or has never produced any useful technology. E^2=M^2C^4+P^2C^2 has brought us anti-matter, which eventually led to improved medical technologies. The fact is, large projects, like the LHC, are necessary for such advancements, but too expensive for even a single portion of the economic spectrum to manage for the initial time between theory and application. To say it was too expensive because you can't see any advantage in it shows a failure of understanding how doctorates lead to economic and social advantages. Perhaps you should join slashdot with the moniker Lysenko, so, we will all know how ignorant you are about the importance of advancing science through large scale. publicly funded projects.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
posting to undo accidental bad moderation
They will probably attribute the increase in Higg's signal strength due to global warming.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.