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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.
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
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.
I am frankly shocked that you can say something like this. Of course it's a loss. But just because the results are not immediately applicable to anything does not mean it's worthless. This kind of research increases our knowledge of how the universe works, and that in and of itself is definitely worth publicly funding. We are increasing the sum of human knowledge. There is almost nothing more important.
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.
Synchrotron light source
Super conducting wire
Positron emission tomography
positron emissions have medical application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
strangely enough, application using one particle, the anti-neutrino, is in the works for reactor monitoring.
muons might be used to catalyze fusion or reduce lifespan of nuclear waste (with fusion products of catalyzed reaction
you are foolish, how can we engineer with the universe's components if we don't learn all we can about them?
How many millions of euro of taxpayer money have gone into this project, which will interest only a handful of scientists?
Approximately $9B, over 15 years, split between 20 nations. So on average, about $30M/year per country. Compared to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's a rounding error. Whatever may or may not come out of the Large Hadron Collider, I rather doubt either of those wars is going to show any ROI.
I bet they said the same thing about electrons, protons, and neutrons several decades ago. The positron is also an important particle in positron emission tomography, which has certainly saved lives. The research that went into the production of these facilities has also yielded very useful things, such as particle counting and cryogenics (neither of which was invented by particle physicists but certainly vastly improved upon by them).
Oh yeah, and the world wide web was invented at CERN, so I guess that was kind of important too...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Not really, because that was only "predicted" after it occurred. That's cheating. In other words, if you sift through millions of events discarding all the "likely" ones (such as coin tosses in other sports, or regular season NFL games, that didn't show any consistency), it is extremely likely you'll eventually find an "unlikely" one.
In contrast, the criteria for detecting the Higgs Boson were set ahead of time.
By the way, the NFC lost the coin toss last Sunday.
Let's see, do any of these require exotic particle theory?
Synchrotron light source? Uses good old maxwell equations to steer electron beams with magnetic fields to make x-ray radiation...
Super conducting wire? The most viable theory behind cooper pairing is QM electron-phonon interaction which doesn't need any exotic particle theory...
PET? That uses simple radioactive sugar (where glucose is fluoridated with radioactive fluorine-18) and the resulting gamma ray decays are imaged...
Not to say that standard-model exotic particle theory isn't interesting, or doesn't explain certain physical things or certain astrophysical phenomena, but unlike QM, theoretical work on exotic particles has yet to prove economically useful. Century old QM theory on the other hand has helped us design flash memory, lasers, GMR disk drive heads, IC lithographic equipment, and has proven useful for racetrack memory, spintronics, quantum dot memory and maybe some day (economical) quantum computers.
Perhaps the time will come for standard-model sub-atomic theory being a big economic payback, but it hasn't happened yet. This might have a lot to do with the fact that other than the standard Hadrons (proton, neutron), and the electron and photons, and practically invisible neutrino, we don't see much, if any, of the other ones except as cosmic radiation or inside particle accelerators, which means economically they are more of nuisance than something to exploit. Who knows, maybe the even the standard model is wrong and we won't see anything economically useful from this theory on exotic particles, but maybe its sucessor theory. We just don't know yet.
It's easy to overestimate the impact of new theories. I'll wager that most cars today are still designed mostly assuming newtonian dynamics, and even more primitively, they got to the moon with a very low precision value for pi. Someday theories prove their worth, just like QM so it's worth investing, but overstating the case isn't being intellectually honest.
To bring a more understandable analogy to the current audience. If you are a computer programmer, your boss may indirectly use Turing computability theory to claim that it isn't impossible for you to write a program to do what he wants it to do, and perhaps P~NP might be something in the back of your mind when you look for algorithms, but the latest computability theory about NP-intermediate set problems probably doesn't yet have any economic value to anyone (after all, they are still NP problems even if not NP-complete). Might be valueable some day, though...
That was almost a haiku if you drag "wire" out into two syllables, but the last line completely strays. What about this?
Synchrotron light source
Positron tomography
Superconductors
High-energy physics research has created extremely beneficial spin-off of technology, without being the primary purpose of that research.
Those 3 things are technologies developed by Experimental Particle Physicists who wanted to test Particle Physics Theory.
Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”
Richard P. Feynman
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
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...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
One could have said the same thing about what Farrady found about electromagnetism, that the economic benefit wasn't much. The practical application of the higgs field we can only guess at now, but being able to dick about with the mass/inertia of matter for instance would have truly epic applications. This is about as insightful as saying in 1825 that electricity might be able to be used to make stuff move. Look how that technological revolution turned out.
It may not be very useful but it could equally well be the opposite. However from any particular point in history you can pretty much trace the current state of technological civilization back to some discovery at some point. I seem to notice a correlation between the effort in the discovery and how it transformed everything.
The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.