Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Certainty ? from a scientific point of view ? infinite! Sigmas in a way tells how probable is to get these results, the more sigmas you have means that the more improbable to get these results without invoking some other model/theory etc etc. So 4.3 is good but not good enough, we need at least 5 sigmas. (What said is not 100% correct, but a rough explanation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
4.3 sigma corresponds to a confidence level of 99,998292% (credit to Wolfram|alpha). This is about as certain as death and taxes if compared to “everyday” events, but maybe it's not enough for theoretical physicists (I'm not one).
I think they usually require 5 sigma (99.9999426697%) for it to be official.
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.
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.
Stupidly assuming you're talking American "football", 119.99993120364 yards, or 0.00247666896 inches from the line.
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.
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?
You managed to get the values for both 3 sigma, and 5 sigma wrong
+/- 3 sigma = 1 in 370 (which is what clued me into them being wrong, 1/81 + 0.997 isn't close to 1)
+/- 5 sigma = 1 in 1,744,278
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
It's not good enough. They've got a good way to go before they achieve Six Sigma.
To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”
Richard P. Feynman
So what you are saying is his transcription is accurate, to +/- 1 sigma?
Sigmas in a way tells how probable is to get these results
To be pedantic, it's a measure of the probability that random chance caused these results. A 4.3 sigma result means that if you just fed white noise into the sensors, you would get a result this strong 0.001% of the time - or to put it another way, if you run the test 100,000 times with absolutely no real signal, one of them will probably have a result this good.
The important distinction is that this is not a measure of "how likely we are right". There is a 1 in 100,000 chance that random luck caused this result, but there is also an unknown and hard to quantify possibility that our theory is wrong and some other mechanism caused this result.
All this is under pure mathematician's "null-hypothesis" assumptions. That is, we have a 99.999999999% confidence level of being right, unless we are making any mistake in our set of thousands of assumptions, there is any miscalibration, any fundamental error, systematic errors, ...
But this is not a mathematical exercise. It is a physics experiment. Knowing how the CMS/ATLAS collaboration works and how politized it is, If there is a (subtle but likely) mistake, then this number means nothing.
The correct reading would be: "we are 99.99999999% (or whatever) sure that if we are wrong it is not due to a purely random statistic fluctuation"
Other than that 5-sigma is a mere convention on when to trigger a press conference to declare "discovery"
This is about as certain as ... taxes ...
Doesn't that make it 99%?