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CERN Announcing New LHC Results July 4th
An anonymous reader writes "The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass. Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people. From the article: 'Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level. Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland."
...but it doesn't carry any weight anymore.
....Gordon Freeman's invited.
Seriously though, they'll find another one won't they, so can I theorise that the Higgs Boson is made up of, say Anonymous Coward Bosons? I've always wanted to be famous...
Marty McFly: Whoa. This is heavy.
Dr. Emmett Brown: There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
today is spelling optional day.
Does it have round corners?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
If we prove that the God Particle exists, will it vanish in a puff of logic?
...and why is everyone trying to get a peek at her bosom? :)
Saying a particle has a "job" sounds an awful lot like intended purpose, which means design... So, which physicists says this again?
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Yo mamma's so fat, CERN used her to find the Higgs-Boson with four-sigma certainty.
The thing about smart people is that they're never 100% sure of anything. They think too much for that.
During a run they record billions of collisions and terabytes a day. Even so that is just a tiny fraction of so-called "interesting collisions"; most routine data goes unrecorded. Over the months they have recorded trillions of collisions, each which represents the state of several thousand detectors. Then they search for Higgs decay candidates off-line. There are several potential decay patterns, so the search may be done multiple times. Last year's "hint" of the Higgs was 3-5 anomalous events at a likely energy at two colliders. They'd like at least a dozen, for 4 to 5 standard deviations above the noise before they call it a new particle. This is searching for one significant event on average out of each trillion recorded.
More like, "hey we found these fossils and foot prints and droppings and DNA in a dead, mummified mosquito, this must mean there's dinosaurs! but since no human was alive back then, we can only say that with 99.999% certainty"
Or, "there must be some force that is keeping us on this planet, let's call it gravity!! we can see it act upon matter and we can drop things, but we can't see gravity itself, so we have to call it a theory."
For 100% certainty you need religion. This is science, no guarantees other than "Best available knowledge."
when they can say with 100% call me
You can never be 100% certain in science only so certain that no reasonable person would doubt it.
i want to lose a few pounds...you can have the higgs in those particles back....
Firstly pounds measure weight, not mass, so it is the Earth's gravitational field that causes your weight. Go visit inter-galactic space any you'll have no appreciable weight (low Earth orbit will have very little effect on your weight though - it's apparent, not true, weightlessness).
Secondly the Higgs causes the fundamental particles to have mass e..g electron, quarks, W/Z bosons etc. The vast majority of your mass comes from the protons and neutrons in the atomic nuclei which make up your body. This mass is almost entirely to do with the binding energy between the quarks and almost nothing to do with the Higgs. In fact, while the quark masses are hard to measure, the best estimate is that less than 0.1% of a proton or neutron mass comes from the quark masses i.e. from the Higgs.
I was expecting an exciting ending to the search, but it just ended up being a big deus ex machina.
Rock Us, Dukakis.
They're going to have a display of the excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state on a day when the U.S. will hold displays of excitation above its ground states across the country. Perhaps in the future the day will be known as Higgsdependence Day?
For 100% certainty you need religion
Or math, the queen of all sciences (ducks from flames)
Interesting how its the soft sciences and the archaeologists and bio majors who get all the heat from the fundies, but the math majors get no heat despite being arrogant WRT possession of the truth in general and their insistence that the value of PI is an unbiblical irrational number instead of gods written truth of exactly three.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So you don't know what the announcement is, but you're speculating anyway instead of waiting a couple of days. What is this, CNN? Enough with this. I want news for nerds and stuff that matters, not circlejerking 24/7!
Found him aboard the Frigate HMS Rigging.
So they think they found the answer but now they need to find the question. Didn't we go through this before?
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Are there any alternative theories to higgs boson, what's the status of them?
If we prove that the God Particle exists,[...]
Do you mean the Goddamn Particle ?
Heh, that's because the Math type have never ever proved (or even claimed) anything that is related to the real world.... In this respect, they are like fiction writers, 100% sure about what's happening in their world :)
A great blog to read about the ongoing research and in depth particle physics articles is Matt Strassler's website: http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/06/27/this-sites-background-articles-on-the-higgs/
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Since I am too lazy to RTFA and since some people here are surely smart in this field, can you answer this: is there a particle BEYOND the Higgs that will be looked for next? That is to say, "we" always think we have found the smallest particle/farthest object/oldest artifact/etc. but then we later realize there is something smaller/farther/older/heavier/etc. Can we expect that to happen here as well?
For 100% certainty you need religion
Or math, the queen of all sciences (ducks from flames)
Really? I don't think 100% certainty means what you think it does. Have you ever made a mistake proving a theorem? Has a peer-reviewed published theorem ever later been found to have a mistake? Is it even remotely possible that it will happen in the future? If so, you need to assign a level of certainty to any given theorem: a probability that it has a mistake. As it gets used more a scrutinized more, that probability declines dramatically, but it can't reach zero. Zero and one are not probabilities. There's a big difference between 0.99999999, or any other finite number of nines, and infinite nines. For the same reasons that infinity is not a real number, zero and one are not probabilities or certainties.
Zero and one are not probabilities.
What the hell? Yes, they are! What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probablity that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
So they are finally going to announcer their plans on building a time machine to take over the world?
Wrong. Read the article s/he linked, it's pretty interesting.
You and the quarter might be nuked before it hits the ground. Ridiculously small probabilites still subtract from the probability you stated of 1.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/Higgs-Tevatron-20120702.html
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probability that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
Not necessarily
I am officially gone from
You and the quarter might be nuked before it hits the ground. Ridiculously small probabilites still subtract from the probability you stated of 1
If nukes aren't part of your model, then they are not part of your model.
Probability is founded in set theory. Probabilities are assigned to events, which are sets of outcomes in you *defined* probability space.
It is a *model* that is *applied* to the world. In the model, 0 and 1 are real probabilities. That has nothing direct to do with the real world.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The thing about smart people is that they're never 100% sure of anything. They think too much for that.
Are you sure about that?
European agency, American holiday, so obviously I'ma quote a Canadian show: "It blowed up real good!"
The urge to anthropomorphize natural processes is apparently very strong
That mind contains different information processing centres that (surprise) process information in specialised ways. There is a module that sees everything as sentient, finding sentient causes and effects, and making predictions based on a model of personality. This module can be applied to /anything/, which is very cool if you think about it from a programming point of view. Since all the modules are always online (baring brain damage), you will see a person, and simultaneously model their personality and the physics of their body. (e.g., can they sit in that small chair?) You will see a higgs boson, and automagically assign some personality model to it.
If you close one eye, then you can see the entire universe as being nothing but sentience -- the very atoms conscious in some way.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Pfft. Motorola had Six Sigma and that didn't stop them from tanking their profits...
Bow before me, for I am root.
Wow, this is an amazingly good way of putting it. Still, there is some question as to whether or not the "axioms => theorems" relationship claimed in math is itself an absolute truth of the universe. Many mathematicians would probably say yes, and it's very hard to imagine how it might not be true. After all, everyone can see that 1+1=2! And if it is true, that's kind of amazing (which is why people get excited about cool things like the structure of prime numbers, or homomorphisms of groups you wouldn't expect, etc). But still, there is good reason to doubt it...
weinersmith
Suppose you believe that to be the case, and then you observe such a coin landing on edge? In other words, what do you do when certain knowledge encounters an absurd event (unity prior vs impossible evidence)? There is no recovery from that, any more than you can say that infinity minus infinity is 5. The numbers one and zero do not behave like probabilities. In order to conclude that an even has certainty 1, you must observe infinitely strong evidence about it. Even in a math journal, a carefully reviewed published paper does not come close to infinite evidence.
Or math, the queen of all sciences (ducks from flames)
Wrong. Math is math. Science may apply math. But it is no more math than statistics is.
Math does deal in absolute certainties. However, it is an abstraction. At best, it can only be used to approximate reality.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
For 100% certainty you need religion
Or math, the queen of all sciences (ducks from flames)
Math is not a science, it's based on axioms like religions are based on dogmas.
the math majors get no heat despite being arrogant WRT possession of the truth in general and their insistence that the value of PI is an unbiblical irrational number instead of gods written truth of exactly three.
That's because math majors usually don't believe to metropolitan myths to bolster their self confidence. They don't need to.
Yeah, you keep saying that. But what is imperfect about a coin with an edge that can be landed on?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Yes.
I'm 100% sure of it. That's how I know there are plenty of people smarter than me.
They're going to announce that they didn't find a Higgs Boson where they expected it and that therefore nothing actually has mass. Hah, didn't see THAT coming, did you?!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I am 100% certain you will die. I am so certain of this fact that I am willing to bet my life on it.
See, that wasn't religion NOR science.
Well done!
You're just adding yet another possibility. It's trivial to reword it. What is the probability that a coin will land heads, tails or on its edge? The probability is 1. It has to do one of those if those are all the possibilities. What is the probability that it will do none of those things? The probability is 0. Whatever other possibilities you want to add, exploding into marshmallows, being nuked while inside a fridge, getting a top 10 single on the UK pop charts, etc, doesn't matter. If you list all the possibilities, the probability that it will be one of those is 1 and the probability that it will be none of those is 0. Basic. Fucking. Logic.
Also, a perfect coin is a definition. It's not some value judgement.
I realize this is a cute 'correction' to establish your superiority, but it's wrong.
Sorry but you are very wrong - the avoirdupois pound came into use circa 1300. A quantitative understanding of mass came about several centuries later with Newton so I'd like to know how you come up with a unit for a concept which was not even thought of, let alone quantified, until 50-100 years later!
What you have just highlighted though is one of the (many) reasons why imperial units are stupid and inconsistent. The pound is a measure of weight which is a force otherwise you cannot explain the use of pounds per square inch as units for pressure. Imperial units use the slug as the unit of mass. Of course because everyone was using the SI system and people (incorrectly) regarded pounds and kilograms as equivalent units in the two systems were fixed by law in the 1960's effectively defining a weight using a mass which only works if you also assume a fixed value of gravitational field.
Moral of the story - imperial units are non-scientific, inconsistent and often have no agreed standard (e.g. pint) so use SI units!
The other tree sub atomic forces are at least 10^38 times stronger. Atoms are mostly empty space. It would be very rare for the black hole to get close enough to another particle to absorb it, much less a cascade of particles that would really enlarge a black hole. And particle size black holes evaporate very quickly.
If you spent ten billion, you better find it too.
You're missing the daily scheduled circle-jerk on WUWT. Go away, troll.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Me tinks there is a 99.99% chance they found zilch
Then they can keep the zilch mines and bupkis factories going.
Stop calling it the God Particle. That's not what the search is for and it riles up the fundies and happily-ignorants.
My kingdom for a donkey!
Wow, what an amazing "us too!" article. Basically, that press release says they could not see anything with any certainty, and they are waiting for the results of the LHC to say "oh yes, there it was all along!".
Tevatron lost funding, SSC lost funding, you lose the results, science loses. Go talk to your politicians.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
nowhere will you find that the bible claims pi = 3.
It is an incorrect reading of measurements given for a bronze basin.
The basin likely had a lip at the top that funneled outwards, and the circumference measurement was likely below the top, or even around the inside rather than the outside. Sure, you could read it as if it was a perfect cylinder, but the verse says nothing about that. Given the time when it was written, I think it's more likely that it was shaped/sculpted. The circumference is likely measured around the middle and the diameter measured across the top. The circumference around the top would be greater than the circumference around the middle. Most basins are built this way. There is no reason for the writer to take a mathematical or scientific approach for that one verse, and not for any other. The chapter is not written for the purpose of someone trying to recreate it.
The context is not a maths lesson, it is merely describing dimensions of something that someone built, from the point of view of an onlooker. Given the time when it was written, it could well have been approximated too. We don't read of any fractional cubit measurements anywhere.
But sure, keep pushing this stuff - if it helps you justify your view of the bible.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
...and their insistence that the value of PI is an unbiblical irrational number instead of gods written truth of exactly three.
This again?
In case anyone is confused, the Bible does not say pi=3. What it does say is that King Solomon built his palace and was having it decorated, apparently with (among other things) a giant bowl:
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it—ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea.
The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.
- I Kings 7:23-26 (NIV)
This is what everybody freaks out about: 30 cubits / 10 cubits = 3. However, notice the part about the thickness - it turns out that if you measure the INNER circumference but the OUTER diameter, it all works.
Let's assume that a cubit is 18" and a handbreadth is 4". If the outer diameter is 180", then that would make the inner diameter only 172", and 540"/172"=3.1395 which is reasonably close to 3.14 when your units of measurement are cubits and handbreadths and you round everything to the nearest whole number anyway.
Now, does the Bible say they were measuring the inner circumference? No, but it doesn't specify that they were measuring the outer circumference either, and this explanation makes a hell of a lot more sense than "God has declared that pi is exactly 3.00!"
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
>What the hell? Yes, they are! What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probablity that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
Unless your definition of "perfect coin" is "has no a thickness of 0" (as in a Euclidian 2-dimensional perfect circle) that was a really bad example.
But anything that can still be called a coin at all (even if perfect) has not 2 but 3 sides. True coming down on the third side is incredibly rare - but it does happen.
If you claim a 2-dimensional only coin, then your concept falls even further flat since 2-dimensional objects wouldn't obey gravity (no real matter = no real mass = no gravitational force) so THAT perfect coin actually wouldn't come down at all.
So for any real coin the probability that it will land either heads or tails is very close to 1. The probability that it will not come down is very close to 0 (if you flick it in zero gravity there is no "down" to speak off - and since that is possible, the probability is not completely 0) and there is even a tiny probability that it will come down NEITHER - and land on it's side. Rare as that may be, it does happen, it's happened to me more than once. They tend to roll like a wheel for a bit and then stop. If they are on a smooth surface like a table and have enough rolling time to decelerate gradually - they don't topple over.
I agree with you that there are 0 and 1 probabilities. The probability of any human not wearing an (as yet at least impossible to design) special suit surviving a trip to the center of the sun is 0.
The probability of a radiactive piece of uranium decaying is 1 (we can't predict the exact time - but we can predict that it WILL happen and there is no known condition that can prevent it).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So it's impossible in your model to flip a perfect coin in zero gravity ? Or anything close enough to it to resemble it?
Newton's law says if I'm in an orbit where the sun and earth's gravitational theory is balanced and I flip the coin straight ahead of me, it will keep going round and round forever.
That's not "coming down" is it? So the probability of it doing none of your predicted things is still not zero. Especially when we HAVE the technology to do this experiment. We do basically the same thing with satelites all the time.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Principia Mathematica includes a proof 1+1=2, though the proof is too complex for the average person.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
The thing about smart people is that they're never 100% sure of anything..
Is that true 100% of the time?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
0 and 1 are probabilities as defined by modern probability theory.
That article you link to is non-mathematical bollocks that begs the question it's attempting to resolve. Worse than that - the "amusing anecdote" it links to is even worse.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You're just adding yet another possibility. It's trivial to reword it. What is the probability that a coin will land heads, tails or on its edge? The probability is 1. It has to do one of those if those are all the possibilities. What is the probability that it will do none of those things? The probability is 0. Whatever other possibilities you want to add, exploding into marshmallows, being nuked while inside a fridge, getting a top 10 single on the UK pop charts, etc, doesn't matter. If you list all the possibilities, the probability that it will be one of those is 1 and the probability that it will be none of those is 0. Basic. Fucking. Logic.
Also, a perfect coin is a definition. It's not some value judgement.
That seems true but trivial.
"The probability of it being a head, a tail, or any/every other thing in the entire universe that isn't a head or a tail is 1. The probability of it being anything else is 0."
Well, yes. Am I missing something?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I know you're not supposed to reply to yourself, but on re-reading this thread I realise the original argument was whether 0 or 1 could be an absolute figure rather than a probability, and so yes, it can.
Using a coin as an example just confused things. It would have been better to use something like being dead or alive, except that someone would have brought in Schrodinger's cat...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
it turns out that if you measure the INNER circumference but the OUTER diameter, it all works.
I believe the theological term for this is "clutching at straws".
Better just to use the defence that someone did above, i.e. it was a non-scientific person using approximate measurements, rather than some engineer, who wrote the passage.
The real point is that you can't take everything in the Bible as the word of God transcribed directly to mankind. It's obviously written by men. Which leads one to wonder where the Creation story in Genesis came from.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
For the love of all that is sacred and holly, silent coder, please, keep silent and stop coding :)
Unless you are making fun of the previous similarly stupid posts in which case, well done, but please try to syntax-color those sarcasm tags
Probably.
+3 Funny
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I only meant to show a possible interpretation that is both consistent with the text and mathematically sound. I am not saying that this interpretation is correct; another, as you say, is simply that they took inaccurate measurements and rounded a lot (although the wording of the passage makes me think they were trying to be as accurate as they could). The original assertion was that the Bible says pi=3 and therefore the Bible must be wrong. That conclusion is flawed, because both of these plausible explanations exist. You're welcome to find other things that you believe disprove the Bible, but this should not be one of them.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
This kind of pedantry is what annoys me about the way people teach physics.....Finding pointless minutia to criticize...
That's ok, this kind of willful ignorance annoys me! The difference between mass and weight is NOT "pointless minutiae" they are fundamentally different physical things - one which the Higgs boson can explain and one which it cannot. It cannot possibly be more central and critical to the topic being discussed! I get that you do not understand the difference between the two and it does not surprise me - this difference is subtle and hard to grasp and was something I struggled with when first learning physics. However to refuse to listen and learn and to continue to deny that the difference is important frankly puts you in the same willful-ignorance category as the creationists when they deny evolution because "they know better". You might _think_ you know better but if you'd open up your mind just a crack and go and look up what the difference between weight and mass and how that relates to the Higgs you might discover how wrong you are to dismiss the difference as "pointless minutiae".
That's incorrect. Scientists don't just assume that nuclear decay rates have been constant over billions of years. Just to be clear, we can't be sure that nuclear decay rates are exactly constant. But experiments have placed constraints on the size of any variation in decay rates: