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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.
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? :)
If Mr. Freeman's invited better have some crowbars and other weapons ready in case alien creatures and head crabs jump out of the machinery! :)
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
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.
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.
Lots of physicists talk like that, it's not a religious statement it's a common was to express ideas. Similar thing in IT, people talk about programs wanting/thinking this or that but nobody actually believes the code "wants" or "thinks" anything.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
On the other hand Fermilab did announce their latest results today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18677808
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 :)
Well, yeah. It's the particle that gives things mass. It's only fitting that they announce it during the celebration of the fattest nation on Earth.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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?
But his half brother Morgan can make it.
Ah. The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. And we all know that the right man for the search for the God particle is someone who's acquainted with the role.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
its me :D yes, higgs is my real last name.
Lots of physicists talk like that, it's not a religious statement it's a common was to express ideas.
Biologists can be even worse sometimes - they'll make casual reference to evolution "designing" a particular adaptation. The urge to anthropomorphize natural processes is apparently very strong, even among people who are trained to look for rational and non-supernatural explanations. But I have to admit I wince every time I read something like that.
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
ain't gonna ask about the one that's the big black hole
Thats the goatse particle. Agreed, best left unobserved. Its metastable and decays emitting Santorum particles, which are toxic little things also best left unobserved.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/Higgs-Tevatron-20120702.html
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It's not just the urge to anthromorphise, it's that there are a lack of useful words to describe it otherwise. You can avoid anthropomorphised words, but the result is usually longer and other scientists (the intended audience) understand just fine.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?
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
Yes.
I'm 100% sure of it. That's how I know there are plenty of people smarter than me.
First they need the IBN 5100.
El Psy Congroo
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.
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.