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."

Comments

This would have been first post.

[daveashcroft]

...but it doesn't carry any weight anymore.

Heavy!

[ruiner13]

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?

The real question is...

[StripedCow]

Does it have round corners?

Risky experiment

[PTBarnum]

If we prove that the God Particle exists, will it vanish in a puff of logic?

Who is this Higgs...

[rcasha2]

...and why is everyone trying to get a peek at her bosom? :)

Re:Who is this Higgs...

[vlm]

...and why is everyone trying to get a peek at her bosom? :)

Wrong end. You're thinking of mesons, specifically one made out of two "top" quarks. They follow the anti-heisenberg uncertainty principle where the better you can see their position, perhaps because they're unconfined, then the better you can see the effects on them of momentum and vibration/oscillation. I like high energy/high mass mesons like that, but Higgs is not a meson so it's all rather irrelevant.

Higgs particle, speaking to husband: "Honey, does this Large Hadron Collider make my butt look fat?" They would have been more likely to get a peek if they told her it was the "Petite Hadron Collider", or if they told her there was a shoe sale there.

Let's get this one out of the way

[davidbrit2]

Yo mamma's so fat, CERN used her to find the Higgs-Boson with four-sigma certainty.

Re:Let's get this one out of the way

[paiute]

Yo mamma so stupid, she thought the Higgs Boson would be found in the 149-206 GeV/c2 mass range.

Re:Let's get this one out of the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo mamma so stupid, she forgot to calculate the rate of Beta events with a standard dilepton invariant mass at a subleading order in the hybrid expansion when she was reducing the perturbative uncertainty in the determination of Vub from semileptonic Beta decays.

Re:Let's get this one out of the way

[ArsonSmith]

Yo mamma so stupid, she ... uhh scored ... umm very low on an ... uhh IQ test.

Re:when these genius people are 100%

[schroedingers_hat]

The thing about smart people is that they're never 100% sure of anything. They think too much for that.

"one in a a trillion" event

[peter303]

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.

Re:"one in a a trillion" event

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost certainly.

This is one of the arguments that had to be deployed against some bozos who warned against starting up the LHC on the grounds that it might create a subminiature black hole.

We already see cosmic rays at higher energies than the LHC can reach. We just can't study their effects at will. However, it's clear that they either haven't created any black holes, or any such black holes are too small to accrete any nearby matter, and have fallen to the center of the Earth where they don't hurt anything.

Re:"one in a a trillion" event

[dotancohen]

... and have fallen to the center of the Earth where they don't hurt anything.

Fallen? And what do you thing happens when they get there with some velocity?

Such black holes almost certainly exist, not only in the Earth but in all other large bodies as well. But they aren't "fallen" in the center, but rather orbiting the body inside of it, possibly eating a few atoms on each orbit. In any case I wouldn't call that "harmless" but rather "mostly harmless". I wouldn't mind one passing through my fingernails, but I might be upset if it ate away at a bit of my brain.

Maybe this explains memory loss... Scientists!

Re:"one in a a trillion" event

[Charliemopps]

you have to understand how small the event horizon is on something like this. The chances of it hitting ANY atom in your brain is so low that it's more likely that the planet would get hit by a full sized black hole than one of these tiny ones. Not only can they pass through matter and not hit atoms, they can pass through atoms and not any of its constituent particles.

Re:when these genius people are 100%

[Anonymous Coward]

For 100% certainty you need religion. This is science, no guarantees other than "Best available knowledge."

Fundamental particle masses only

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Who says it has a "job" ?

[TapeCutter]

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.

Re:when these genius people are 100%

[vlm]

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.

*Goddamn* Particle, not God

[advid.net]

If we prove that the God Particle exists,[...]

Do you mean the Goddamn Particle ?

Re:when these genius people are 100%

[meekg]

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 :)

Re:Alternatives to Higgs Boson?

[dalias]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgsless_model

Beyond the Higgs Boson?

[CMYKjunkie]

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?

Re:Beyond the Higgs Boson?

[ArsonSmith]

nothing else. This is the last thing we need to discover then we're done and can get on with life.

Re:Beyond the Higgs Boson?

[jfengel]

Yes, there is. The Higgs completes the Standard Model, which covers a lot of stuff, but leaves a lot of crucial questions unanswered. It doesn't explain why we see a universe of matter and not antimatter; it doesn't explain why the mass of the particles are what they are; it doesn't explain the egregious discrepancy between observed vacuum energy and the theoretical one ("egregious" meaning "a factor of 10^120").

There are models that do cover these things, and these models predict particles not currently observed. One of the most promising is called "supersymmetry", and the particles it predicts have names like "sleptons" and "squarks" and "neutralinos".

There's a very, very faint hope that the LHC might find them, but it's probably not powerful enough even if they exist. So the first step isn't to start a new search, but to examine the Higgs more closely and see if we can narrow the hunt.

There's also a search in a different direction, for the graviton, in an attempt to unify general relativity with the standard model. (The Standard Model takes special relativity into account, but not general relativity.) Those experiments are already underway, and sadly they're not turning up anything, which is a little discouraging. And worse, it's not the kind of null result that they can use to throw out the old model and begin on a new one, because they didn't expect to see much.

Still, they soldier on. There's always more work to do. This is the end of one phase of physics, and the beginning of another.

Fermilab Press Release today regarding the Higgs

[stox]

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/Higgs-Tevatron-20120702.html