CERN Announcing New LHC Results July 4th

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CERN Announcing New LHC Results July 4th

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 2, 2012 @02:16AM from the building-block dept.

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."

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Who is this Higgs... by rcasha2 · 2012-07-02 02:27 · Score: 5, Funny

...and why is everyone trying to get a peek at her bosom? :)
Let's get this one out of the way by davidbrit2 · 2012-07-02 02:33 · Score: 5, Funny

Yo mamma's so fat, CERN used her to find the Higgs-Boson with four-sigma certainty.
1. Re:Let's get this one out of the way by paiute · 2012-07-02 02:50 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Yo mamma so stupid, she thought the Higgs Boson would be found in the 149-206 GeV/c2 mass range.
  
  --
  If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
2. Re:Let's get this one out of the way by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-02 03:09 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  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:when these genius people are 100% by schroedingers_hat · 2012-07-02 02:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by peter303 · 2012-07-02 02:35 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:"one in a a trillion" event by Charliemopps · 2012-07-02 04:25 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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% by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-02 02:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

For 100% certainty you need religion. This is science, no guarantees other than "Best available knowledge."
Re:when these genius people are 100% by meekg · 2012-07-02 03:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by dalias · 2012-07-02 03:18 · Score: 5, Informative

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgsless_model
Beyond the Higgs Boson? by CMYKjunkie · 2012-07-02 03:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?