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LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson
The wait is over: new submitter Roger W Moore (among many, many other submitters) writes "The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have just announced the discovery of a new particle which is consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. There is still a lot of work to do to confirm whether this really is the Higgs, and if so whether it is a Standard Model Higgs, but this is a major result."
Does somebody mind to explain why a particle that gives mass is... that heavy? (no pun intended, just my total ignorance. Intuitively I'd thought it'd be very light, since it's used to give mass to other particles)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
This is a weighty finding.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
I am glad they are being careful with their announcement and not jumping on it to claim 'I have found the Higgs Boson. Take that Tevatron!'
In the press conference, Dr. Higgs summed the findings up nicely: "This is an achievement in experimental methodology." To detect this signal has required a momentous effort, and the good people at CERN have had the good fortune of reaching results quicker than anticipated.
This isn't earth-shattering news or anything even unexpected, but it is still cause for celebration. Let us rejoice and then continue to push on towards new findings.
Here's a good introduction to the Higgs boson and why it matters.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
Phew.. that was close !!!
Glad to see we may not be a Type 13 planet after all...
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Obviously this is a grand conspiracy by the Europeans to distract us from what really matters today - blowing shit up! If they really wanted to celebrate the Fourth, they would have blown up CERN.
This just a few minutes old...
Live coverage of the announcement, courtesy of The Telegraph.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Got to be a CERN insider in for a quick $$$
I made it in the auditorium after queueing through half the night, but it was totally worth it. The atmosphere was collegeial and almost rapturous, one of sharing a feeling that we have as a whole community worked for so long to prove some mathematical construction of almost 50 years ago to be really realized in nature.
And let it now please NOT be a standard-model Higgs boson, but something a little more intriguing!
Now the "god particle" is proved everyone has to believe in Jesus
"Based on the Cern results alone there appears to be less than one chance in a million that this is fake, which is roughly the same probability as flipping a coin heads-up 21 times in a row."
That this is the day the 20th century ended, as the discovery of the boson attached to the Higg's field is the last major prediction of 20th century physics. The stuff of mass and gravity itself lies open to exploration.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w0tty/higgs_boson_confirmed_at_5sigma_standard/c599ijb
Actually, we observed a new state at 125 GeV and it seems consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. We have NOT discovered the SM Higgs boson because we simply haven't confirmed that this new particle is the SM Higgs because we're only looking at mass itself. It could be something else with a mass of 125 GeV. To actually claim it is the SM Higgs, we need to confirm that it has spin 0, the right coupling ratios, etc. And that's what I'm working on right now. But it is very exciting because we have discovered new physics. Source: Working at CMS
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
So, they might be mistaken. They've probably just detected me and got confused.
Now we just need to solve gravity, dark matter, dark energy, unify quantum chromodynamics with relativity, and a ton of other stuff.
Party's not over, folks. :)
I suspect dark matter will be easiest. Wouldn't be surprised at all if the LHC solves that one. All you need to see is what looks like a clear violation of conservation of energy/momentum at a consistant, high energy in your results, and you've got evidence that something heavy that interacts weakly or not at all with normal matter is flying off in the opposite direction. That something would probably be dark matter.
The others... that's probably going to be a long, hard slog.
Rock Us, Dukakis.
The mass of the Higgs boson is just the energy needed to make the Higgs field vibrate. The reason that the Higgs field gives particles mass is that, at its lowest energy level, the value of the Higgs field is not zero and this non-zero field then fills the universe and binds to particles giving them mass.
Hence the mass of each type of particle depends on the zero energy value (vacuum expectation value) of the Higgs field and how strongly the particle couples to it while the mass of the Higgs boson depends on how the energy density of the Higgs field changes as the strength of the field varies.
The legendary Higgs Boson is in my pants, and it feels great!
Scientists also report the particle is much smaller than expected
Already Apple have patented the new particle, on the basis that it gives the iPad mass so they must have invented it.
Let us remind that while the Higgs boson to some extent "explains" the mass of the heavy particle sector (quarks, thus protons and neutrons), the Higgs boson sheds no light on the mass of neutrinos, nor on the mass of the expected dark matter particles.
Also the particular value of the Higgs mass remains a natural constant escaping explanation.
It's also not a Hadron.
A paper from 2009 predicted the Higgs Boson Mass at 125.992 126 GeV using the Four Color Theorem.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.5189v1.pdf
IMPRESSIVE!!!
If we can't confirm it as a Higgs Boson, (1) we have many new toys to play with, investors, landlords, etc. are happy, science got done.
If we can however confirm, see (1) . What a great day.
This is more akin to predicting that, say, a particular town, on a particular planet, in a particular star system, looks like Paris - even though NOBODY human has ever been there before and we had no other information but some complicated (and mostly previously unobserved) science to help us.
And then going there and it turning out to be the case (or at least substantially correct if not a perfect Paris replica).
n/m
4.9 "SIGMA" BITCHES! hey ./, now that the second-largest methodologically driven task has been completed (to 4.9 sigma) ... can you get this crappy system here fixed (the first-largest methodologically driven task.)
Except for the supposedly FTL neutrinos, I wouldn't exactly call these things discoveries. "Creating" organs and cells and vaccines would qualify as inventions. You don't find these things in nature. The mapping of the human genome is best described not as a single discovery but as the foundation or springboard for discovery. From examining the information, a researcher might make a discovery about, say, the origin of certain genetic disorders. As it is, the data from the Human Genome Project is simply a data dump no different from the TB's that the CERN computer spit out (otherwise the discovery of the Higgs would have been mechanically announced months ago and not just now after careful vetting by physicists).
The field is everywhere, not just around us but also inside us. Everywhere and anywhere. Comparable to electromagnetic fields, except you can't shield them.
What holds the galaxy (-ies) together is something else, that's gravity. Also a field, extending to fill the universe.
The Higgs particle (or field, can't talk about one without thinking about the other) gives the universe mass (well, it's one of the things that do that) so perhaps some clever brainiacs might be able to think something up connecting the Higgs and gravity in such a way that it unites all the forces. That would be a garuanteed ticket to Stockholm and a place in history as the greatest discovery (or theory, if you like) since the discovery of fire itself.
The LHC found the higgs at 125GeV. It can go up to 7 TeV. There are many more discoveries that this massive machine will find.
"That's right...I said it."
Mac-Light: It won't get you fat, it is Higgs Boson free.
Don't take this the wrong way, consider me very excited to hear we've finally discovered the Higgs boson.
But honestly? I would have preferred we didn't find it. However deep we look, the universe appears to fit the standard model flawlessly, just a matter of adding more decimal places to our store of knowledge. So, we found it, the standard model prevails yet again - Where does that leave gravity and QCD? What do we look for now?
Or perhaps more to the point, does finding the Higgs, that everyone fully expected to find roughly where they found it, really answer anything? At the risk of sounding like I would ascribe some sense of agency to the question (I do not mean to - consider me an agnostic in the strictest epistemological sense), this just barely answers the "what"; Yet with billions of dollars and millions of man-hours and the highest tech known to Man, we haven't even come close to answering the "why". We have a handful of nice tidy self-contained islands that make up the fabric of the universe, with no better idea of why they exist or how they interact (in the mechanism sense, not the phenomenal sense) than we did a decade and many billions of dollars ago.
Ha, I see what you did there, you clever dikc
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Thanks, you're right that I didn't get the reference. In retrospect it is obvious...
In my defence I'd like to offer that on a regular day about 67% of my brain activity goes to suppressing the memory of JarJar "MeesaSuckSoBadly" Bincks.
Wow a critique of the patent system in a completely unrelated subject, how absolutely fucking original.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
That theory could _also_ say that the far-off land is the only land in that region when there are several other lands that are missed because we A) found the predicted far-off land and B) then assumed that the second prediction, that it was the only far-off land, was also true, and failed to look any further.
This is the mistake I fear CERN is going to make.
Light "bends" around stars because space-time itself is "bent" around the star by the star's gravitation. Light in free space (outside of transparent objects, etc) travels along a geodesic of space-time, which is (usually) the shortest way to get from one place to another. It would be difficult to say that a photon's relativistic mass is interacting with gravity because if that were the case then you would expect that photons of different energy would take different paths in a gravitational field, which they don't.
It is misleading to say that "Photons are massless in rest", because they can't exist at rest.
Dr. Sheldon Cooper will be happy to hear about this.
A Higgs Boson is a quantum of the Higgs Field which gives everything mass.
The Higgs Boson has a probable mass of around 126 GeV.
So what gives the Higgs Boson mass?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I've been trying to get a peek at Cindy Higgs' bosom since high school.
Have gnu, will travel.
For those of us that only took high school particle physics then got IT degrees (aka most of us) can someone post what a neutron, proton, and electron are actually made out of with this "standard model" and how the Higgs boson comes into play to give them mass? Oh and photons and neutrinos too since I think they have a tiny tiny tiny bit of mass so they must have a higgs boson inside them too or something but somehow express a different mass than "larger" particles. I dunno. Someone explain it, lol. I think that'd help explain this a lot better than some of the posts above which are still a bit over our heads.
I think we're so used to seeing the word Hadron now that the mispelling effect (whatever you call it) doesn't work on it anymore.
Well they found a new something, it walks like a higgs, it quacks like a higgs, but they have to look some more to see if it looks like a higgs; I'ts pretty improbable that its not a higgs, but they haven't met the burden of proof yet.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We're not talking about "describing", but "unifying" and "simplifying". We can describe mass and energy without the Higgs field.
Rock Us, Dukakis.
Or as Resonaance says, Physics Works, Bitches!!
you can in fact have "negative" gravity depending on your reference point its just like in electricity if you have electrons going away from a point you can have positive voltage (i may have this backwards).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
we did NOT get quantum mechanics from either special nor general relativity; in fact the first quantum mechanical equations were the non-relativistic form. Adding relativity to them gave us model for thing known as "spin"
This is the mistake I fear CERN is going to make.
All particle physics experiments have two aspects: they are designed with some very specific target in mind, and once that target is found or excluded they are then run for as long as humanly possible searching for new stuff, both by going to higher energies and making more precise measurements on things already known (different decay channels, etc.)
Sometimes--as in the case of the Kamiokande detector, which was originally aimed at proton decay--we repurpose the system for different particles entirely (solar neutrinos, say.)
So your "fear" is that the LHC teams will behave completely differently from every particle physics team ever anywhere. Good luck with that.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Just to put in perspective of what 5 sigma certainty means, it's like someone claiming a coin is loaded, so it will land on the same side every time, and then testing this by flipping it 20 times. Taking into account the chance that the coin was not loaded, as in you just by chance flipped the coin on the same side every time, you now have 5-sigma certainty that the coin is truly loaded as described.
Relativity (special relativity, that is) is pretty damn central to our understanding of quantum field theory
Which is why I read his "relativity" as "General Relativity". It may have been technically ambiguous to leave out the word "general", but there was only one reasonable interpretation of his statement, and pretending to be confused is very much a case of the Mathematician's Answer*--correct, uninformative, and useless.
Anyone who would potentially be confused by his "relativity" probably doesn't know enough about any form of relativity to actually be confused. :)
* warning: link leads to TVTropes, which may eat your brain.
Technically, it was known as the "Goddamn particle". Someone, unfortunately, dropped the "damn" part, and the whole "god particle" nonsense exploded from there.
(No, I'm not joking, though I may be oversimplifying a little.)
Therefore, the Higgs field, while not binding the universe together, is vital for gravity to do so.
Not really - most of the mass in matter comes from the binding energy of the quarks in protons and neutrons, less than 0.1% comes from the Higgs. Turning off the Higgs field (which would require enormous energies) would have very little impact on the total mass of objects.
I would presume the investors that are happy are the ones that invested money in the firms that supplied stuff for CERN to do the research with.
That's another, less immediate, set of investor-beneficiaries.
The E in E =mc^2 refers to the rest energy, which is indeed zero for a photon. There's also a component related to motion, and it can be shown from relativity that the total energy is given by E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4. For a photon of course, this means that E=pc.
Relativistic mass is a rather useless concept, since it doesn't behave as we'd intuitively think that mass would, and is in any case equivalent to the total energy mentioned above. Best to stick to rest mass, which has the useful feature of being independent of frame of reference.
Given e=mc^2, if we have the Higgs that gives things mass, could we theoretically manipulate it to turn matter into pure energy or vice versa?
10:56 Higgs says: "I'm glad it happened in my lifetime".
10:57 Boson says: "Me too".
Riddle me this - photons and the supposed gravitons have infinite range due to zero (rest) mass. Strong and weak forces, heavy bosons, short range, right? I'll accept a counter-example that shows how I can manipulate the strong or weak forces from a distance larger than a nucleus or thereabouts. Not just fire some other non-boson particle into there (which then is that close or closer). So how does the Higgs work over all of space, guys? This is ridiculous as the SM being right to N decimals, and relativity also being right to N (N being however many we can measure). Yet, the huge gaping, embarrassing, festering (yet almost always not spoken of) wound in all physics is that - they can't both be right, yet in their own domains, they are. C'mon, even politicians do better - and this is from one of your own, I'm a scientist. Relativity says - can't have a big bang, all that concentration of stuff would be a black hole instead. Are we inside one? Does anyone have a frigging clue, or are all we scientists just singing choir behind a preacher who hasn't a clue or a self-consistent model. I know what I'd like to think here, but....
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
One thing to beware of is the naive assumption that p=mv. That is true for objects with a rest mass, but for photons p=hbar*k, where hbar is the reduced Planck constant and k is the wave vector of the photon. Confusing this leads to incorrect conclusions.
Not a sentence!
640GeV should be enough for everyone.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
In 2012, it's 8 TeV by the way. Hopefully 14 TeV in 2014.
It's a little more complicated than looking at the total center-of-mass energy and saying we can discovery any particle up to the max. A single proton is made of multiple constituents, and a proton incoming with 3.5 TeV (or 4 or 7) of energy represents the total energy of that system. When two protons interact, it's actually two constituents which are interacting, and they will have some fraction of the proton's energy. So typically the probability of producing particles drops considerably as you look for more massive particles.
That said, the central sentiment of your message is correct. There is a lot of potential signals that remain to be investigated. There could even be particles found with considerably less mass than the Higgs, but which have an unusual decay signature which we haven't been sensitive to yet.
Quoting from the original post: "The premise is fairly crazy, but many things in physics are constructed that way... The difference here is that... previous 'crazy' ideas gave consequences that were clearly testable and attestable to the new nature of the theory, in an objective manner, and involved the behavior of inanimate objects (i.e., not humans). However, in this case, the consequences seem quite contrived... Exactly in line with their argument, I could say that Nature abhors the Chicago Cubs, such that the theory which describes the evolution of our universe prescribed Steve Bartman to interfere on October 14, 2003, extending the 'bad luck' of the Cubbies."
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/21/0159233/the-lhc-the-higgs-boson-and-the-chicago-cubs
So, this means yes and we should all head to Las Vegas to make a killing on what has to be a huge long-shot?
Or, does it mean that "nature" abhors the Cubs more??
If the Higgs field is "disturbingly like" the luminiferous aether theory, then so are electromagnetic fields. :p
Then LHC (the ring) along with HB can truly be the one ring that binds us and in the darkness finds us!
Oh no, here we go again...
come on fhqwhgads
For example, look at the binding energy of the electron in the atom. It is flat out proportional to the electron mass. A zero-mass electron could not be bound at all.
I understand exactly why you say this but there is one thing which you've forgotten about. If you have a zero mass electron then it is relativistic which means that you cannot use the Schrodinger equation which is what gives the energy vs. mass relationship you are quoting. Instead you have to use the Dirac equation to calculate the bound states. These will look different but they will exist. The quarks in a proton are in this situation. Their masses are a lot less than the energy of the field which binds them so they are relativistic.