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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.
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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.
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."
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.
It's also not a Hadron.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're not talking about "describing", but "unifying" and "simplifying". We can describe mass and energy without the Higgs field.
Rock Us, Dukakis.
Actually, no. Electricity is something from point A to point B. Gravity is an interaction between A and B. So you an't change the point of reference and get a negative result.
Gravity is really weird.
morcego
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.
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.)
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.
You mean the Hutchison Hoax?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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!
Bullshit. The so-called "Hutchison Effect" is a hoax, pure and utter fakery. Protip: anyone who claims to have discovered something weird, and then names it after themselves, is most likely a hoax.
And we have a very good idea of what causes gravity, or rather, what gravity _is_. Gravity is the tendency of spacetime to curve in the presence of objects with mass (and/or energy). This curving of spacetime causes other objects to travel not in straight (relative to our local Minkowski space) line paths, but in curves, when they are close to the first object (and vice versa). Since you can't see the external dimension that spacetime is embedded in where it curves (google "de Sitter-space" if you are interested), you see gravity as a force between massive objects.
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Protip: anyone who claims to have discovered something weird, and then names it after themselves, is most likely a hoax.
so what about this Higgs thing?
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!
Peter Higgs didn't name the mechanism. He only theorised about the family of "Lorentz-covariant field theories in which spontaneous breakdown of symmetry under an internal Lie group occurs".
(Yes, that's a direct quote from his second paper.)
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Given our present knowledge of the universe, gravity is just an experimental fact, like special relativity. What causes the speed of light to be finite? You can then invoke the (either strong or weak) anthropic principle, and say that if gravity wasn't there, you would not exist and could not ask the question.
On a more speculative note, it is possible that one day some ultimate theory of everything, unifying all physics in one theory, explains what causes gravity. It is not necessary for a theory of everything to explain what causes gravity, though, it just has to be a consistent theory of all the fundamental forces which matches all experimental results. Some have e.g. tried to explain gravity as a direct consequence of entropy, but this is widely disputed. In the end, no theory can be made without some experimental inputs in one end. One would of course like to have as few of these as possible, but it could well be that the fact that gravity exists has to be an experimental input.
However, the current theory we have of gravity is sufficient to explain all phenomena that can be experimentally observed on scales you and I can experiment with. Any experimental setup concerning phenomena on the scale of centimeters to kilometers that contradicts our current theory of gravity is pure hocum.
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