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Texas Scientists Regret Loss of Higgs Boson Quest
MarkWhittington writes "The probable discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is greeted as bittersweet news in Texas. Had the Superconducting Super Collider, at one time under construction in Waxahachie, Texas, not been cancelled by Congress in 1993 the Higgs Boson might have been confirmed a decade ago, some believe, and in America."
Mexico regrets the loss of Texas...
If it's Texas.... should have said "God Particle" in the proposal.
Eleventy billion dollar grant.
They are saying that their experimental results fit the predictions of the Standard Model Higgs boson, to a relatively high confidence level. This is the best that you can hope for from any scientific experiment.
Scientists are notoriously cautious when announcing a new discovery. They stil have to do some verification, but they found a 5 sigma bump that walks, talks, and farts like a Higgs, it's all over but the credits.
They should have recorded a song about discovering the Higgs Boson, then prepared to sue anyone who discovered it first.
(not really, but the nerd in me would pay 0.99 on iTunes to fund their Super Collider music)
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
They have a Sigma 5 confidence level which is equivalent to one chance in a million that they're mistaken.
This is science, not a pissing contest. Where something is discovered is meaningless.
... they would have patented it then sued everyone for having mass.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Well, I'm sorry to point this out, but you won't win any science awards by kicking critical thinking out of the classroom.
Just sayin'.
It will be a cold day in hell when the people of the US realize that those elected to congress actually need to KNOW their shit, rather than just talk it... Meaning that EVERYONE elected needs to prove they know what in the hell they are doing, technical and otherwise, rather just knowing how to talk the talking points...
Step 1: Discover Higgs Boson.
Step 2: Find a way to weaponise it.
We'll save the "bittersweet" nonsense until it's confirmed.
As others have pointed out, they have this very accurately as what was predicted. There's not a whole lot more to do to prove it is what they think it is, shy of building another giant supercolider looking for something else, and having it give the same result.
This is significantly different from the 'neutrinos are faster than light' problem, where neutrino's being faster than light didn't fit with any existing theory, and it didn't really seem to make sense as a physical result and was far more likely something else (which is also in many ways the reason they published a paper saying 'anyone have ideas cause something seems seriously wrong here'). In this case they have a particle predicted by theory, that, within the bounds of how good any physical experiment ever can be*, seems like they've found where they expected.
*physics theory is usually very much a single effect sort of thing. They predict a single particle with a particular speed/mass etc. Unfortunately physical experiment is never that good. There's always some inherent detector error, certain inherent randomness in systems, some other very minor effects that normally can be discounted but still do something to your results. The unfortunate part here is that the theory seems to so accurately predict the result that we don't have any clues to anything else that might be going on to chase after. If the result had been close, but not quite what was predicted that would have led the way to even more interesting science. As it is physicists now have to start poking at the problem to figure out if there's anywhere the theory does fall apart.
The schools aren't, the politicians are. Knowing the difference could save your life on day.
funding education, healthcare, science: that's evil socialism
Next you'll tell me funding bridges, roads, tunnels, railroad, etc. is good for the country
These are just feel goid schemes to funnel money away from rich folk and corporations, preventing them from creating jobsand growing a giant government that stifles growth
Nothing useful or capital creating will come out of this, just some socialist European egg heads making up theories without proof that destroys young people's faith in God ...welcome to America. Weep for us.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As long as it's found, then I don't care where they found it. Get over yourself Texas.
We still have a space program! Well, for the moment.
On the other hand, it leads the rest of the world by leaps and bounds with innovations in Litigation.
Oh, god, this is stupid.
Science is not a zero-sum game. Scientific discoveries enrich everybody, regardless of which country they're made in.
The SSC was way over budget. Better to pull the plug than to give various contractors a blank check.
American physicists are well represented at the LHC. Grad students are still being trained, etc. It's not like American experimental particle physics was dealt a fatal blow from which it can never recover by the cancellation of the SSC.
The actual fatal blow to accelerator-based experimental particle physics may be a world-wide one, due to (1) accelerator technology reaching the point of diminishing returns, and (2) a physics scenario in which the Higgs is detected but absolutely nothing else (such as supersymmetry) turns up. If this is how things turn out, then we'll just have to say that accelerator physics was a field that was active and then died. It happens. There's no god-given rule that says that every academic field will remain viable forever. Take a look at the Nobel prizes in physics from years like 1912 and 1920. The future of experimental particle physics may be in cosmic ray experiments, for example. If so, then the US Congress will look prescient for canceling the SSC.
Find free books.
Actually they said they found a mass of a possible new particle at one of many of the possible energy levels of the Higgs. It is very possible it is something entirely unrelated (there is no proof yet that it is even a Boson).
Is what the headlines should read. The reason why SSC was not completed is because Poppa Bush had chosen it based on POLITICAL reasons. Had the reason been up to scientists, then this would have been built in illinois by extending our original collider AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FINISHED.
The reason that I say so that:
1) it extended the current collider. As such, only part of it had to be built.
2) the ground was soft in Illinois and did not suffer from water issues like Texas did. Just building part of the tunnel in Texas was more expensive then doing all of it in Illinois.
3) Illinois was loaded with diggers and plenty of workers that were finishing up various projects in Chicago. They would have brought the diggers down there and finished it in no time flat. In texas, they brought in loads of illegals who had to be taught how to do simple construction techniques.
What Americans should be doing is screaming that we have suffered ENOUGH of the politics that permeates today. For example, the neo-cons (these are the ppl that have taken over the republican party and are the ones responsible for the above screw-up), are currently pushing for the Space Launch System to be built (ANOTHER 20 B to build a system that will not have its first SCHEDULED launch for another decade) and working hard to kill off private space. They are basically trying to destroy NASA and America's space assests. What is amazing is that they proclaim one thing, but do another. And their loyal followers have not notice that over the last 30 years, they have sunk America into being a mediocre nation with massive debt and destroying our science and R&D.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This might be a good place to mention that Democrats held both houses of congress and the white house. Whatever you may think about Texans, they didn't have anything to do with canceling the project.
:wq
They run billions of experiments. At that rate, you need higher confidence to be really certain.
And aside from that, it's very important to point out that what's been found is a "new particle". Whether it's the Higgs or not has yet to be confirmed.
May the Maths Be with you!
From what I heard, "think" means 99.999% certainty. and yes, they spelled out that it was ninety nine dot nine nine nine percent.
I realize that you're just a bigot who wants to make a kneejerk comment about Texas, so this comment is probably a waste of my time.
However, a couple of points: Texas actually does have some decent research institutions (The UT System, A&M, and Rice all have excellent science departments).
Secondly, the SSC would have attracted the best and brightest from all over the nation.
Our K-12 system does have some issues, especially with the dolts who approve textbooks in Austin. However, we do have a lot of smart kids and good school systems in some places that have produced some of the nation's top talent in the sciences.
I don't have a problem with atheism, especially since I am one myself. However, mindless bigotry and gross generalizations puts you in some of the same moral categories as the Christians go as far as being pragmatic about solving the world's problems. You're not pragmatic; you just want to whine and moan with your air of superiority.
It was still discovered, and this way I didn't have to subsidize it. WIN.
hmmm... an experiment must be falsifiable.
It's theories that must be falsifiable. Experiments should be repeatable.
The whole SSC project was amazingly corrupt. It was fortunate it was cancelled when it was, otherwise it would have completely ruined the reputations of all involved, although many would have deserved it. Sadly, no one ever dug deep and exposed what a fiasco it was.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
They have a Sigma 5 confidence level which is equivalent to one chance in a million that they're mistaken.
The way that I understand it, is that they have Sigma 5 confidence level that they found a new boson type particle. And that they have sigma 4.9 confidence level that it is the boson responsible for the Higgs field i.e. the Higgs Boson
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Forgive me thinking it's premature to jump to conclusions until the information has been vetted by a larger group of scientists
how much larger a group are you looking for beyond all of the high energy particle physicists in the EU and the US?
You mean like how they waited 6 months since http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1334.short? (title First Solid Signs of the Higgs Boson Could Be Announced Next Week).
They've been looking for stuff at the LHC since dec of 2009, and the whole point of the damn thing was to find the higgs boson. And they have been *very* tentative with every piece of data they've talked about since then.
Congress thought what?! sounds like the word "esoteric" was a bit too esoteric for TFA's proofreader...
The Texans wanted the free money. The loop to nowhere was pushed through by powerful Republicans in TX, and when the parties swapped, that pork was on the top of the list to go. Whether it was "good" or "bad" wasn't considered by either party when voting it in in the first place, or voting it out later. Just where it is and how much it costs. That's the same reason so few bases get closed. We could close 50% of our bases and not lose domestic military capability. But every time someone talks about closing a base, every congresscritter with a base in, or near, their district bands together and makes sure none are closed to guarantee theirs isn't on any closure list.
The *only* thing that will fix US politics is a revolution and Zombie Franklin writing a new Constitution "We hold there truths to be self evident, that all men are created BRAINZZZZZZZZ."
Learn to love Alaska
Okay... they've discovered a particle that confirms existing theories about the universe are actually correct. That's really cool, and it's not my intent to downplay that accomplishment.
But now what happens?
I mean, it's all well and good to know that it exists, but what can we actually *DO* with that knowledge?
What does the existence of the "God Particle" actually mean for the future science? Will it actually ever make any difference to anybody's future who isn't into theoretical physics?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Here we go...
Why don't you explain to us what you think "falsifiable" means?
I think we can make some very good predictions about you from that statement. Like, there may be some other reason that you don't want to see any confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson. In fact, from your seemingly neutral statement above, I can make a prediction about your political views and affiliations with a great deal of confidence. I can predict with a very high level of confidence your educational level.
You are what happens after a decades-long attack on science - actually a decades-long attack on all forms of expertise. Because once people are convinced that scientists are all liars with agendas and all experts are eggheads that you can't trust, then you can fill people's heads with all sorts of BS, because now their only reference for reality is what you tell them. It's how outlets like Fox News work. "Oh those scientists don't know anything and they're all lying" and, "Oh those professors don't know anything because they're all lying" and, "Oh, you know those Nobel Prizes don't mean anything because...Al Gore is fat." etc.
And yet, here you are telling us how you are "a fair judge of human nature" and how you "do understand how important this issue is to the physicists". I would predict, with a high level of confidence, that you are neither "a fair judge of human nature" nor do you understand what part of this issue is important to physicists.
Wait, what?
No, you're not. If you were skeptical, you wouldn't have already made up your mind. It's OK to question what you hear, what you read, but only if you question to the same extent your own biases - your own limitations. And questioning your self is not, "I may not be an expert, but dad-gummit, I know what I know...".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Had they not cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider, chances are high they would've also beat Aperture to the Supercolliding Super Button which history proved to be just a logical step away. Oh well. I'm not American anyway, my country didn't lose anything because it's never had anything to being with. Woohoo!
I've been following this and it sounded like they were going through a very long check list of possibilities. Trying one thing after another. And this whole thing about "we're getting close" was mostly that they were getting close to the end of the list of possibilities.
What I worry is that they didn't so much find it as they got to the end of the list and are concluding by process of elimination that that must be the Higgs.
The particles that they are looking for are not exactly something that can be placed on a podium to exhibit to everybody
It's something even more minute than an electron
I am a layman in this too, but the way I see it is that they are trying their best to check, re-check and triple-re-check the list and compare it to what the theory has stated
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
That's why they waited until they have 5 sigma confidence. They had 3 sigma last year.
Rethinking email
I don't think Texas has had any use for science since 1993 either.
Officially coming out against critical thinking was just the final reveal.
They have 5 sigma confidence that they found a particle, with the expected mass. They have quite a good confidence it decais to the right particles, except for one decaiment mode, that doesn't give much confidence, but is still at the expected band.
To confirm it is the Higgs boson they'll have to setle that decaiment modes down, and study the particle's interactions that, honestly, I have no idea how it is done.
Rethinking email
The USA is declining, we know, but the information was finally found. What difference does it make where it was found?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The same thing was found by 2 groups, studying the data of 2 different sets of colisions on 2 sensors by 2 completely defferent ways. The only thing they have in common is that they use the same machine to accelerate their hardrons.
What more confirmation are your expecting? Well, whatever it is, you won't get it because people won't just build another LHC.
Rethinking email
Because a deeper understanding of fundamental physics could _never_ lead to new discoveries and understanding in materials science. I mean, just because it always has in the past...
It's the school boards driven by ideological dogmatic sheep who don't give a rats fuck about children being educated, nor preparing those children to live in the real world and be able to compete in said real world when they become adults. That should be considered a form of child abuse.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
PopeRatzo probably has you nailed down quite well, there. If a little harshly put.
Your information on this is, quite frankly, bullshit. I am familiar with the workings of the ATLAS experiment, and have been present at numerous private lectures given by them giving updates on their data and possible conclusions.
Indeed, far from being the last possibility on the list, the figure of 125.3GeV is basically exactly what the standard model predicted. In fact, the result is so predictable it is almost boring. You say that physicist would be deeply embarased if they didn't find it, but actually many were hoping to find a less expected result than this. So far, the results have not helped us at all with understanding dark energy (though, it is early days, still) as many had hoped. Supersymmetry is looking less likely.
It is OK to be sceptical, but you seem to be basing your comments on nothing more than an uneducated hunch.
People get the government they deserve; they're not being punished by any outside force, if they really wanted the SSC they could have pushed their politicians to push for it, but obviously it wasn't an important item for the voters, so they didn't get it.
You talk like people are being "punished" by some outside force when their own leaders make poor decisions and screw them over. Sorry, but the people are responsible for themselves. Those "vocal nutjobs in a position of power" were elected by the people, it's not like they took those positions by force, so obviously those "nutjobs" are reflecting the true attitudes of a majority of the population. The people of Texas have no one to blame but themselves.
The best and brightest can go somewhere else, such as Switzerland where this great work is being done. Why stick around in a country where your work isn't appreciated?
"The *only* thing that will fix US politics is a revolution and Zombie Franklin writing a new Constitution "We hold there truths to be self evident, that all men are created BRAINZZZZZZZZ."
The only thing that will fix US politics is to detach it from "big money" interests. Money is the problem, and that is the answer.
Period. I don't give the slightest damn what particular brand of politics you may follow, but if the money isn't taken out of it (including outrageous government spending), then it will never be fixed until somebody nukes D.C.
Herman Wouk (of all people--he's better-known for "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Winds of War"--) wrote a reasonably amusing novel about the project, published in 2005, entitled "A Hole In Texas." I'm afraid I don't remember the plot twists--it's not a layman's crib sheet on either the physics or the history of the supercollider. If you enjoyed the atomic bomb background material in "War and Remembrance," it's that sort of thing... and as Abraham Lincoln probably didn't say, "People who like this sort of thing will find it just the sort of thing they like."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You realise it is not possible to be peer reviewed in the conventional sense? The peers would require a new LHC. As it is, we have just about the best peer review process already: two experiments working separately, on different data, different methodology, with the same accelerator and they have both produced the same result.
It was more like a range of possibilities where it could be hiding. The maths says it could be in a number of places.
All the other news articles previously were testing the ranges and ruling them out.
This result is that they were testing a range and found it at 125 GeV/c2.
If they tried at say 100 GeV/c2 they wouldn't find it so yes the experiment is testable..
>wider group
You don't even know what the fuck you're talking about when you say "wider group"
CERN is an international effort, with hundreds of scientists working together. It's a pretty wide group in itself.
You are, in fact, disparaging the entire effort because you deliberately refuse to educate yourself and insist on arguing from ignorance. You are basically saying that they are wasting everyone's time because you can't be arsed to go and read what's been written by hundreds of people around the globe about this.
This makes you an asshole.
--
BMO
That is not the gist of what you said in the comment PopeRatzo was replying to. You implied flawed methodology and even the possibility of a conspiracy. That is neither patient nor intellectually valid.
Fuck Yeah!
Sigma 5 is a good level of confidence. Its not jumping to conclusions.
It is plenty enough to make a announcement.
The duplication of results can occur afterwards.
If I told you that 1 + 1 = 2 with a verifiable 3 in 500,000 chance of being wrong, you probably wouldn't ask someone else what 1 + 1 equaled.
Possibly the clock won't start until they formally publish. It doesn't start until the wider scientific community gets a good look at the data
uh...
Not sure where to start with this. Other than the fact that we had presentation here, where I am (and I'm a computer scientist in canada) with raw data from the LHC back in January. Anyone who wants the data can get it if you are part of a collaborating institution. Which at this point is basically all the institutions that have high energy particle physicists.
There literally is no wider scientific community at this point except maybe china (and frankly, enough of their scientists are in US and European institutions it would be unrealistic to think they don't has the same information as anyone else). I don't know what 'broader scientific community' you think exists, but between Fermi Lab and the CERN you have basically all of the high energy particle physics researchers in the world. I used to be an optics guy, that's a much bigger field with a lot more people in the private sector, but there's no secret high energy particle accelerator in Japan that they'll just pull out of the air to verify this experiment. Fermi Lab and CERN are it, and they're in agreement with a reproduced result. that's why this is all over the news.
because people won't just build another LHC.
Well, CERN is broadly planning a Super Large Hadron Collider for 2019/2020 or thereabouts. he might have to wait until then.
"You realise it is not possible to be peer reviewed in the conventional sense? The peers would require a new LHC."
Not even close. Peer reviewers do not have to duplicate the experiments, they just have to verify that the analysis methodologies are correct, given that the data is accurate as presented.
Peer reviewers have no practical way to determine if the data is in fact correct, unless they see obvious flaws in the procedures. Therefore verifying the accuracy of the data is not a normal part of peer review. Their job is to catch blunders in the procedures as stated in the paper, and the analyses as stated in the paper.
However, finding flaws in the experimental or analytical procedures is very much the job of the reviewers. This has been the big stumbling block for "climate science": the researchers used -- and have continued to use -- highly questionable methods. Even if their DATA is all correct (which I very much doubt).
It's the school boards driven by ideological dogmatic sheep who don't give a rats fuck about children being educated
Well, actually, they do care about children being educated. It's simply that what they care to educate children in is different from what you mean by education. </sardonic>
disclaimer1: I live in Texas
disclaimer2: I'm on the Left-Libertarian side of things, so I pretty much don't so much fit in politically with the majority of my fellow Texans (or the majority of my fellow Americans, for that matter)
disclaimer3: I have taught mathematics in a classroom setting in Texas, my wife has worked as an aide, and I have closely observed the education system as a parent also. The education system as it is is so so broken, just like all of our society is.
The only thing that will fix US politics is to detach it from "big money" interests. Money is the problem, and that is the answer.
When we are in a communist country (whether we got there by all the companies buying the government or by the government nationalizing all the companies doesn't matter), and the money *is the government, what, other than a bloody revolution, will separate the money from the government?
it will never be fixed until somebody nukes D.C.
I say bloody revolution, you say nuke. Doesn't sound like you are correcting me, just suggesting a specific revolutionary method that's quick and may lower collateral damage, yet your tone seemed confrontational.
Learn to love Alaska
Texas' support for colleges has gone into the crapper too.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/higher-education/tuition-rising-fast-while-state-support-drops/
They are in a death spiral. Large percentage of min wage jobs isn't going to generate the revenue needed to support the education needed to move up the economic curve.
Don't feel bad - lots of states have that problem right now. It's going to take some serious priority setting to fix.
Not everywhere. Suburban schools in northern states compete well with anything in the world.
Yes, well, Texas politicians are in the hip pocket of bidness, not of the people of Texas. See Molly Ivins' work for some wry and humorous perspective on how things are here.
It sounds like they're saying they "think" they found it. Which is not the same thing.
We'll save the "bittersweet" nonsense until it's confirmed.
I watched both the symposium and the press conference online, real time. In the symposium the project lead was much more blunt. I forget the exact words, they were something like "I think we all agree it's fair to say we found it". The applause and cheering, likened to a football match, left no room for misinterpretation. In the press conference they were all very careful to stay well short of that. My layman's opinion: with two independent experiments both getting close enough to 5 sigma to call it that and with no observations contradicting Higgs, they found it, it's the Higgs. By the way, the first mention of "5 sigma" was by the CMS experiment lead Joe Incandela at 9:45 Geneva time. I did a time check. As far as I am concerned, that counts as the time at which the Higgs was officially "discovered". Fabiola Gianotti, the Atlas experiment lead, also said the 5 sigma word a little over an hour later. Many graphics of curves nicely centered at 125.something GeV were shown. I think CMS found 125.3 and Atlas, 125.5 GeV, something like that. Close enough for horseshoes. These two experiments were supposedly "blind" to each other in order to strengthen the case for independent discovery. It does strike me as a little convenient that they both hit exactly 5.0 sigma on nearly the same day. No doubt this has something to do with how the machine power ramped up and got stable, but still... I strongly suspect there is a bit of chivalrous "after you, please" going on. Higgs himself absolutely refused to take credit for anything and declined interviews, although he did record a great video probably the day before the event. Still very much part of the theoretical physics scene apparently.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
There are people out there who are pooh-poohing the Higgs Boson. "What can we do with it?" they ask, implying that we can't ever do anything with basic science almost sneeringly because they can't wrap their own tiny minds around why we do basic scientific research. They can't figure out why we try to discover why the Universe is the way it is.
James Clerk Maxwell unified electromagnetic theory in the 1860s. This was the basis for all modern electronics and radio, and had implications for special and general relativity. There were absolutely *zero* practical implications at the time. It took people a while to figure out what to do with his equations.
It wasn't until the 1920s that broadcast radio started to become common. This was a gap of 80 years, more or less. That does not even include the implications for the nuclear science and MRI and such. We are still using his equations and the math of those who followed, like Einstein, Szilard, Bose, Feynman, et alia, as the basis of new technology more than 140 years later. We probably won't figure out the full implications of the Higgs Boson in the next 200 years. So what if there are no immediate applications for the Higgs? Discovering how the universe works helped the "primitive" hunter-gatherer track his lunch, and it has helped modern man in more ways than can be described here.
But that's not enough for certain people. These are the people who decry the study of fruit fly genetics as a waste of time and money because they can't possibly ask someone why we do such research. They are politicians, wannabe politicians, media dunderheads, demagogues, and people who don't see advancement of basic science as the self-centered advancement of themselves. They are the Sarah Palins of the world. They are the ones who, if actually listened to, would put a halt to all basic science because, to them, it is "useless."
Because they think their 8'th grade (if that) misunderstanding of science and technology trumps that of people actually doing the hard work of basic science.
Fuck them with a rake.
--
BMO
this whole thing about "we're getting close" was mostly that they were getting close to the end of the list of possibilities
No, it is because they were ramping up the sigmas. They knew where the Higgs was months ago, and as I understand it, the Tevatron people also had a pretty good idea, based on data collected years ago.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Clinton kept our deficit low, and it was ingenious if he would have got a balanced budget amendment passed.
He spent 1/2 the money on this project getting it started then 1/4 closing it down, if he would have just spent 1/4 it would have been completed and bringing in physics jobs
God spoke to me
After all, Texas is home for creationists and arms dealers. Anything that smells like science and will not translate in creating bigger explosions is considered irrelevant.
Someone there would have patterned it and it would have been tied up in the court's for years!
We would end up having to pay the pattern holder if we were demonstrated to have mass.
With every virtually every federal election lies the possibility for massive changes. The fact that such important research was based solely on the availability of government funds shows exquisitely poor planning.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Do subatomic particles exist in the same way that atoms or a grain of sand exist? What if the Higgs and other subatomic particles exist only as the product of the LHC and other particle smashers.
Or put it this way: Imagine I have created, in my disgust at Apple's patent practices, the Gimongous Apple Smasher. (Apple fans can use my other invention, the Android+ Smasher.) Because of the way it's constructed, whenever I use the iSmasher, I wind up with five pieces of broken glass. Am I justified then in proclaiming that the iPhone screen consists of five pieces of glass cleverly joined together (subatomic particles) rather than a single sheet of glass (an atom)?
"I say bloody revolution, you say nuke. Doesn't sound like you are correcting me, just suggesting a specific revolutionary method that's quick and may lower collateral damage, yet your tone seemed confrontational."
That's right, I wasn't trying to correct you, so much as add my 2 cent's worth. And the nuke thing was only an example, not a suggestion or an implication that it's the only way.
Believe it or not, I still don't believe a "bloody revolution" is necessary to do that. But it will be close.
You are incorrect. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally at the end of World War 2. The terms demanded by the allied powers were laid out in the Potsdam Declaration and require an unconditional surrender. These terms were initially rejected by the Japanese. After the bombings, the Japanese agreed to them and surrendered unconditionally.
The emperor was removed from power, as the terms required, but continues in a purely ceremonial role.
The Tevatron in Illinois is capable of reaching 1 tera volts or 8 times as much energy the LHC needed to produce the Higgs.
Seems to me the LHC found it because they were able to pull the signal out of the background which was more a data analysis feat than a "let's smash protons together even harder than we have before" feat.
Then again, I'm not a physicist so perhaps I missed something.
One chance in three million :-)
Here is what Atlas found for the confidence level at various energies. The spike at 126.5 GeV breaks out to 5 sigma.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
they have sigma 4.9 confidence level that it is the boson responsible for the Higgs field
Not exactly. Both experiments reported 5.0 sigma confidence that they had found a new, scalar boson with mass of approximately126 GeV/c2. They did not claim it is the Higgs, but neither did they leave much doubt.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
There's not a whole lot more to do to prove it is what they think it is.
Way wrong. They have hardly even begun to analyze its properties.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I remember, back in the late 1980's and the early 1990's, the DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) region was so excited over the prospect of having to host the "Super Conductor Super Collider"
And then, the congress killed it
At the time they were saying that congress couldn't find enough $$$ to build such a thing
However, I think there's another reason - the Congress of the United States of America simply does not like Texas
Maybe I am wrong on this, but that's my hunch
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Estimating the mass and energy of particles is a very established science- I would be very surprised if all of the detectors aren't calibrated in real-time against well known particles identified in the same event.
love is just extroverted narcissism
>It has to be disseminated and then other scientists need to look over it all.
But the other scientists are at CERN already.
That's what you don't get. You think that CERN is a monolithic entity and not something like an academic institution.
>As to your insult, you make me sad
Tough. I've had enough of arguments from ignorance from people who think they matter.
--
BMO
So what can you, being an expert on climate science, statistical analysis, and data-gathering methodology, pinpoint as being "highly questionable methods" that are currently and incorrectly being used by climate scientists? And who might those climate scientists be? And exactly what data do you "very much doubt" is correct?
It's great that you have an opinion, but you can't validly state that climate scientists are using highly questionale methods and doubtful data without citing specific examples of flawed metholodigies, identifying the scientists and papers that use these methodologies, and giving examples of the suspect data, and expect to immediately be taken completely seriously. I eagerly await your repsonse with all of its citations and background research.
I think that bloody revolution is necessary. If the people don't draw first blood, the companies will when the changes happen. Either way, the blood will flow.
Learn to love Alaska
The Nobel Prize is a large trust left by the inventor of dynamite to perpetuate his legacy. The prizes are awarded each year by six Swedish scientists in secretive deliberations with no input from the scientific, academic, or political community at large. I have long abandoned the belief that the prize is in any way an accurate indication of the recipient's accomplishments.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
Way wrong
proving something exists is the problem at hand. Proving someone posted under the name Tough Love posted on slashdot in english is a different problem than trying to determine age, gender, location etc.
I'm in no way suggesting they know everything there is to know about this particle yet (although the LHC data will provide most of that in the same way it does for other particles so that's not a huge stretch), but at this point it's pretty settled that it exists consistent with predictions.
I'll listen to the hundreds of Ph.D's that have been dealing with this day in and day out, and knew beforehand to make sure they had a high confidence level before releasing the info. They had this stuff over 6 months ago, maybe longer; and vetted it, making sure it was sigma 5 before letting it loose. They did that because there are ass hats like yourself even in their own community. The fact that Stephen Hawking(a much greater mind than you) was confident enough in the results to say he lost a hundred dollars on betting they wouldn't find it, says a lot. So really, I'll take their word for it, since your "confidence level" means fuck-all.
GG luddite.
You have mass, therefore you owe a licence fee.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
First though, stereotyping is stupid and unfair. I could say that based on your bullying, calling the other guy an idiot, Fox News watcher, global warming denier, I could guess your political views.
Life is not as black and white as you make it out to be. For example I'm a Catholic, have conservative views, tend to agree more with Republicans, watch the O'Reilly Factor every once in a while and will vote for the Republican nominee this year. However in '08 I voted Democrat, studied nuclear physics in college, do believe that the Earth is warming, disagree with our reliance on foreign oil, drive a hybrid car and installed a geothermal heating system in our house. My best friend is gay, I'm not against abortion and my kids play with Asian and African-American kids. I also don't own any guns and there is evolution.
But let's get back to you calling the other guy uneducated. A simple search on wikipedia reveals that Catholics have been historically Democrats, and recently:
"Their party independence continued into 2000, and Catholics became the large religious grouping that most closely reflected the total electorate, ahead of mainline Protestants. 50% of Catholics voted for Al Gore versus 47% for George W. Bush in the very close 2000 election. 52% of Catholics voted for Bush's successful reelection compared to 47% for the Catholic John Kerry in 2004, versus 51% to 48% overall.[4] Barack Obama, who chose the Catholic Joe Biden as his running mate, received 54% of the Catholic vote in 2008 compared to John McCain's 45%, close to the overall 52% to 46%."
Most Jewish people are also Democrats, Republicans hardly get any votes from them.
But I won't do your research on all religions. You should do that, before you call the next guy an idiot.
Al Gore could lose a couple pounds, and if he really believes in the sea levels rising, he should not buy an ocean front mansion nor fly around on his private jet.
And just before I let you go, you should know that discovering Higgs boson will not put a dent in Creationism and there's nothing wrong with people having different beliefs. Religious freedom is what our great country was built on.
"I don't know if I'd say NOTHING. It's pretty fucking hot outside."
Where you live, maybe. We've just gone through one of the coldest Springs on record. The other was last year.
But that's beside the point. Gore sure as hell didn't show us any CAUSE. What he showed us were graphs without scales or indexes, or numbers of any kind... rhetoric, but not evidence.
We knew it was getting hotter, even without AGW. So "it's hot outside" isn't an argument in Gore's favor. If AGW ever does turn out to be true, he stands to make a freaking fortune with the cap-and-trade businesses he set up. And if that's not conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
On that, we definitely agree. They make some very good choices sometimes, in my opinion, but also the occasional blunder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
and you sound like a dirty socialist
THAT WAS A JOKE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let other countries do the hard work and then profit from their research results. Chin up, USA!
It's fundamentally unscientific to be so hasty.
It's fundamentally ignorant to say 99.99999 isn't pretty much certain. Or are you one of those people that refuse to believe anything that goes against your preconceived notions no matter what evidence exists.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Go watch the movie again. It is unusually hot where I live. You say it's unusually cold where you live. That is not contradictory to what he was saying in the movie. The theory is that climate change will manifest itself differently in different areas. I watched the movie and his message seemed completely plausible to me. If he's wrong, no big deal. We spend a lot of money on lots of dumb things. Spending a little extra to convert to carbon neutral energy sources that don't funnel money to our enemies doesn't seem all that bad to me. If you're wrong, we're fucked.
Joe Incandela distinctly said 5. Yes, he also said 4.9 earlier in his talk. When he said 5, that's when the applause broke out.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yes, politicians in Texas and the federal government are in the pocket of lobbyists, however the ultimate responsibility is with the people to elect people who represent them, not some corporations who give them bribes. For all our problems, one thing we don't appear to have is obviously rigged elections. Sure, there's been a few small irregularities here and there which may have cost an election when it was extremely close, but that's about it. If more than 50% of the electorate (or 49.9% of it in those other cases) is so dumb they'll elect corrupt politicians, then they don't really need to rig elections.
You can always control a conclusion if you control the premise.
Do you have any idea of what an "experiment" is? They made a prediction. They ran the experiment. The experiment met their prediction. Previous experiments did not. The experiment they ran isn't that new in terms of methodology. They've run variations of it over the last several decades: Small atoms together; see what is created. What is new is better detectors/detector methods/computers so that they can sift through the massive truckloads of data that is recorded in a miniscule of a second.
If I told you to just trust me because I'm really sure you wouldn't take that as a fact would you.
No one asked them to trust them. They gave their preliminary results. Nerds everywhere cheered. They will release more details later.
I'm not being unreasonable here. I just think it's a bad idea to jump to any conclusions until people have had more time to go over the data.
You are being rather unreasonable in how you express things.
The level of certainty is THEIR estimation of certainty. If you're wrong but think you're right then you're going to say you are very certain. If you made a mistake but didn't realize it then that isn't going to factor into your calculations.
If you can find a mistake in their calculations, go right ahead. I suspect that you can't so why are you even attempting to say they made a mistake.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've been following this and it sounded like they were going through a very long check list of possibilities. Trying one thing after another. And this whole thing about "we're getting close" was mostly that they were getting close to the end of the list of possibilities.
No, that's not it at all.
The properties of the Higgs are well known from theory, if it exists. Very roughly, the experiment was searching for evidence that a particle that exhibits those properties exists, with the major complication that its mass is unknown.
The "getting close" has nothing to do with any sort of process of elimination, but with observing enough events to have statistically sound evidence that such a particle was observed. This is tricky, because the Higgs cannot be detected. Instead, you have to work back from detections of decay products that may be several generations removed from the Higgs decay. Higgs creations are rare, even when you have the energy to make it possible, so it requires trillions of events to make the search sensitive to the presence or absence of the particle.
What they've found so far came from a search that was sensitive to a few of the particular ways a Higgs will decay, and they've found that a particle that decays in the same way that a Higgs would, with a mass of about 126 GeV, has been found with high significance. The reason for the hedging about whether it's the Higgs is that they've not yet tested all the properties known for the Higgs. So they've found a new particle, and it behaves as the Higgs would behave, but there are more properties to be tested.
Incidentally, at this point, the discovery turning out to be a standard model Higgs boson is the least interesting possibility available (barring this whole business turning out to be an outright error, I suppose). According to a report I read earlier today, there may have been some evidence that the particle was behaving slightly different from the simplest expectation, so I guess there's some hope that the particle physicists aren't obsolete quite yet.
There is no "Nobel Prize," mind you, there are a litany of Prizes in various fields of endeavor. The peace prize is obviously associated with political intrigue and making statements (such as Obama's, which was basically Europe very publicly giving Bush one last middle finger).
Now, had Al been awarded a Chemistry or Physics prize, I'd start believing that the whole process is bullshit.
"Who the hell knows. Given the fact that you can't get your hands on the original datasets without the right secret handshake or whatever it is that climate scientists use to identify each other they could be doing just about anything,"
Let me Google that for you.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
By the way, remember the Berkeley statistician who was a skeptic about global warming and the methodologies by the climatologists? He got their raw data and processed it in what he believed was the right way. The answer came out the same as the mainstream climate community said. They aren't lying, or faking.
Again, I completely disagree. At some point, people are elected who are in charge of things. Someone has to appoint those appointees, and there have to be elected people in the mix who have the power to change things, including the constitution. Sure, there may not be the possibility for immediate change (like in states such as California with its recall elections), but the opportunity does come around now and then. Every republican form of government has mechanisms built in to prevent "mob rule" from taking over and government being too beholden to short-term whims of the voters, by having a long feedback loop; just look at the federal government's Electoral College and the way Senators were chosen before the 17th Amendment. Yes, it sounds like Texas's system is worse than many. But if the people really want change, and don't forget about this and get distracted when the next election rolls around, they can effect change at the ballot box. If they don't, they only have themselves to blame, not people dead for 150 years.
If they're saying to just trust them, why did I sit through a two hour conference talk last night where leaders from two different experiments explained exactly what their procedures for running, calibrating and analyzing data from the LHC in half a dozen channels each were, including multiple tests against other known values/constants?
The council of concern trolls seem to be really, very, seriously, awfully concerned about the Higgs discovery...
There is falsifiability, but guess what, it came up positive. Now they are just trying to verify that no mistakes were made, and it fits the predicted parameters of the Higgs.
Michael Kristopeit, is that you?
Wrong, wrong. ATLAS and CMS are using different equipment and people, both have observed the Higgs in the same place. And it's not like the scientists all want to see the same result: everybody has their own pet theory (supersymmetry and such) which imply different results about the Higgs. There is just no way there was a conspiracy, the incentives aren't there.
FACTS:
1:CO2 induces the greenhouse effect, TEST THIS YOURSELF.
-->here is the wikipedia article on the greenhouse effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
-->and here are the youtube links showing HOW to do an experiment showing CO2 induces the greenhouse effect
repeat them
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge0jhYDcazY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeYfl45X1wo
2:Humans emit a LOT of CO2 (oil or coal + O2 + ... = energy + CO2 + soot + ...)
1+2 = default position is AGW, you need to provide proof of NOT-AGW
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
With regard to Texas, consider Gunny Sergeant Hartman.
Were the Higgs discovered in Texas, Perry would want its secession from the Standard Model.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
Seriously, what is this post. Russia could have won the “space race”, hell Europe could have won the space race with enough funding. We could end would poverty with enough funding. Could have, might have, if only. Yawn, move on.
The butthurt runs deep in this one!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The Standard Model doesn't "put" the Higgs anywhere because the Higgs mass is an input parameter to the theory. And all the theorists I talk to about this sort of thing would love to know how you've concluded that SUSY is confirmed, since they're lamenting the absence of anything that would fit or require supersymmetry, at the same time current results rule out a larger and larger fraction of possible theories/parameters for Susy models.
In conclusion I'm, going to venture that you may possibly not know what you're talking about.
"I don't know if I'd say NOTHING. It's pretty fucking hot outside."
Where you live, maybe. We've just gone through one of the coldest Springs on record. The other was last year.
Arguing that climate science is wrong because of weather is like arguing that the theory of gravity is wrong because your helium balloon goes up. Stupid.
But that's beside the point. Gore sure as hell didn't show us any CAUSE. What he showed us were graphs without scales or indexes, or numbers of any kind... rhetoric, but not evidence.
Yes, and Nelson Mandela should never have gotten the Peace Prize either. I mean, his work against Apartheid was sorely lacking in citations and his party program wasn't even accepted by any major peer-reviewed journal!
We knew it was getting hotter, even without AGW. So "it's hot outside" isn't an argument in Gore's favor. If AGW ever does turn out to be true, he stands to make a freaking fortune with the cap-and-trade businesses he set up. And if that's not conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
The whole POINT of the Nobel Peace Prize is to help a good thing become a bigger thing. Both by granting it visibility on the global stage and a little bit of dough, it's supposed to help it out. Gore does not operate a "cap and trade" business; that's government policy, not a business model. He does oversee some green investment funds, though.
Which kind of makes sense if you seem to be one of few people with deep pockets who realize what impact this will have on the profitability of different things.
toresbe
Electron has been discovered. Its pretty cool.
But I can't fathom whats the use.
Remember, particle physics discoveries usually take decades, if not centuries to result in something usable.
Look at Quantum theory viz quantum computers.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
The precise quote was not "I think we all agree it's fair to say we found it" as I wrote above, but: "as a layman, I would now say I think we have it. Do you agree?" (applause) -- Rolf Heuer, Director of Cern.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I've been following this and it sounded like they were going through a very long check list of possibilities. Trying one thing after another. And this whole thing about "we're getting close" was mostly that they were getting close to the end of the list of possibilities.
Not really, the standard model predicted what was found. however "finding it" involves using statistical analysis on an enormous number of individual experiments. Think of it like a very long time exposure of an extremely faint astronomical object, the longer the exposure the better the clarity of what you have "found". If you have two independent "time exposures" you can combine them for even greater clarity, which is basically what has been done here, two different experiments using different technology and techniques have come up with the same "picture" predicted by the standard model.
It would be deeply embarrassing if after all this they make a break through.
If that's what you think then you really need to listen to some actual scientists talking about their work, and there's no better starting point than a youtube search for Feynman interviews, but don't stop there have a listen to Sagan, EO Wilson, and the rest, even Alan Alda is worth listening to, not for his views on the higgs but for the way he approaches scientists in his interviews.
You will discern a side of human nature in these people, but it's a side that is rarely seen in the political/corporate world, ( the best name I can come up with is "self-skepticisim"). You see, no matter who predicted what, all physicists have "won" because the Higgs has moved from "best theory" to "scientific fact" but it will never reach a point of absolute certainty because physicists will never stop thinking of new ways to test their models.
I'm obviously a layman and my opinion on these matters isn't worth much.
The value of your opinion is not limited by your layman status, it's limited by your lack of undersatnding of how to judge the strength of the scientific evidence.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Jane be honest, you have not watched the movie, nor have you even skimmed the reports they were based on, have you?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's the particle that gives mass, it's been weaponized ever since sticks and stones..
FRA: STFU GTFO
He seems to be managing it quite well.
A reasonable way of coping with a trolling cocksmoker who deliberately misunderstands science is to stop arguing with him. BMO sounds like he has very good anger management.
Grind up a nation's education system and divert the science budget into tax cuts, and see what you end up with. The United States will have trouble competing with North Korea soon.
But at least schoolchildren won't be offended by hearing about evolution, and college students will just have to become indentured servants to pay off their debt. Who needs a functioning public education system anyway?
CMS measured multiple channels of decay. If I remember correctly, the 5 sigma combined the data from the most prominent channels, but it dropped below the 5 sigma threshold for the complete dataset.
HAHA!
scientists lament, an AC goes fucking bananas, news at 11
China's HEP institutes also are in both Atlas and CMS. These are global collaborations and anyone with a significant research interest would likely have joined one or the other by now.
The world is much, much bigger than the USA alone... Also, in regard to TFA, well, the world is big and science is not really a competition.
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
First they discovered timetravelling at LHC
http://news.softpedia.com/news/LHC-Could-Allow-Matter-to-Travel-Through-Time-189936.shtml
Rewrite history!
You are providing a textbook example of concern trolling, whether by intention or not.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I know you're just being funny, but this is /. so I'll press the pedantic button. Benjamin Franklin actually had very little to do with the creation of the Constitution. Although he was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, by that time Franklin was getting up in years and was rather frail, and generally let the younger delegates battle it out. The few times that Franklin did speak at some length, he would either ramble about something that didn't really concern the topic at hand, or he would suggest solutions that weren't very well thought-out. However, the other delegates respected him immensely, and so they let him speak without interruption.
The more likely undead to rewrite the Constitution would be either Zombie James Madison or Zombie Charles Pickney. Zombie Madison, when not thinking about brainzzzz, would likely take away some of the powers of the national government that he was so adamant to give during the Convention. Madison began to change his views after seeing the Federalist policies of Alexander Hamilton and President John Adams.
You're wrong: it is established to be a boson, because it has been observed to decay to 2 photons. (because of spin) You're wrong again: it cannot be something entirely different. Except for the mass, we knew exactly how it would be produced and decay. So, keeping only the mass as unknown, we went and search in those billions of collisions for very peculiar signatures, matching what we expected it to look like after decay. And guess what, we managed to find it exactly there, the decays kind-of matching with our expectation, across several channels and in two independent experiments. If you here a physicist say "we have to understand better the nature of the particle", it means we have to understand if it is the standard model Higgs boson, or something very much related, with properties slightly different because of new physics at higher enerrgy levels we don't know about yet. With what we have seen, noone in the field doubts about that we were and are on the right track. Btw, we also almost certainly established it's a scalar (the only fundamental scalar we know), and not a spin-2 particle, because of what we see in the WW decay mode.
We have two independent experiments, with different techologies, different people, even a different culture.
We were getting close because we had seen hints last year, which needed confirmation with more data. That's how it goes with a statistics.
It is false to say we just got to the end of the list. It was always clear that if the particle was there, we would first rule it out in all other mass ranges, before we would be able to establish it at its current mass. Again, that is how it works with statistics: we talk of exclusion when 5% chance remains we missed it; we talk of discovery only when we are really really damn totally sure statistics is not fooling us.
It is also false that it was a process of elimination. There was a perfectly viable option of not finding anything at all. It would have been a PR catastrophy, but a scientific breakthrough as well.
And if you're skeptical about statistics: quantum mechanics is all about probabilities, so live with it. Your phone works because of it.
Not so much we have ass-hats in our community (well, we do, of course ;-)), but more that if we fuck up, like happened recently with the FTL neutrinos (not a CERN experiment), it might mean the end of the field, and the end of all of our academic and scientific careers. Going public with this is a big thing. Therefore our internal peer review is extremely intense: hundreds of people trying to shoot down observations from all sides. And what remains is rock solid. Science at its best.
What I worry is that they didn't so much find it as they got to the end of the list and are concluding by process of elimination that that must be the Higgs.
This is where you show that you're absolutely clueless about science and the scientific method.
The Scientific Method:
1) Observation
2) Theory
3) Prediction
4) Experiment
Memorize it. Write it on your shower wall. Repeat it every morning. If something doesn't do all of those steps it isn't science. (3) and (4) are the most important (and they're what most pseudoscience skips...)
The physicists at CERN made a prediction about the Higgs Boson. What they're doing now is step (4). They don't have a wishy-washy list of possibilities, they have a definite prediction, made at step (3) before they started building the machine.
Sorry for ranting but your post sums up everything that's wrong with modern education and where it's failing.
Look at the pictures and think. Do you really, honestly believe that people who are capable of designing that fit the Fox news image of "scientist"?
No sig today...
PopeRatzo...a red rag to the remaining Catholics who actually take the Pope seriously. I know one of them and all I can say is, don't mention the Hitlerjugend, he goes ape. (For the record, my personal view is that the Catholic Church is a great institution which has been repeatedly let down by its management. In which it joins a number of banks, and many countries. As someone who believes that Hans Kung is a truly great theologian, I have nothing but contempt for Ratzinger. But giving yourself the nick of "PopeRatzo" is provocative, just as that Irish blogger who called himself Guido Fawkes while anonymously attacking the British government was being provocative. (I mention him just to make the point that Catholics can be tasteless too.. nihil humani a me alienum puto).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Had the Superconducting Super Collider, at one time under construction in Waxahachie, Texas, not been cancelled by Congress AND BILL CLINTON as one of his first attacks on the U.S.in 1993 .
corrections, corrections....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No, I said such things are possible.
You seem to be comparing the scientists at CERN with the guys who build perpetual motion machines in their garage (in between converting cars to run on water and lighting up light bulbs with spinning magnets).
These are the brightest minds in the world. They work out in the open and they're being closely observed and criticized by thousands of other bright minds since the 1980s (when the machine was first discussed).
You claim to be some sort of judge of human character. I can promise you you're not. You're just Yet Another Armchair Conspiracy Theorist.
No sig today...
Plenty of Nobel winners turned out to be crackpots who used the "Nobel prize winner!" title to push their crackpot theories later in life, yes.
OTOH even crackpots can do good science sometimes and usually the work which wins the prize is worthwhile/important.
No sig today...
I simply have a problem with concluding things quickly.
Human auditing systems are not that fast. So if you decide this fast it wasn't audited.
I want it audited before I give it credence.
Maybe the machine was designed to give a very clear yes/no answer so the "auditing" process you're looking for happened before they even switched it on.
No sig today...
Which Nobel Prize are you talking about? They are all different. Only the money that funds them is the same.
I think you're referring to the Peace Prize, which was my original point. Saying a Nobel in economics is worthless because you don't like a recipient of Nobel Peace prize is like saying "I don't like football because I hate Babe Ruth".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I believe the 87km circumference tunnel at the Superconducing Super Collider still exists. The land above it has been built upon since, according to Wikipedia. However, the tunnel is the most capital intensive investment in a collider project, so perhaps in the distant future there could well be a Texas collider producing new physics. In contrast to the 27km circumference Large Hadron Collider, which provided evidence for the Higgs yesterday, the 87km ring would allow even higher energies to be obtained, and, along with it, hopefully some new particles (e.g. those predicted by superstring theory and other ToEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything)). As a citizen of the physics community and the world, here's hoping.
Al Gore's Nobel Prize doesn't mean anything because Al Gore's Nobel Prize doesn't mean anything.
Well, that's a permeating syllogism you've come up with...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Did this story start with the words: Texas Scientists? Ok, too easy, sorry Houston.
The Literature Prize winner is decided by the Swedish Academy, and the Peace Prize winner is decided by a bunch of Norwegian politicians.
They have a Sigma 5 confidence level which is equivalent to one chance in a million that they're mistaken.
Can somebody please confirm/explain if the above quote is a correct interpretation and if so how.
Normally i would assume that the scientists use some kind of frequentist reasoning:
Assume a H0. In this case the H0 would be no new particle.
Run tons of tests and calculate how probable the results are under the H0.
If the results are under a certain alpha level they throw away the H0 and assume the non H0 (ie. H1) as the new H0.
Then calculate a confidence interval and report this.
Is this, in principle what happened? :)
If so, then "one chance in a million that they're mistaken" is just plain wrong because the only probability/chance calculated was under the assumption that there is no new particle in which case there would be no new particle
*Translates as "good speech 16th". If you happen to be Jewish or Muslim, YMMV.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
First they mod you, then they say don't feed the trolls, then you win! All you have to remember is one year Al Gore was warning people about a 20m sea-level rise, the next year he bought a condo with a front door 3 ft above sea-level..
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Which "they", the peace prize committee is a very different animal.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The collider funding may have passed USA Congress if it had been named the "USS Ronald Reagan" super-collider, that is how the military industrial complex gets these spending appropriations passed. Then they have some part manufactured in several states, to keep jobs for key legislators. The collider folks could have won an additional 25 votes that way, which may not have been enough. But the key problem was that you cannot intimidate anyone with the collider. Aircraft carriers are a gift that keeps on giving.
Gently reply
There is no raw data anymore, it's all adjusted, it's such a travesty; they don't even know for sure how the data are adjusted to prduce their product.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
He showed the results of scientific studies. Of course he didn't show you 'science'.
" If AGW ever does turn out to be true"
It has turned out to be true. IN the field of study, it is NOT controversial. In fact, it's so solid the heartland institute has turned to intentional attacking the classroom.
Al Gore isn't a climatologist, he isn't an expert, and if it was smart enough to put himself in position to make money from scientific facts, then so what?
You are just using a verbose ad hom attack. No different then idiots who called the theory of evolution 'Darwinism'
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In short:
Someone got one and I didn't like it, so now I hate them!
I hear the argument from pretty much every 11 year old.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, sometime the crack pottery comes later in their life.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and?
20 m rise in a 100 years doesn't mean a condo at sea level today is bad.
Not that Al Gore attacks have any bearing on the science.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh, well politicians chastised the scientist, clearly there's a problem and not a political move to come up with something.
So, they where chastised? bottom line, there data and interpretation was fine. It was a media created circus, nothing more.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It wasn't a fuck up.
They had unexpected result.
The ran the tests thousands of times
They said, this really should be right, but if it is it is huge.
They showed there data and experiments to the scientific community
Someone found a=n error..no that wasn't it.
Someone found another error, ah, there's the reason.
No fuck up, just science.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Another incorrect attack on Bill Clinton.. you haters are so sad.
in 1993, Clinton tried to prevent the cancellation by asking Congress to continue "to support this important and challenging effort" through completion because "abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science"
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-1993-book1/pdf/PPP-1993-book1-doc-pg864.pdf
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes and no.
There was a lot of "that's how science works". Good.
However, I advise you to read: http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/neutrinos/neutrinos-faster-than-light/opera-what-went-wrong/
People resigned. That shouldn't happen if it's just science at works. Also, the dynamics in the authorlist of the Opera articles in question are interesting from the sociological point of view.
Another bad thing in my opinion was the CERN involvement, which I still don't understand. This was not a CERN experiment, nevertheless CERN chose to profusely communicate on the issue.
And, a scientific fuck up or not, that's how it will remain to be perceived by the outside...
Congress killed it with a veto proof majority. While I think a president shoud veto something they don't think is right even ehen it has a veto proof majority, few presidents do as it is a waste of time. The best they can do is make a public statement, sign it and move on.
This applies to any president Clinton, Bush, Reagan, doesn't matter.
, in 1993, Clinton tried to prevent the cancellation by asking Congress to continue "to support this important and challenging effort" through completion because "abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science"
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PPP-1993-book1/pdf/PPP-1993-book1-doc-pg864.pdf
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
3, the trevatron had basically the same results to 2.9 sigma.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
But no. Congress fancies other types of bang.
If they, and many other governments, would spend more money on research instead of war...
Privacy is terrorism.
They spent billions now we know as much as they do.....Win-Win
Holy shit.
They still didn't, because they still don't know what they want in a new accelerator. They'll need to gather more results from the LHC, create and test more theories, then they'll have new gaps to fill that may, or may not (but probably the former) demand a new accelerator.
But they are already constructing a new accelerator anyway. It's only that they use the same structure that holds the current LHC.
Rethinking email
"Which 'they', the peace prize committee is a very different animal."
From the context of my comment, I think it is pretty clear that by "they", I meant those who decide who gets the Nobel Prize. No matter who "they" are.
"... such as Obama's, which was basically Europe very publicly giving Bush one last middle finger."
I agree. This reinforces my point. It was done for political purposes, and Obama actually did not do anything to deserve a prize... it was awarded largely in response to someone else entirely.
I'm not saying that is exactly the case with Gore, but I don't think he deserved it, either.
"Not that Al Gore attacks have any bearing on the science."
Nor that his movie had much to do with it, either.
Nobody has published, that was a press-release, it will take a while to get a publishable paper submitted for review.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"Go watch the movie again. It is unusually hot where I live. You say it's unusually cold where you live. That is not contradictory to what he was saying in the movie. "
Do you have reading comprehension issues? What do you think "that's beside the point" means?
"Arguing that climate science is wrong because of weather is like arguing that the theory of gravity is wrong because your helium balloon goes up. Stupid."
And I'll say the same thing to you that I did to that other person: I stated this myself. Or else what do you think "that's beside the point" means?
Dumbass.
Yes, I did in fact watch the movie, very closely. I saw it when it first came out and I was very displeased with it.
For example: A giant chart comparing temperature proxies against CO2 concentrations from ice cores, showing a high correlation. But no labels or indices, or even a casual mention that one of the two lines had been shifted somewhere between 300 to 800 years to the left! Even assuming the correlation is correct, if you don't tell people you have massaged the data in some way, you are "lying with statistics".
Hell yes, I saw the movie. And I walked out of the theater when it ended, disgusted.
It was at a movie mini-marathon, along with a couple of other environoment-themed movies like "Who Killed The Electric Car?" An Inconvenient Truth was the last one.
"We'll" know for sure? Are you planning to analyze the data, or even read the paper? Do you have the background to understand it? I'm betting that's a double "no". Here's a clue: just because YOU don't understand something, that doesn't mean no one else understands it. The lack of mathematical certainty does not equal "Well, they aren't 100% sure about it, so my half-assed guess is just as valid as their 'theory' or report of results"
"It has turned out to be true. IN the field of study, it is NOT controversial. In fact, it's so solid the heartland institute has turned to intentional attacking the classroom."
Nonsense on both counts.
It has NOT been shown to be true. In fact the evidence has been increasingly been building against it. For one thing, almost all versions of the CO2-warming model rely on the concept of "back radiation", which physicists (not climate scientists) have proved to be impossible.
I'm happy to leave actual climate science to climate scientists. But when THEIR models rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, I'll take the physicists' word for it, thank you very much.
As for the Heartland thing, there is very solid evidence that the document was forged. We have no evidence that it was actually among the papers the journalist received, we only have his word -- and nobody else's, or any other evidence -- that the source of the document was actually the Heartland Institute. To summarize: there *IS* strong evidence that it was a forgery. There is *NO* evidence that it is not. Only one man's word.
Al Gore isn't a climatologist, he isn't an expert, and if it was smart enough to put himself in position to make money from scientific facts, then so what?
My problem with it -- as I have already stated -- was that his movie purported to be representing "science" but he used misleading, unlabeled graphs and similar persuasive devices in order to alarm people. That's not "science reporting", that's propaganda.
I did not use "Stupid" as a noun to address you, I used the word as an adjective to describe the line of reasoning. Clearly.
"That's beside the point" means "it is not relevant to the argument I'm making", which is not the same as "That is irrelevant to global warming".
toresbe
"But when THEIR models rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, I'll take the physicists' word for it, thank you very much."
Just to clarify:
First, it was the statisticians (and the investigators who later examined the science) saying that the statistical analyses the climate scientists used were shaky at best. ("The statistical methods used do not support their conclusions." was the summary of one report), and now it's physicists saying that they've got the physics wrong.
That's a very far cry from "NOT controversial".
Be happy about it. Otherwise...
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
"Since idiots question the methods, the methods are by definition questionable. However, those questions did not invalidate the results.
You, my dear girl, are an ignoramus of the first order."
PROFESSIONALS have questioned them... including, as I pointed out elsewhere, the investigators who investigated the science. If you want to call them idiots, then you can't very well celebrate the investigators' conclusions of "no criminality", can you? You can't have it both ways.
And you call ME an "idiot". Haha.
They have been accused of using more-than-questionable statistical methods by professional, well-respected statisticians.
They have been accused of getting the physics of their models wrong by professional, well-respected physicists.
"You, my dear girl, are an ignoramus of the first order."
And you, sir, are apparently a sufferer of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. I've done my homework on this subject. You have not.
"I did not use "Stupid" as a noun to address you, I used the word as an adjective to describe the line of reasoning. Clearly."
It wasn't clear at all. And you didn't even follow the actual line of reasoning, so that's a silly argument.
"That's beside the point" means "it is not relevant to the argument I'm making", which is not the same as "That is irrelevant to global warming".
Let's take it in context, shall we?
We've just gone through one of the coldest Springs on record. The other was last year.
But that's beside the point.
I fail to see any ambiguity there.
"So, they where chastised? bottom line, there data and interpretation was fine. It was a media created circus, nothing more."
Not so, at all.
The comment about the statistics was not made by politicians, it was made by a professional statistician, who was investigating the statistical methods they used. His paper was peer-reviewed by six other professional and well-respected statisticians, who found no flaw in it.
The ONE investigative report, that was conducted by "politicians" (British House of Commmons) was not DONE BY politicians. They hired investigators to do the job. They reported the investigators' findings. It's pretty hard to say politics was involved, since in fact it would have been in the House of Commons' best interest to play down anything negative.
You know, modding somebody as "troll" when they're simply reporting easily verifiable facts reflects pretty badly on the modder.
Again, modding somebody as "troll" when they're simply reporting easily verifiable facts reflects pretty badly on the modder.
The conclusions of these reports are easily and publicly available, to anybody who bothers to go find them.
So how do you justify a "troll" mod?
*Implying that school boards aren't staffed by politicians.
*Implying the controversial proposals aren't introduced at the state level.
You've got it subtly wrong: It's not that "by process of elimination that must be the Higgs". Rather, it's a matter of "We expect the Higgs to be in one of these places" (or, rather, be within this mass range), and then exhaustively looking at all those places for it. In one of those places, they found an unknown particle. By Occam's Razor, it being the Higgs is a more reasonable assumption than it being some other particle that's in the same mass range as the Higgs, but we hadn't actually predicted. Also, from what I gather (I have a few physicist friends, including a guy that was until recently working in CERN), the particle they found is pretty "boring", in that it behaves pretty much as it ought to, no weird stuff. So that also helps towards the conclusion that it must indeed be the Higgs.
Ha ha ha! Just wait til they detect an even smaller particle, and so on.
Will that be the NEW and IMPROVED "God" particle? Or the Protestant "God" particle?
Humans are so full of themselves. It's just a smaller particle. There will be many more.
Just because we can't detect something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Mankind's science is severely limited. It will take a much greater intelligence than he has
to discover the tiniest particles of matter.
Well you can't look at a vote without looking at the alternatives on the table. It wasn't so simple as "pro science if and only if pro SSC." There were at least two other debates going on here: "big science vs. small science" and "pure vs. applied." There were a lot of scientists who were against the SSC because they thought it was sucking away funding from many worthy small projects of individual researchers and small teams.
At the time of the cancellation, there was a sharp partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats over the funding of applied science, precipitated by radical changes in funding requests by Reagan and George HW Bush. The Reagan administration was strongly against any public funding of applied research unless it had military applications.
This led to a sharp difference in funding priorities between Republicans and Democrats. In the you-say-potato world of Washington politics, this made the SSC a political issue. It was easy for Republicans to get behind the SSC because it was a matter of national prestige and it didn't violate their funding ideology. The Democratic attitude towards the SSC was initially more apathetic than antipathetic; Republican support for the SSC made it easier for them to reason that we didn't really need it that much.
Even so, it wasn't quite the kind of sharp partisan divide we're familiar with today. Many Republicans were unenthusiastic about the project, and Democrats were pretty close to evenly split. Clinton was a supporters, although not a strong one. I don't think that the SSC funding issue of pro-science vs. anti-science, but a more complex one involving fiscal conservatism and ideologies about government spending.
These days we've moved on, and science controversies have become much more divided along partisan lines (climate change research, support for "creation science"). Iindividual lawmakers are voting more party-line than they used to.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
some extremist non-americans might say it doesn't really matter where it was found, as long as it was
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
No, it's not: I mentioned exactly how much the SSC would cost each citizen, had it been completed -- $40. The argument is that that $40 would have been a good investment for the country, for the reasons outlined, had it been made in 1993.
I certainly can't change your mind
yes you can, show me hard abservable facts and a theory showing why the above doesn't work on a global scale.
there is no way you can convince me
ah ...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
President Clinton cancelled the SCSC about five minutes after he assumed the presidency in Jan 1993. He was punishing the state of Texas for voting Republican in the 1992 election.
Synchronizing stop lights across the US = one less nuclear power plant
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You are full of shit Jane, and we both know it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Ordinarily I don't reply to ACs, but this one's too good to pass up:
I find it laughable to listen to someone trivialize CERN, and the EU's investment in it, as an economic waste on the world wide web. Where do you think this wonderful tool came from, the sky? Don't you think that invention of the web alone added more to the economies of the investing EU nations than all the money they invested in CERN?
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