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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson?
PhunkySchtuff writes "OK, so we're all hearing the news that they've found the Higgs boson. What are some of the more practical implications that are likely to come out of this discovery? I realize it's hard to predict this stuff — who would have thought that shining a bright light on a rod of ruby crystal would have lead to digital music on CDs and being able to measure the distance to the moon to an accuracy of centimeters? If the Higgs boson is the particle that gives other particles mass, would our being able to manipulate the Higgs lead to being able to do things with mass such as we can do with electromagnetism? Will we be able to shield or block the Higgs from interacting with other particles, leading to a reduction in mass (and therefore weight?) Are there other things that this discovery will lead to in the short to medium term?"
We will find a way to blow stuff up with it. It's humanity's specialty, after all.
Will we be able to shield or block the Higgs from interacting with other particles, leading to a reduction in mass (and therefore weight?)
EOM
There will be an immediate and nearly catastrophic increase in the amount of bad science, pseudo-science and technobabble-based science fiction in popular media.
It could be years before the world recovers from this.
1)The Higgs diet. Eat whatever you want, you'll always weigh as much as you want!
2)A freakin' suitcase that no matter what I'm putting in, it will always weigh less than 20kg, 'cause FUCK YOU AIRPORTS AND YOUR EXTRA FEES.
Comic Sans in particular can be expected to become more popular.
We will be able to develop a new physics engine for Angry Birds.
Honestly. The hype on this Higgs-Boson quest is reaching nauseating levels. It's cool, but what of it? Will it give us world peace? Will it deliver flying cars? What about donuts? Doesn't anyone think about donuts anymore?!?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't think anything changes except that the model they've discovered years ago is in fact real.
To manipulate it's properties would would be something like LHC.
Plus, one you return it the higher state of symmetry, how do you generate a field to prevent symmetry from breaking?
returning it to symmetry would mean the particle becomes zero mass. If it's zero mass would it even interact with other particle in the way needed to hold 'large' objects together?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
now that its been discovered, all textbooks will have to be re-written and sold to students.
Sudden, otherwise inexplicable increase in popularity of "Higgs" as a baby name.
God help us!
Invenio via vel creo
They were confused by a Led Zeppelin mp3. Besides, too much digital music can lead to deaf leopards.
It validates the Higgs mechanism, which explains why elementary particles have mass. Now the Higgs boson is no longer considered hypothetical, likewise the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs field, mediated by the Higgs bosun. Speaking as a layman.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Someone already beat me to these but s/he was an anonymous coward so s/he doesn't count.
I listed phasers first cuz they're cooler.
I would suspect if all that happened here is that the expected model was confirmed, that lots of research under the premise of the expected model being accurate would have already occurred/be taking place currently. I would think confirmation might just make it easier to get funding to do more. That said, I was itching to burn my mod points on anybody who responded with a non-joke answer. Ah well.
Of what use is a newborn child?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Full disclosure: I'm a physicist with some high energy/field theory in my background; but I stopped doing anything with high energy theory twenty years ago. Maybe someone who works in the field will disagree with me. And also, some of what I'm saying here I said on /. nine years ago, when someone asked what the practical implications were of experiments that were shedding light on the quark-gluon plasma, because my answer is close to the same.
With that said . . .I can't imagine any short (or even medium) term practical application. In fact, I can't even imagine practical value in the long term. Mind, it's certainly possible that down the road someone cleverer than I am will come up with something. In fact, that's the normal way in which major technological advances have occurred. For instance, Schottky wasn't trying to invent the transistor when he started studying the quantum behavior of transition metals. Michael Faraday didn't really see any public benefit to understanding electromagnetism, either. It's always worked like this: pure research has historically been without such obvious benefit.
But nevertheless, I don't want to suggest that that's the eventual result here, because I don't believe it will be. I think that would be disingenuous of me. I highly doubt that an improved understanding of Higgs physics will ever produce any wonderful and amazing technological advance. To me, the motivation is simply that understanding and knowledge -- especially of something like how the Universe got to be the way it is, and why it works the way it does -- is inherently a good thing. It has value by definition. Perhaps my least favorite thing about our society is that we are trained to evaluate the worth of things in terms of their economic value. Just like love, understanding has its own value, in my mind -- bereft of any "practical" value.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star. Only elements as heavy as carbon or lighter can be formed in the early universe (and, for that matter, the amounts of Li, Be, B and C formed in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis are very very small); for heavier elements, and for larger amounts of carbon etc., you need a star. Now, if you didn't already know this, stop and think about it for a second. A huge chunk of you, perhaps all of you, was inside a star at one time. It appears that you and I are star debris. And it gets even better. The way that large amounts of these elements, forged within a star, can get out of the star is if the star supernovas -- dies at the end of its lifetime with a big boom. That big boom also serves to make very heavy elements -- such as uranium, for instance -- that cannot be made even in a star while it's burning away. There's uranium, and other similar very heavy elements, on our planet. Do you see what I'm getting at? Much of the atoms that make all of us up, that make this planet up, were at one time inside a star (or stars) that lived its life, supernovaed, and spewed out debris. Eventually, maybe a few hundred million years later, that stuff is part of our planet, part of our atmosphere, our water, part of you and me. We are all brothers and sisters; we all came from the same place, sorta.
Now, that knowledge will never make me any money. It will never have any practical benefit in my life. And yet, I consider myself immensely richer for knowing it.
Understanding has its own value.
http://chainsawsuit.com/2012/07/04/a-matter-of-grave-con-cern/
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Notwithstanding the chatter about non-zero rest mass being related to the Higgs mechanism, an undermentioned fact is that 99% of the mass of all ordinary matter comes from strong force binding energy in protons and neutrons. E.g., look at the mass section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark
Twiddling with rest masses of quarks only twiddles with about 11/938ths = about 1% of the rest mass of nucleons. Some of the bias to neglecting this statistic is surely to help elevate in the popular mind the significance of results from the expensive LHC and standard model verification. Naturally, truly massless quarks and/or leptons would lead to major revisions of the standard model and all that. Still, it's just a bit disingenous to keep referring to the Higgs as the origin of "mass" with a bunch of celebrity analogies and whatnot. In the popular mind, mass is more akin to the effective mass of matter at rest (or in slow motion relative to the speed of light), and for that trait it is really strong force binding energy rather than Higgs interactions that creates almost all of it. Such poor analogies lead to weird comments like the original snippet above.
I get my Hoverboard that's been long overdue!
Don't forget your self-tying, inflatable Nikes!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Or just in time?
Just two and a half more years.
Personally I would love to have some Higgs sprinkles, for a more weighty donut that fills me up too.
Have you considered Lard Lad? He's the Bottom Line in Donuts!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
. . . from a book by Physicist Leonard Mlodinow:
Sure, the physics behind the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator in Switzerland, is a monument to the human mind. But so are the scale and complexity of the organization that build it -- one LHC experiment alone required more that 2,500 scientists, engineers, and technicians in 37 countries to work together, solving problems cooperatively in an ever-changing and complex environment. The ability to form organizations that can create such achievements is as impressive at the achievements themselves.
-- From his book "Subilminal"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm not down playing the significance of the potential assassination of Arafat, but this is one of the biggest scientific discoveries in the past 40 years. A few days coverage is not that crazy. It would be weird to not cover it. As for "what of it?", understanding what sort of universe we live in can have a very powerful effects. For example, understanding that the Earth orbits the sun or that creatures evolve or that space and time are not absolute fundamentally changed how a lot of people see themselves, religion, and their relationship to society. Those discoveries have really shaken up humanity. Does this discovery do that? No, probably not, but it may lead to some other discoveries that might do that. For example, in presentations on Higgs results I've attended, it has been suggested that if the mass of the Higgs is 125 GeV instead of 124 or 126 GeV, the vacuum may be unstable. Let me spell that out a little more clearly, space may be unstable. That's kind of a big deal.
Whoa, we are stardust?
So like Every atom in your body
Came from a star that exploded
You are all star dust
From a star that exploded
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Now, that knowledge will never make me any money. It will never have any practical benefit in my life. And yet, I consider myself immensely richer for knowing it.
Understanding has its own value.
Science based Spirituality?
I LIKE it! A spirituality that has facts to support it.
Thermodynamics began in 1650, but the first air conditioner wasn't invented until 1820.
Maxwell's work on electrodynamics was published in 1861, but radio wasn't invented until 30 years later.
Quantum mechanics was first formulated in modern form in the 1920's, but the integrated circuit wasn't built until 1956.
Today, Higgs is a scientific curiosity, and a validation of the Standard Model. While I suspect it will take longer than 20 years for practical applications of Higgs to emerge, the science and engineering required to build the accelerator are already leading to breakthroughs in material science, computation, and engineering today. Today's accelerator is tomorrow's medical proton beam to cure cancer. And maybe, just maybe, the grandkids will get warp drive out of it.
Or, we could go bomb some more brown people and give more tax cuts to billionaires. Which seems like a better long-term investment?
Is there some reason you're insisting on being Mister Crankypants Rain-on-my-parade guy? Did you not have your coffee yet today? Or did you forget to take your meds this morning? Got turned down and laughed at by that girl you were interested in so you're taking it out on everyone else?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
A Nobel award is given to at most 3 people. But in modern times theoretical research is not something that a single person does in their basement .. so there are 6 people (actually one is deceased - so isn't eligible because of that) who could make a claim for the glory. See higgs-boson-nobel-prize-headache for a better run down on all of this.
Interestingly Higgs wasn't the first to publish on this subject. And I heard yesterday on NPR from a former student of Higgs who suggested he wanted to call it the "God Damned Particle" - but it seems that the name went all PC.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Thanks for posting.
which would subtract mass, allowing for negative mass and thus faster-than-light travel. Someone write sci-fi around that, sounds sweet.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but I do know that the speed-of-light limit is mass-related. Massless particles move at the speed of light, particles with mass move at up to the speed of light.
Could it not be true that particles with negative mass move above lightspeed? I know tachyons are at least theorized, although I'm not sure if they're supposed to have negative mass or if they have some other relativistic loophole.
Now, assuming the above is true, couldn't the manipulation of the Higgs field result in negative mass? We obviously have no method, right now, of doing so, but wouldn't that at least be plausible?
We can't even directly detect the thing; we have to infer its existence from the decay of other particles. I'd say it will be a while before we use it to blow shit up.
It appears that you and I are star debris.
Speak for yourself. I'm big bang debris.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'm not by any means a particle physicist - but doesn't this deal a blow to some other theories? Like wasn't supersymmetry an alternate explanation for mass in the event that the Higgs field wasn't the right mechanism? ie, confirming the Higgs field eliminates the "problem" supersymmetry was designed to solve? I thought I also read that maybe some aspects of string theory are also affected similarly... Maybe someone here much smarter than I can explain it to us in layman's terms :)
The research team will be in the running for a Nobel prize, and of course they would generate large numbers of published articles that will enhance their work metrics and keep them in "most favor researcher" status with their research institute. Not to mention, the additional travel to conferences and an increased amount of celebrity for the principle scientists.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Not necessarily fall as in need revision, but we know this already. The basic matter/force particles have been known for a while, except Gravity. We couldn't find any particle that linked us to mass, the search for the Higgs was just that, a search for an explanation for mass.
However, we know just based on observing the heavens (where all science truly begins), that it doesn't end at gravity . There are clearly forces out there that we didn't predict with our current models, namely dark matter/dark energy. It is currently theorized that dark matter is a manifestation (of fields/particles) that we currently do not have in the "Standard" model. The Standard model was doomed as soon as we discovered that galaxies are accelerating away from each other.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
He's given a few, but the longest one, he shows a page full of equations, with terms expanded, and says something like "this is how the forces relate" then admits to cheating because there is one wildcard on the page: H. And now we know that sheet he showed us is indeed correct.
This will sure up the model, but we are still left asking how does gravity work? With this identified as the mechanism, we can devise some experiments and learn more about G, which has the most awesome applications of all.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Finding Higgs boson (or proving it's predicted existence) may not yield any practical implication. However, having many thousand of the brightest and smartest engineers and scientists working close together, and collaborating on singe (or multiple) endeavors like this (and similar others) surely brings many practical things to life. Say, for example, World Wide Web, which, coincidently was "discovered" precisely in CERN, so that you and me can today read and write in more casual manner then using old-fashioned telnet (vt100 emulated), or using ftp or gopher, and whatnot. Even technology used in building CERN's fine detectors is engineering marvel, pieces made just for that task, so surely many innovative approaches were used. In that sense, Higgs boson is the goal, but much more important, in my opinion is how to reach that goal. Along that path there are many other, much more practicable discoveries. Whether or not we'll some day be able to carry around gadgets capable of producing few TeV of energy (as finding Higgs with 125 GeV necessitates having an order of magnitude or more source energy) who knows. So far the only such "gadget" is in CERN, uses exorbitant amount of electricity, radiates all around profusely when turned on, etc. But hey, as one said, if "laser" was first cumbersome, but now it's everywhere, the who knows...
Pffft, I eat big bang debris for breakfest.
http://stoploudness.org/
They didn't actually announce that they found the Higgs boson. Rolf Heuer said "... we have a discovery... [that is] consistent with a Higgs boson." [emphasis mine]
Now, I'm not trying to nitpick. There is a subtle but very real difference. They did not announce 5+ sigma evidence that they found the Higgs. What they announced that they have 5-sigma evidence that they found a particle. Which, so far, seems to be consistent with the Higgs.
While they are pretty sure it looks like a Higgs, what they announced was the discovery of a particle. It remains to be seen whether it is the Higgs boson or not. It looks probable, because the mass and longevity are consistent with predicted values for the Higgs.
BUT... they haven't seen any of the other properties yet. Until they do, they won't know whether it's the Higgs.
But just keep in mind: that's NOT what they said. What they found was "a particle" We'll have to know more before we decide for sure whether it's the Higgs. It appears very probable, but we must make the distinction.
Faster first, then light travel!
Society had to pay for this research. And it may be a good thing and have value as a purely intellectual pursuit (value is not the same as money). But society's resources are finite. It has to make choices on how to use those resources. The wise thing to do is to use those resources on things that have greater value.
Or to put it another way: is this the best use of talented minds and piles of money? Couldn't the same have been used on other branches of physics with greater result? Areas equally profound, esoteric, and with of little immediate benefit, but several areas instead of just one?
Now expand the uses to other fields of science. Or solutions to more immediate problems that, if not solved, may make any long term benefit of understanding the Higgs particle irrelevant?
Gotta think of value. Gotta compare it. Gotta make decisions.
Bah! In my day we had mass, and we liked it! Get off my lawn you kids, with your two-pound bikes!
Proverbs 21:19
The thing with practical implications is.... the theory has been around for a while. If there was any practical implication of the higgs boson existing then there would be an easier way to test... you simply do whatever it is that the theory predicts, yet other theories don't. If it works, then you have a data point validating the theory and an extra nail in the coffin of others. If it fails, then you have the opposite.
The problem here is that there are no practical implications, to the point that, the only way to devise a test involved miles of underground tunnel and huge, expensive, very precise equipment....and it doesn't get much less practical than that.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/plotsummary
They made an inertia free passenger type vehicle. This stuff always reminds me of that :)
In a related story, creativity and productivity at CERN goes down by 200%.
Seriously, though, it would seem like in theory, fun things such as the actual mass related stuff in Mass Effect (but not crazy stuff like biotics) may finally be on the horizon.
Fun, and potentially scary, times ahead.
Have they really confirmed it's existence? Or are they still dancing around pretending to know what they're looking for?
IMHO when you start off with a flawed premise and write one thing after another trying to shore it up, and spend billions in an attempt to "prove" it, I would (hope) that the "proof" is as compelling as the theory!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Amazing, as soon as we discover something new about our universe, there, we have this irresistible urge to go and mess with it, even if we understand nothing at all about it.
Would it be possible to just hold on for a minute and see if the "use" of this new knowledge might be less obvious, less appropriated by our perennial self-serving attitude?
Something entirely new presents to us, and we respond in the same way as the neolithic man. Or a monkey. Duh.
From reading the 'popular science' explanations the Higgs field and Higgs Boson is what gives everything else mass. So if we can find a way of turning off' the interaction with the Higgs Field we suddenly remove all mass, inertia, weight etc. There are doubtless guys out there much smarter than I am who will be able to tell why this won't work, but if it does then it's our big stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and ultimately the stars.
That particle really ties the room together, man.
Nicely said. But it troubles me, If most of what makes me up was created in the heart of a star. Why does it feel like I'm burning up when it's 103' F outside? You'd think I'd be freezing my genitals off.
Thanks for the reply though. I think it's the best bit of truthful science we've heard in a while.
DS
In the long term, understanding the universe has always paid off. In the meantime, neglecting any long-term payoff, you can consider the $7.5b of the LHC at worse a neutral waste of money.
Take a look at what we spend on wars.
Take a look at what we spend preparing for wars.
Take a look at what we spend bulking up, hoping to scare the other guy out of wars.
Take a look at what we spend on drugs, medicating ourselves because we find reality too boring. (For those not enthralled by LHC, space travel, etc.)
Take a look at what we spend trying to keep the aforementioned people from buying drugs, because it offends our moral sensibilities.
The list could go on forever, most of these things quite negative...
and you want to pick on science and understanding the Universe as a waste?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Not everything moves at lightspeed.
This is a good post, and expresses valid concerns.
As far as the best use of talented minds, I think the best use of a talented mind is generally not to tell them what problem to work on, but rather to let them decide for themselves. If you take a smart person, and give them a problem to work on that they have no interest in or love for, and you order them to do something brilliant and creative . . .generally, they won't.
Money, OTOH, is another matter. You're absolutely right that resources are finite, and that sometimes we have to make tough decisions. That's very pertinent to this discussion, because we made such a decision almost twenty years ago when we decided not to build the SSC, which would likely have answered all the questions the LHC can a long time ago, and other stuff too. But we decided we couldn't afford it; and maybe that was the right decision. All I can really say in response is that we absolutely should ask the kind of questions you're asking, and we do; and sometimes the folks in control of the money say "yea" and sometimes "nay," and rarely does everyone agree. Any one of us can think that a funding decision or decisions should have played out differently (for or against a line of research); but the mechanism for asking those questions and using the answers to motivate the funding decisions does exist.
I heard they're turning it into a zombie theme park.
We are all brothers and sisters; we all came from the same place, sorta.
Now, that knowledge will never make me any money. It will never have any practical benefit in my life. And yet, I consider myself immensely richer for knowing it.
Sure it will. Start a hokey religion based on that knowledge, and you'll have more money than you know what to do with.
I think the central problem is actually that I'm a certified idiot and I don't even understand what "mass" is. Look at the photon it is supposed to have no mass cause if it did its energy would be infinite.
Yet the photon convinently still has "momentum" so its not mass but it sure behaves like something that does anyway.
My understanding is if you bottled up a bazillion photons and put the bottle on a scale and weighted it ... it would also be heavier and experience/exert the same gravitiational influence as matter thanks to E=MC^2.
So I'm confused as to how it is even possible to define "mass" in a way that does not also fit all the measurable properties of a photon.
Then we have neutrinos which change as they propogate so of course they must have mass yet nobody has ever been able to detect any difference in velocity between neutrinos and photons..including those ejected from infamous 1987 supermova having raced photons for 168k years.
While I'm sure the math works to make predictions I'm not so confident about the translation to english.
After reading headlines and wikipedia articles I'm no closer to understanding what the fuck higgs means that E=MC^2 already does not say.
If there is no coupling between photons and the higgs then photons have no mass... and the difference between having "mass" and not having "mass" is what?
... for ages.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Higgs Boson?
Why longer firework shows of course!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Notice that the duration of each period that you have cited above grows increasingly short. These durations do not appear to be consistent with any obvious mathematical description, but Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns implies that we might very well see benefits from research on Higgs' phenomena within our (natural, non-extended) lifetimes.
Actually elements up to iron can be made in a star. Elements heavier than iron can only be created in a supernova. This is because a star can fuse lighter elements into heavier ones, up to iron. Iron cannot be fused into heavier elements without energy, lighter elements when fused release energy, and so keep the star going. But once the star has started to make iron, it starts to loose energy while gaining mass. Eventually the energy output cannot keep up with the force of gravity from the increasing mass in the star's core and then the star 'implodes'. This is one form of a supernova.
You never spoke to Helmut Bakaitis?
Maybe we'll discover a way of creating three-dimensional objects that have zero mass.
...and that are zooming away from you at the speed of light.
Because someone will have filed patents on any ideas based on it and nobody will do R&D as a result.
Slashdot editors get to put up a half-dozen front-page "articles" on it in an attempt to increase page views.
Come on, guys. There are already tons of posts on the Higgs in the Science section. And that thing about Texas was so blindingly obvious that it's just there for page views it is insulting to your readership. There's no need to post yet another post, this time a stupid question in Ask Slashdot, just because it's got the word "Higgs" in it.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Applications for mass/gravity manipulation are possible some speculate. But not necessarily due to Higgs.
Cosmologist Marcus Chown says of the "Quantum Vacuum Intertia Hypothesis" work of Calphysics.org: (From http://calphysics.org/articles/chown2007.html)
"Haisch is perfectly prepared to believe that the rest mass of a particle - its mass-energy - is "explained" by the Higgs mechanism and that the rest mass is intrinsic to the particle. However, Haisch believes that the inertial mass and gravitational mass of a particle are not explained by the Higgs mechanism and are not intrinsic. If they are not intrinsic then there is only one other option. They must be "extrinsic". "In other words, they must somehow arise from the interaction between a particle and the environment through which it moves," says Haisch. "That environment can only be the 'quantum vacuum'."
This might explain why the Higgs mass is small. Haisch's theory suggests a mechanism similar to the Higgs effect, but relies on Zero Point Field Quantum Fluctuations instead of The Higgs Boson, and the Electromagnetic Quantum Vacuum instead of the Higgs field. But their work also tantalizingly suggests that Gravity appears to be the same phenomenon, but behaving differently in the presence of warped space-time.
So if mass (inertial, gravitational, and rest), is a function of either Quantum fluctuations or Higgs bosons, then it might be possible to manipulate not only mass, but also gravity.
By Clarke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God), humanity will now be retired and replaced with a different experiment.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
You sound like the guy that invented moving big rocks by rolling them on top of tree trucks, he was against further investments in fundamental science that later led to the invention of the wheel.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Why the "Ob Faraday" title? The comment is from Ben Franklin. He was observing one of the first balloon flights by the Montgolfier Bros in France, and replied to the question 'What good is it?' from another observer.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I grok your jive, me hearty.
... will be a device that makes the girls' locker room walls invisible!
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
It explodes... People call that decayment.
Rethinking email
Not withstanding anything else - I like and appreciate your use of the word "Boson", as opposed to "boson".
we don't care if you were conceived at an orgy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No. Lead is a noun, and you should not eat it or club people to death with it. Hmm? Oh, you mean you correctly interpreted the proper meaning of the word, even with a small typo, too? I see; you're pointing out a typo that every single Slashdot reader that read the summary also saw, to be an asshole. Gotcha.
Led the way, good sir, us shall followed you.
What will we see? Manipulation of gravity on an unprecedented scale: Cities as a whole will lift off into space!
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Not only the above, but the atoms that make up your left hand probably came from a different star to those that make up your right.
as said by Lawrence Krauss
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Which would be awesome if Kurzweil's law wasn't crap.
seriously, he only applies it to specific domains, young domains, never older domain that have gone past their intial accelerated development period.
It's also nice to see he doesn't understand evolution~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually elements up to iron can be made in a star. Elements heavier than iron can only be created in a supernova. This is because a star can fuse lighter elements into heavier ones, up to iron. Iron cannot be fused into heavier elements without energy, lighter elements when fused release energy, and so keep the star going. But once the star has started to make iron, it starts to loose energy while gaining mass. Eventually the energy output cannot keep up with the force of gravity from the increasing mass in the star's core and then the star 'implodes'. This is one form of a supernova.
Right. That's why, in the post to which you replied, I wrote "That big boom also serves to make very heavy elements -- such as uranium, for instance -- that cannot be made even in a star while it's burning away."
If they have only fractions of the mass of conventional buildings, then how are they massive in the first place?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I cheated on a physics exam once. There was a question about radiation pressure - a 5mW laser is reflected off a perfect mirror, what's the pressure exerted on the mirror. Now I missed the lecture on radiation pressure where they talked all about electromagnetic stuff and derived an equation for this. So I computed the mass equivalent of 5mJ of energy and then the impulse it would produce from bouncing off the mirror with a deltaV of 2C. Impulse/Time = Force. Got the answer correct while neglecting to show most of the work (might get marked down). Only later used the same method to derive the same general formula rather than a specific case. So light acts as a particle with mass moving at speed C. You can also arrive at this conclusion from other angles like allowing Energy/Mass conversion along with the conservation of the CG of a system (If I convert an object to energy and beam it to the other side of a room and convert it back, there must be a reaction force, the CG of the system must not move etc...). Light MUST behave this way. This also means that matter must also be gravitationally attracted to photons. But yes, there are plenty of ways "massless" photons behave much like particles with mass, and yet they don't contain any Higgs.
I don't think physics has an answer to your question, nor a number of questions I have.
If the mass of the higgs boson likes at the right spot around 125 GeV then this is true, the vacuum may be unstable. I keep hearing people say the Standard Model needs to be fixed in this case, but does it? We are observing the universe undergoing accelerating expansion. Maybe we are already witnessing the result of an unstable vacuum.
In other words, the universe may be exploding right now.
People have always starved in some part of the worlds but we never knew about high energy physic before last century and as a side effect it brought us the web *1. So to me this was money well spent. People are insignificant at universal scale; knowledge is not as it contribute immensely in the Sisyphean fight to organize the results of the all mighty entropy.
1- web != net
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
The question "what was before this?" seems to me to be a fair and predictable one, and one that a LOT of scientific effort has been expended on already. You would be well served to let go of your biases and consider the questions on their merits.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star. Only elements as heavy as carbon or lighter can be formed in the early universe (and, for that matter, the amounts of Li, Be, B and C formed in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis are very very small); for heavier elements, and for larger amounts of carbon etc., you need a star. Now, if you didn't already know this, stop and think about it for a second. A huge chunk of you, perhaps all of you, was inside a star at one time. It appears that you and I are star debris. And it gets even better. The way that large amounts of these elements, forged within a star, can get out of the star is if the star supernovas -- dies at the end of its lifetime with a big boom. That big boom also serves to make very heavy elements -- such as uranium, for instance -- that cannot be made even in a star while it's burning away. There's uranium, and other similar very heavy elements, on our planet. Do you see what I'm getting at? Much of the atoms that make all of us up, that make this planet up, were at one time inside a star (or stars) that lived its life, supernovaed, and spewed out debris. Eventually, maybe a few hundred million years later, that stuff is part of our planet, part of our atmosphere, our water, part of you and me. We are all brothers and sisters; we all came from the same place, sorta.
Now, that knowledge will never make me any money.
You might not be able to figure out how to make money, but Moby appears to have done well with it.
Craig Milo Rogers
Isaac has already thought of this.
...as soon he realizes Amy Farrah Fowler is Higgs Blossom
I expect a new wave a penis enlargement pills touting their new super-duper ingredient, Higgs Boson, GUARANTEED to make your tool MASSIVE.
A Higgs Boson walks into a church..... The priest says, "we don't accept your kind here" The Higgs Boson says... "but without me, you can not have mass!"
I wonder if Higgs field could serve as something to push against, spending only energy, and not having to carry the propellant mass with you in space travel? Just a wild guess by a complete layman. This could make sending probes to nearby stars a bit more realistic.
THIS.
This comment, is why I read Slashdot.
Thanks a lot for your insight and knowledge sharing, it made my day =)
Stephen Wolfram has an interesting article giving his thoughts on the progression of particle physics and where he thinks it might be headed. http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/07/stephen-wolfram-on-higgs-particle.html
...am still looking forward to riding my hover skateboard.
Lets say this science has no value at all beyond entertainment value ("wow, that's cool, I never knew that"). It's really not so expensive as entertainment budgets go, if you look at how many nations and years it's spread across. We piss away far greater sums of money on far more frivolous pursuits. If we're looking for places to conserve "societies resources", fundamental physics research simply isn't the low hanging fruit!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It'll be marketed as the ultimate weight loss pill.
I mean, all you have to do is attach a machine larger and more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider to your rocket ship and then you can manipulate mass. A little bit.
Most of Physics has been working with the model that it does exist for decades now. There would have been a LOT of impact if it didn't exist. This is a "OK, it looks like what we thought was true"
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
It doesn't have to consume the entire universe.
I've long thought that gamma-ray bursts -- those unexplained explosions that happen in distant galaxies, and are much more energetic than supernovae -- are the "oopses" of alien civilizations experimenting with really potent physics that they don't fully understand.
As I understand it, these bursts can sterilize the better part of a galaxy. I'm not a luddite, but let's apply a little caution and try not to end up like those poor sods.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
My conclusion is that I AM AS SMART AS ALBERT EINSTEIN.
My reality is a wonderful reality, care to visit?
I suspect that if you were subjected to the "Total Perspective Vortex", you would come out feeling pretty good.
What about s-process nucleosynthesis on the asymptotic giant branch? There's no supernova involved, but elements heavier than iron are created by neutron capture. About half of the heavy elements in the modern Universe were created this way.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
But in E=m c^2, m is the relativistic mass (non-zero for any moving particle) and not the rest mass which comes from the Higgs field. All particles have mass, even photons.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
nevertheless we do practical things with nuclear transmutation, from medical applications to electronics (-quiz question) to power plants. And we make practical use of particles other than electron, proton, neutron and photon.
You've violated the conservation of momentum. There is no need to answer the second part of your statement because it is irrelevant. Remember F = dp/dt.
You have not violated any conservation law. First look at what you just wrote: F = dp/dt. So if there is an external force acting on the system dp/dt !=0 i.e. the rate of change of momentum is not zero. Only a system with no external forces has a constant momentum. An even easier way to see that there is no problem (classically at least): reduce the mass while at rest when v=0 this way momentum remains a constant zero before and after.
However the whole premise is flawed because only 0.1% of the mass of a proton or neutron (which is where almost all the mass of atoms comes from) is due to the Higgs. So, even if you could shield something from the Higgs its mass would decrease by 0.1% but all the energy states of the electrons would change due to their suddenly relativistic nature so the chemistry of the object would radically alter which is probably not a good thing to have happen.
There is ALWAYS a gravitational field.
Not true. The gravitational field of a mass may stretch out forever but there is nothing to stop you from placing a second mass such that its gravitational field precisely cancels the first gravitational field at a single point. At this point there will be zero gravitational field.
Yet when we observe something that doesn't match up with our predictions, we never take that as evidence that the universe is unpredictable.
Yes we do - that's exactly what happened with Quantum Mechanics! There is NO requirement in science that the universe be predictable, only that that the nature of that unpredictability be predictable!
Also if you fly in executive class, you can carry bags of unlimited mass.
Not quite - you only get 32kg/bag, same as if you are a frequent flyer. So, by causing me to fly to CERN frequently, the Higgs has managed to increase my baggage allowance from 1x23 kg to 1x32 kg + 2x23 kg. Unfortunately, were you ever to be able to turn off the Higgs field, it would only decrease the mass of your bag by 0.1% (and radically alter their chemistry) so I think the frequent flyer route is definitely the most practical!
All this fuss about the font choice makes me more and more certain that we really are descended from the Golgafrincham B Ark. If Douglas Adams rewrote the Hitchhikers Guide today it would probably go:
Arthur: "...but you haven't even found the Higgs boson yet!"
Golgafrincham: "Oh we discovered that years ago but we are still trying to find the optimal font and colour scheme to present the result with"
Extinction of pigs and buffalo if these dang scientists keep colliding them at high speed.
I'll write a GUI in visual basic to plot the occurrences over time of misuse of Higgs boson technobabble-based in popular media.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Don't forget that the rich receive a disproportionately high amount of their annual monies from investments, i.e. capital gains. Capital gains are taxed at a much, much lower rate than general income (15%).
Why does the attractiveness to Higgs make gravity pull as hard as it does?
Because that attractiveness which grants intrinsic mass via the Higgs Effect is a form of energy, the amount of which is directly proportional to the granted intrinsic mass. The amount that space is warped is proportional to the energy in the system.
Ergo, however much intrinsic mass the Higgs Effect grants it also creates a proportional amount of gravity.
That's it. Let me know where I lost you.
Yours is no different from the antropic principle that genuine scientists have considered and discarded and decided to make extremely clever devices to see if gravitational mass and inertial mass are *precisely* 1:1. If it were definitional, they would not have bothered.
The equivalence principle is technically a postulate of General Relativity, not a definition. But either way -- only in mathematics and the minds of /.ers on the losing side of an argument do "by assumption" or "by definition" mean there is no reason to question the claimed fact any further.
Of course "geuine scientists" investigate whether the assumptions -- and consequences -- of General Relativity are true. And they know that finding that inertial and gravitational masses are different would mean knocking out one of the fundamental assumptions of GR -- that in a GR universe, the fact that the Higgs mechanisms along with any other energetic mechanism creates a proportional amount of gravity is not a mystery at all, it falls from the postulates. No need for the Anthropic Principle at all.
If they don't precisely equate, then we may just have a fluke of nature (maybe by only universes with these figures CLOSE to 1:1 is the only way to make a universe that will last long enough to be noticed as existing, much like the only way planets can orbit is if we have three and only three accessible space dimensions)
Now who's appealing to the Anthropic Principle? Not that this is bad. Contrary to what you said, the Anthropic Principle hasn't been discarded per se, it's just considered an unsatisfying answer if any other explanations can be found. It just makes a useful fall-back for things like the Fine Tuning problem. Meanwhile people search for a deeper answer than "because otherwise we wouldn't be here".
If they do precisely equate, then there must be an Ur-mechanism that drives both and we only see the effects as separate mechanisms because we're looking at them differently
Not true in a Relativistic universe. Gravity is a separate mechanism from other fields, but arises as a result of the energy in those fields. Gravitational theory itself is sufficient to explain why something like the Higgs Effect would always produce exactly the correct amount of gravity.
Of course that theory could be wrong, which is why scientists continue to poke at it. But within the framework of that theory, it is no mystery at all.
By the way, you seem to be confused about something, and maybe this will help: "Intrinsic" and "inertial" mass aren't the same thing. The Higgs field does not impart "inertial" mass, it imparts "intrinsic" mass. Intrinsic mass is the mass/energy an object has when it is not moving.
The inertial mass also scales with the total energy in the system, of which Higgs energy/intrinsic mass is just one component. If this wasn't so, then inertial and gravitational mass would diverge in a measureable way.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm betting that someone will say it is the theoretical breakthrough we need in order to get create strong AI within ten years.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A lot of out-of-work theoretical physicists of the standard model and a corresponding increase in the numbers of grocery baggers and taxi drivers. Also, expect to hear the beginning of arguments for a larger, more expensive particle accelerator to find the "we-just-made-it-up" boson.
E Proelio Veritas.
All this is presuming that the mass field can be manipulated in a fashion similar to the EM band. A big assumption. Reduced inertia: A safety field for vehicles. It's not the fall that kills, it's the impact. If you impact with the mass of a snowflake, you're probably not going to plow as deep a hole. Localized lowered/raised gravity. Faster vehicles (of all types again) that use less energy to get to speed. Inertialess or lowered inertia drives. If you can diddle with the direction/polarity, you might have a space drive to explore the Solar System a lot faster and more cheaply. And probably a MUCH better payload to fuel ratio. Fly me to the Moon! And possibly a drive that uses electricity directly like an ion drive would be a lot more energetic. "Gravity Polarizers" a la Baron Harkonnen. Also a big aid in construction, both terrestrial and for something like the Beanstalk/Space Elevator to synchronous orbit. And drives for the same. Though I'm not sure I'd want to live in a building that was held up and together by the thing. Power failure could be...your downfall. Someone who knows physics better than I can probably suggest hundreds of places that being able to make the inertial constant a variable would be interesting and practical. And then there's Superman: http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/superman.pdf
I hear that someone is working on an aluminum brief case that carries itself. It is going to be called the Zero Higgs Haliburton.
under some dark matter behind a gravity wave. Most lilkely it will be under a piece of paper on which is written 1+1=3.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
The hype around discovery of new particles is proportional to the amount of money spent on the discovery
Correct me if I'm wrong... but there seems to be something even more significant coming from this: the Higgs discovery confirms the Standard Model's claim that electrons, quarks etc. of which stuff is made are point particles that have zero volume. Not just infinitely small, not just less than Planck's length, but zero. They get their mass "charge" from the Higgs field, but they are not tiny balls of solid matter, they are points designated in space. So the total sum volume of all the fundamental particles that make the Sun, this planet, each one of us, is exactly zero.
So it follows there is nothing solid, nothing material underneath this reality. There is only an illusion of solidity coming from the electromagnetic/nuclear interaction of those points in space. But the whole world is like a dream, empty of any substance.
Am I missing something? One sort of check is that in light of this the Big Bang makes sense, you can certainly fit all of the universe in a zero-sized point when everything that makes it is no larger than a zero-sized point.
If CERN needs a new Oracle DBA, im available for hire :) Can you imagine the amount of money they're going to be pumping into CERN now when they made the discovery? If you thought they had a huge grant before, then that'll probably pale in comparison to the coming years.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
My name is David Leon Emery. I've always wondered how things like the pyramids were build
Ramps? Ropes and sledges?