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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.
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.
We will be able to develop a new physics engine for Angry Birds.
now that its been discovered, all textbooks will have to be re-written and sold to students.
Everyone knows Bosun Higgs is in charge of the mass on this ship.
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.
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.
. . . 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!
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?
No. Gravity does not operate on mass, it operates on energy. Therefore the Higgs field is irrelevant when it comes to anti-gravity because it really just explains the linkage between mass and energy. It might help in converting energy and mass (which would be far more useful that anti-grav!!), but at the end of the day, a certain amount of energy be it kinetic, binding, chemical or simple mass is always going to weigh the same.
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.
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.
Speaking as a layman, I don't think this discovery validates the Higgs mechanism yet. All they have done is found what looks like a particle at 125 GeV/c2 (about the same as 130 protons). They don't know what it does yet. Yes it looks like a duck, but it hasn't quacked yet...
About the closest analogy that I can come up with is that they smashed billions of cars into each other and listened to the result. They know how heavy all other known cars are, and they are looking to see if there's a rare Tesla Model S in there but they don't know how heavy it is because they've never seen it before, but they have some rough idea it's between 115 and 130 units. They make the assumption that a car crash would make a certain characteristic crash-sound based on how heavy it was. Of course there is a whole continnuum of sound because no crashes are the same and after the cars crash, they might break into other parts, but they kinda know how heavy the major parts of disintegrating cars are and what sound they might make as well. After listening to all theses crashes and doing lots of math they conclude that they have found that it is highly likely some car around 125 units heavy was part of those billions of smashed cars and no other car they know of is that heavy.
From that they conclude they have found the Tesla Model S and it is 125 units heavy. Now that the Tesla Model S is no longer considered hypothetical, likewize the assertion that it goes 0-60 in 4.4 seconds and 300miles on a full charge must also be true (whoops, better not make those assumption until someone takes an unsmashed one for a test drive, right?)