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Higgs Data Offers Joy and Pain For Particle Physicists
scibri writes "So now that we've pretty much found the Higgs Boson, what's next? Well: 'There's going to be a huge massacre of theoretical ideas in the next couple of years,' predicts Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. The data has shored up the standard model, but technicolor is dead and supersymmetry is starting to look pretty ropey now. Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks in the standard theory in the hopes of being the first to find a deeper truth about how the Universe works."
C'mon slashdot, you're better than that.
Yes I'm being funny (or trying to).
From what I understand it was only one single experiment that showed us something that we think is where/what the Higgs Boson would look like.
Has it been reproduced or confirmed?
Scientists using the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle to very high confidence that is consistent with what we expect the Higgs particle to look like.
That's not very definitive. Can anybody else around well versed in particle physics tell us if the Higgs has really been found or not?
Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks
I realize Asians are known for excelling at math, but do we really have to bring race into this?
I'm very, very sorry. I couldn't resist. I understand I'm a terrible person, you don't need to reply and tell me that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
>> poking at the mathematical chinks
Not all Maths graduate students are Chinese, you know.
That's true. It's only the good ones.
(They're especially good in wector calculus.)
Did you miss the part about "looking ropey"? That's String Theory on Steroids.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I predict, over the next two years, what's going to come out of this is the following:
Physicists will have poked holes in most all the prevailing Standard Model-compatible theories, and will start talking about the inadequacies of the LHC and how we need a much bigger collider to prove or disprove the existence of those elusive super-partner particles required by supersymmetry.
#DeleteChrome
>> poking at the mathematical chinks
Not all Maths graduate students are Chinese, you know.
That's true. It's only the good ones. (They're especially good in wector calculus.)
No, that's actually a Russian specialty.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
Every new discovery of the past few decades has supposedly "killed" SUSY, but every time it makes a comeback with a modification to avert whatever problem the observation caused. Other theories do the same, to a slightly lesser extent.
I don't see why Technicolor is dead. The Nature article makes the claim that it's because Technicolor is Higgsless, but that's something of a falsehood. Technicolor lacks an elementary Higgs, because the role played by the elementary Higgs in the Standard Model is instead played by a composite particle. As far as I can tell it's perfectly possible that the bosonic state at 125GeV is a composite rather than elementary Higgs.
(FD: I'm a PhD student with a thesis area based around technicolor)
I'm just wondering how "The Big Bang Theory" is going to respond to all of this when next season starts. Will Sheldon be devastated, will he defend String Theory against "this silly, inept Higgs experimental data," or will he somehow hop on the Higgs Bandwagon?
I think he will rail against it at first, but his gf will convince him to change. After a few mild electric shocks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The experiments indicating the existence of the Higgs Boson at now at 5 sigma, which validates the "pretty much" qualification for particle physics.
The existence of God fits into a entirely different ontological category. There are no experiments you can perform to confirm or invalidate the existence of God.
This is an idiotic analogy. This isn't about breaking things, it's about reproducing the kinds of conditions necessary to observe phenomena. Do you feel the same way about dissecting animals to learn about internal structure or heating various substances to get spectral signatures.
If you're going to confirm or throw out a model of subatomic physics you're going to have to use accelerators to produce the conditions where particles can be observed.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Uh, I hope you realize that Dark Matter doesn't have anything to do with the universe being "dark". Besides, it's not dark in the microwave band anyway. The Dark Matter "bandwagon" is trying to account for 23% of the mass of the universe which does not interact with the electromagnetic field, and hence is "dark". Much of this is hot dark matter consisting of neutrinos (generated by the conversion of a proton into a neutron) and antineutrinos (generated by the conversion of a neutron into a proton). These reactions were known in the Twentieth Century. Neutrinos have a very low rest mass, and travel at just under the speed of light. So infrequent are their interactions with normal matter that a neutrino would be able to pass through a light-year of lead with no scattering events. That leaves warm dark matter (with velocities from 1 to 10% of c) and cold dark matter (with velocities below 1% of c) to be discovered. The negatinos and positinos of supersymmetry theory were promising in this direction, but apparently have been falsified. But no one is "afraid".
Actually, he had something to say about it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2012/jul/05/stephen-hawking-higgs-boson-bet-video
One of the reasons to believe they have found the Higgs boson and not some other particle is that the decay relative rates for each type of decay are pretty close to what the theory suggests.
Actually that is not really true because we do not have enough statistics to measure these rates with any accuracy. In fact the "most likely" value for diphoton rates for both ATLAS and CMS are quite a bit higher than the Standard Model predicts but the accuracy is sufficiently low that they are not yet inconsistent with the SM values. So really the rate measurements are currently far too inaccurate to have any idea whether this is a Higgs boson or not but things are improving rapidly as we gain statistics.
What is far more important at the moment are the decay channel observations. Since it decays into photons, W and Z bosons we know it must be either a spin-0 or spin-2 particle and it cannot be a fermion (spin-0.5). The Higgs should be spin-0 so this is consistent but not conclusive. Essentially it decays into the particles it should do and it _potentially_ has the correct spin. We can get a more accurate determination of the spin i.e. whether it is spin-0 or spin-2 by looking at the angle between the two leptons (electron or muon) produced in the WW decay channel - expect results from ATLAS and CMS on this soon.
However by the end of the year the rate measurements should be a lot more accurate and things will possibly start to get interesting if the current diphoton rates stay where they are but we end up with less uncertainty on the measurement.
This is worth a watch...
http://vimeo.com/41038445
Enjoy!
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
Hey, I thought string theory wasn't falsifiable. Did you guys figure out something last time I looked at it?
> There are no experiments you can perform to confirm or invalidate the existence of God.
Actually there is. Unfortunately it requires death as that results of that experience and the aftermath will provide all the proofs and more then one person could ever dream that indeed your consciousness simply changes state after death, and that there is a super-consciousness to the sub-consciousness of everyone. *Unfortunately* getting the results of said experiment back to the living is the catch. The other "kink" is that: Besides if you already knew the answer, it would (mostly) invalidate the purpose of being human in the first place.
The other way would be to learn meditation and learn how to interact with your True Self. Again, unfortunately one could spend an entire lifetime before ones "get confirmation" that there is indeed far, far more to "who you truely are."
The point though, either way the answer is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. There are indeed many good people of all kinds of beliefs, faiths, and lack of said beliefs and faiths. If one has to rely on an external force / rules to be positive internally methinks one is the missing the *whole* point of religion which is little more then spiritual kindergarten. At some point one doesn't need others telling you to internalize how to treat others with respect, kindness, etc.
The ignorance and arrogance of man is to simply assume that some questions are unknowable. They may not be easy to get, but they are indeed there if one dedicates their life to seeking them. Again, the proof of this, sadly, is also going thru the death experience.
It is simpler to "just get on with life" - learning and loving. That's what its all about at the end of the day -- creating positive relationships with everyone else.
The instant someone is trying to "sell you" a philosophy is the instant it would be good to be skeptical of their agenda.
"Joy and pain"? Jesus, what are they doing, tying the boson in a knot and putting it up their bums? (I guess it would have to be a "boson's knot").
Instead of the God Particle, they could call the "Oh God! Particle".
[note: I only make this kind of off-color joke because it's past 9pm and the children have all gone to bed. I call this the "safe harbor" hours, when normal FCC rules moderating online behavior are relaxed, like a sphincter with a Higgs Boson in it. Thanks to these safe harbor rules, constitutionally-protected free speech rights of adults are balanced with the need to protect children from harmful content, like the word "fuck" and references to tying massive particles in knots and putting them up one's bum and then pulling it out slowly as climax is achieved (thus the expression "string theory"). Two physicist doing this while standing face to face are called a "Hardon Collider", named for the famous Scottish physicist Sir Ivan Hardon (1847-1903) who first posited that there's nothing else to do while waiting for the experiment to finish and there were so few female physicists back then that, hey, what happens in the lab stays in the lab. Tragically one of his experiments exploded while Hardon and a lab assistant were engaged in this act of outrage and since they had their pants down both of them got kilt.]
You are welcome on my lawn.
String theory has many, many variations. Falsifying them means first narrowing down which variations just might have some correspondance to physical reality, then finding ways to test those further. All the ones that we could call interesting (because they might fit 'objective reality for this universe'). involve very high energies, so we can't build an accelerator nearly powerful to test them by that particular method. That's not the same as being untestable - for example, a particular string model might make predictions about something else, like Proton decay, that we can test. Some versions imply things about cosmolgy that we can test by astronomical observation.
The point is, that we probably won't test all the variants much or at all. Sometimes, a physicist may decide to toss out a bunch of variants because the equations look needlessly complex or full of fudge factors - scientists often look for certain types of style or form in fundamental equations, as when Einstein decided to not add the complexity of a Cosmological constant to General Relativity. It's not the same as doing a scientific test for falsifiability to just decide not to look at the more complex equations at all and hope you will either find something going through the more beautiful and elegant versions, or shoot them all down, and then some grad student can try some of the more complicated variants.
It is essential to science that experimental results are public and repeatable. What you are talking about doesn't fit into those categories. Perhaps you could call it knowledge, but it isn't knowledge in the ordinary sense.
If I had a dream where I met Satan and he told me his favorite shampoo, you could call that knowledge, but it isn't knowledge in the scientific sense, or even common sense.
The three valence quarks inside a proton for instance have a rest mass of only 11 MeV/c^2, which they get by means of the Higgs mechanism. The rest of the 938 MeV/c^2 that is the full rest mass of the proton is its quantum chromodynamic binding energy, that is the energies of the gluons that are keeping the three quarks together, so the Higgs mechanism accounts for only 1% of the mass of a composite particle like a proton. Not all mass is drag in the Higgs field. It is by no means the final word on the origin of all mass. If the Higgs mechanism was the only way particles could acquire their masses, then the neutrino should have zero mass, and well, it doesn't.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The data obtained by two independent experiments (CMS and ATLAS, both at the LHC) is in excellent agreement for the mass of the particle. The results are also coherent with those obtained by two experiments (CDF and D0) based at the Fermilab. Something has been found, with a very high statistical relevance (five sigma level, so there is only a chance in a few million that this is a fluctuation). Whether this something is indeed the Higgs boson as predicted depends on its detailed behaviour, so it will take more time to find out. It does however look like it, or a close relative...
Since mass is apparently simply drag in the Higgs field...
Ah, I don't know anything about this to speak of, but obviously mass is not drag. Drag always slows things down while mass has momentum which tends to keep things going. I'm afraid the drag thing (journalists hanging onto thus slowing down celebrities) was just a crude analogy sombody cooked up in a press conference to try to explain the abstract mathematical nature of what is really going on to journalists and other mere knuckle draggers like myself. Frankly, I think they need to get back to the drawing board and cook up a better metaphor.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
While disproving the existence of God is effectively impossible - proving it does exist would actually quite simple, provided you had His/Her/Its/Their cooperation. The fact that their is no credible evidence the existence of God suggests that either:
1) It doesn't exist
2) It doesn't desire to prove Its existence, or
3) It's incapable of proving Its existence
Considering we're talking about a being who most claim created the universe and intervenes in peoples life in ways both subtle and miraculous, number (3) seems unlikely - even just having one of his chosen messengers take part in a double-blind psionics test while God read out the cards to them would be enough to give the question serious scientific merit.
Now (2) could very easily be the case, and is in fact perfectly consistent with some faiths. But in that case I would suggest that either It doesn't actually care about our worship, codes of conduct, or the other stuff religions tend to obsess over, or It's a complete jerk: "Yeah, I know it's been a hundred generations or so since I bothered to offer any evidence that I even exist, much less which of the hundreds of continuously-mutating religions I endorse, but you didn't follow the right one so you're getting eternally condemned anyway".
Which leaves (1) as the default assumption. Either God doesn't exist, or It wishes us to be free to conduct our lives as though it does not - in which case spreading the "Good Word", especially through coercion, would seem to run counter to God's will.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> There are no experiments you can perform to confirm or invalidate the existence of God.
Actually there is. Unfortunately it requires death as that results of that experience and the aftermath will provide all the proofs and more then one person could ever dream that indeed your consciousness simply changes state after death, and that there is a super-consciousness to the sub-consciousness of everyone. *Unfortunately* getting the results of said experiment back to the living is the catch.
But what if experiments were to conclusively prove that all aspects of personality can be explained by neurological processes? Then, consciousness would be tied to an observable, physical mechanism and then you would need to render the idea of a mirroring consciousness existing outside the observed - which is kind of a stretch, but those are not exactly news to theology.
The basic point that should be made is that just because something cannot be disproven does not mean that it is more likely than any other arbitrary and absurd claim. The reason the belief in a deity is taken seriously is because it is more widely held than the belief that we all stem from an invisible Coca-Cola dispenser inside the core of the Moon; the two claims have the same amount of intellectual merit.
toresbe