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Why All the Higgs Hate? It's a 'Vanilla' Boson
astroengine writes "Decades of searching and a 7.5 billion Euro particle accelerator later, why is everyone so down on one of the biggest discoveries of the century? Well, as the evidence strengthens for a bona fide signal of a 'Standard Model' Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV, many scientists are disappointed that the discovery of an 'ordinary' — or 'vanilla' according to Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll — Higgs removes any doubt for more exotic physics beyond the Standard Model. It's a strange juxtaposition; a profound discovery that's also an anticlimax. But to confirm the identity of the Higgs candidate, LHC physicists still need to measure the particle's spin. 'Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin,' said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci at this week's Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy, 'the particle will remain Higgs-like. Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs.'"
TFA is mainstream butt-hurt-ness that the progress of science isn't appropriately entertaining, and unsurprisingly misses a few key points. Sure an announcement of 'we are making progress and confirming what we expected" isn't as exciting as the original announcement, but is just as important (if not more so) to the scientific process.
When/if this particle is confirmed as the higgs, that does not remotely "[tie] up the Standard Model of physics in a pretty, neat, red quantum bow" (TFA) let alone "[remove] any doubt for more exotic physics beyond the Standard Model" (TFS). Both are patently false. A major reason for looking for the higgs in the first place (beyond confirming that part of the SM) is to being to actively investigate the higgs field, which is moderated by the higgs boson itself. The higgs does not impart mass to particles as is usually claimed (although it's not an unreasonable simplification). The higgs particles are what moderates the higgs field, the presence of which is what brings about mass in particles. (The higgs - and presumably all/most particles - are actually just field fluctuations. What we think of as a discrete particle is really then just the instantaneous average of the fluctuation [wave]).
I can't find my exact sources for this, but at least some of them were from the Higgs section of this site, which I highly recommend. Meanwhile, this article is quite interesting anyway:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/
Can somebody tell me if particles with zero spin can or cannot violate the Pauli Exclusion Principle?
Science of the 21st century will be less about discovering what we can do and more about what we can't. We'll find that that there aren't any radical exotic physics left to discover, cementing the fact that Star Trek will never exist no matter how far technology never advances, for there is no way around c. We'll also be doomed to never having a good energy solution.
That said, considerable advance in biomedicine and artificial intelligence will happen. Engineering and reverse engineering of the human body will continue to progress.
The saying that "any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is probably false: technology obeys thermodynamics. We as humans need to discuss what we want to do once science can no longer progress, something I fear will become true for our grandchildren.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Shut up, you ridiculous luddite.
If everyone in history took your point of view, those countries would still be shitholes, but they'd be shitholes without electricity and penicillin and refrigeration and computers.
Higgs removes any doubt for more exotic physics beyond the Standard Model.
Don't go in to physics, Max Planck, it's almost done. There just aren't any big discoveries left; just a few minor details to fill-in.
From the article:
Although I’d argue that the Higgs boson discovery is a triumph of modern science and only the beginning of a golden era for quantum physics, many will be subdued at seeing the Standard Model being completely proven — of which the Higgs boson is the last component to be discovered — thereby disproving more exciting possibilities of exotic physics beyond known physics.
Ian O'Neill, you fail basic epistemology forever.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Like, dude !! What's a Higgs boson anyway !! It's stupid talk !!
Clocks !! Check your clocks !! Or the Higgs boson will get you !!
But, has anyone discovered the "Jeeves Bosun" yet?
Well then. Keep my posted.
It's like when you're flirting with a cute girl at the bar and after she sucks your dick, you stick your hand in her panties and find a penis.
magic doesn't???
They are paying thousands of engineers, scientists, and contractors. Do you think the work those people should be fired to give money to people who can't take care of themselves? But yes let's stop all pure research till all problems are solved everywhere, because the only time such a situation is happen is when everyone on the freakin planet is dead.
You don't even know what "Luddite" means, do you?
Why are you on Slashdot tonight instead of working to help the infected Italians?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It is always best to find unexpected results, that increases job security.
Finding what you are looking for reduces job security.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
That's a troll.
He's basically claiming that the Black Death is raging through Europe.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...worked on finding the hugs boson first.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Doesn't non-zero neutrino rest energy already lie outside the Standard Model?
for my 3D printer?
Nobody gets excited because the theory is too complicated. Even a physics major has trouble understanding what the Higgs is (and just repeating "the thing that gives stuff mass" is not an explanation).
The problem with the Higgs discovery is that it does not explain anything new. Why? Because only failed predictions lead to new and exciting science.
Not sure if you're serious or trolling (like the religious AC that responded to you definitely is) - see my post above (first post) for some of the reasons why you're ludicrously wrong. The discovery of the higgs/the process of it's confirmation is a key milestone that will allow us to begin to make inroads on the investigation of gravity. Certainly there is a long way to go, but this is a necessary step before we can even fully understand what the standard model might be saying about gravity.
There are far more wasteful things to be spending money than fundamental science. (War being the most obvious example, although I'm not aware of the Euros being involved in much military activity recently.) Following your train of thought, we'd still be living in caves without the wheel or the ability to make fire ourselves. We can't say right now exactly what benefits the higgs boson specifically, and the extended thread of research in general will bring us - but history clearly demonstrates that theoretical research brings major quality of life improvements in the long run.
I would argue that dollar for dollar, research brings more long term benefit to society than welfare. Welfare can only address short term problems, and is LITERALLY just throwing money at the problem/down the drain. At least with infastructure, once it's built, the upkeep costs aren't quite as high. There needs to be a healthy balance of both, to address issues on both short and long timescales. Cutting one for the other is short sigted.
Finally, the LHC was built long before the financial chrisis came about. All the money was already spent. At best, only upgrade money could be diverted to help the troubled countries even if they wanted to (and I've discussed why that's a bad idea.) Note that the EU has thrown plenty of bailout money at them anyway, whilst still funding CERN.
"The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, and "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind".[1] It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 1998 to 2008, with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics, ..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
The world's physicists want to discover the universe's deepest secrets, and have up until now believed that more and more intricate experiments would gradually force the desired information out. What they are finding is that their efforts have yielded only a reasonably self consistent theory which fits observed facts when they are experimentally observed, yet is massively complex, incompatible with other fundamental theories, and ultimately unsatisfying to the scientist who hopes via his science to understand reality. This one's a win for the universe.
John_Chalisque
I think there are still big unexplored frontiers, people just don't know where to look for them because they don't lend themselves to the mathematical tools that were so successful in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For example, raja and jnana yoga are half nonsense, but not all nonsense. There's some remarkable stuff there that does not have pat psychological or physiological explanations, if you work at it a bit and can cut though some of the crap.
I don't think scientists have finished figuring out all the implications of quantum mechanics either. Apparently a lot of people, including many physicists, think that Schrodinger's cat is a metaphor for something that only happens at a microscopic level, or for coherent wave-functions. I'm pretty sure its not. Sometimes it seems to me that scientists get so caught up with being an expert at something, after the incredibly hard work they've put in, and stop recognizing anything as real unless it is already described by their models.
Things that can't be controlled well in a laboratory setting, or modeled with functions and well defined probabilities, are really hard to study. But that doesn't mean that no such things are real, or that they won't ever be understood better. Hyperbolic geometry led to Einstein's theories of relativity. Quantum mechanics would not have been possible with the statistical ideas of a few hundred years earlier. People keep hammering away with the same types of ideas, applied in ever more complex ways, because they worked so well before. But I think we'll get through this period of consolidation, exploiting what we've discovered, for better or for worse. There is still potential for more revolutions eventually.
I'm searching for the "big bosom", I've had glimpses of it at times even for several years, but I am thinking more long-term research is required.
Science of the 21st century will be less about discovering what we can do and more about what we can't. We'll find that that there aren't any radical exotic physics left to discover...
Dark Matter: makes up ~23% of the mass of the universe and we have no clue what it's fundamental nature is. Then there is Dark energy which makes up ~73% and is accelerating the expansion of the universe. So given that practically all science to date has been regarding 4% of the universe and there is 96% of if out there (that we know of so far) with a nature we simply do not yet understand I can tell you that we know for 100% certainty that there is some "radical, exotic physics" left to discover. What I cannot tell you is its nature nor whether we'll discover it in the 21st century but we know it's there. Even if you don't yet believe in Dark Matter the largely discredited alternative theories to explain the observations involve corrections to Newtonian dynamics and/or gravity which is even more "radical and exotic".
I think you're about 700 years late if you want to stop yersinia pestis in Italy.
I think you are getting a little confused which is not surprising given the site that you linked to! It's a very interesting site but it's talking about the special case where the minimum energy in the Higgs field corresponds to zero Higgs field which not at all the case in the Standard Model.
The Higgs field does indeed give mass to the fundamental particles. It has a strange property that the lowest energy density of the field is NOT when the field is zero but rather when it has a non-zero value (so very different from a magnetic or electric field). This field is then what couples to particles and the coupling energy is what we see as mass - indeed at a fundamental level this is why mass and energy are the same thing. The Higgs boson is simply a quantized vibration of this field in the same way that a photon is a quantized vibration of the EM field.
However, to get back to the original discussion point, I would argue that we are seeing exactly what we might expect to see were this a Supersymmetric Higgs rather than a Standard Model Higgs. If you scan the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model phase space with a Higgs mass of 125 GeV then you'll find that most of it has the lightest Higgs looking just like a SM Higgs with only a few percent difference in some of the branching ratios. It will take a few years more data before we can measure things this accurately by which time, with the higher energies after the shutdown, we may have already found something new.
Try walking through Italy and see if you can't find someone infested with yersinia pestis.
We can cure that with antibiotics and, if needed, life support while they recover. In the past if we'd spent all the money on caring for the immediate needs of people instead of pushing the boundaries of knowledge then you might be out there offering help but that help would be selecting a suitable burial spot and digging a hole. Science is like a pension plan - you may feel like all the money is disappearing without any return but forty years down the line you'll be very glad you had the foresight to invest in it.
Interestingly, like entangled particles, those nearly always occur in pairs. However they seem to have the ability to generate entanglements that involve the attraction of other masses characterized by a different pole-arity.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
No , NO , Yes no and Ha ha ha ha on the rest :)
Hm, could it be because he is busy building support for his case ? This could indeed be quite a bit more efficient than trying to do the whole thing by himself.
That however does not mean I agree with him. Or disagree with him for that matter.
This article reeks of Heisenberg Uncertainty ...
Maximal effect , minimal impact
Yes , we are on the right track , Blarny.
What about : the meaning of the trip is in the travelling and not in the destination ?
Avoid your fears , or wonder at the past
Try walking through Italy and see if you can't find someone infested with yersinia pestis. It's destroying the EU
Hi, bubonic plague - wrong century, EU + black death don't go together, try again.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It's trolling, disease it mentions is black death / bubonic plague.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
A Higgs Boson walks into a church. The pastor says "we don't allow your kind in here." The which he is replied, "but without me, how can you have Mass?"
Hmm, no utility bills,lowered resistance to disease, fresh food or Microsoft. Oh I'm sorry, did you have a point, I was lost in a better world there for a second.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
In Soviet Union we troll with goatse.cx / http://bayimg.com/dAkAKaAEH
I believe if they can determine if mini black holes are being created in the LHC this may be evidence of additional dimensions proposed by string theory.
"Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs." If they're waiting for it to make a guest appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, they could be disappointed.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
There are some places in Africa where you would be very happy.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Even more interesting, the smaller the mass, the higher the attraction. At least in most circumstances, though there seems to be a cutoff point.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...kind of crap-submission is this? Nobody is "down" because of the Higgs Boson.
I prefer a version of this argument that doesn't appeal to racist treasonous assholes.
The interesting part of the search is over -- what follows is a couple of decades of shrinking the error bars. As it stands right now, all the data is converging to a bog-stock standard model particle. There is an anomaly in some of the ATLAS data, but the discrepancy is shrinking. According to the LHC data presented at the Moriond Conference on March 6, the anomaly isn't getting worse when more data is included, which means that it probably can be explained by something other than new physics. Add in the 2.5GeV difference between the Higgs masses in the ATLAS data, and it looks more like there is some kind of systemic error with ATLAS, not a glimpse of new physics. All other data are tightly consistent with the SM. And for what it is worth, the idea that a spin determination needs to be made is a bit of wishful thinking. It's probably Director Bertolucci trying to keep the media interest going. A 126 GeV particle can have only spin zero -- there isn't even a model for a spin 2 resonance that is simultaneously mathematically rigorous and not eliminated by experimental evidence that already exists. According to this excellent blog by a particle physicist based in Paris, the best chance of finding new physics is observing the Higgs making non-SM interactions in some hitherto unexpected decay channel, something that is possible, but very, very unlikely. Given the fierce competition for shrinking scientific research funding, getting funding for that kind of research is not going to happen, and the grumbling coming from particle physicists is because they realize that the Higgs is not going to be a meal ticket for them anymore. .
Can someone moderate this as a troll please.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You could try asking this guy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html
Primer Fields
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
'Cuz a higga's gonna hate.
Like a boson.
Try walking through Italy and see if you can't find someone infested with yersinia pestis.
While the Bubonic Plague is far from dead, we have this:
There is no plague in Europe; the last reported cases occurred after World War II.
So in other words, you're not going to find someone in Italy "infested" with the bacterium that causes Plague, unless they picked it up somewhere else.
FYI: "the rest of the world" is not western Europe.
1. CERN's annual budget is only something like $1.1B. It's not actually that much money and certainly not enough to fix the economies of various European countries.
2. Most of that budget, in one way or another, creates jobs by employing Europeans.
Luckily, Europe's leaders don't take economic advice from random ACs on Slashdot.
"The entire world is made of nothing, of moving twists in space. 100% empty."
I wasn't aware that this is an implication of finding the Higgs. If that is true... Whoa. Déjà vu.
Karma? What's that again?
Why can't I keep regressing the expansion of the universe and get to a God particle which had all the energy, and thus the mass that has ever existed? It seems that is what physics is doing. It keeps finding ever more energetic and ever more massive particles. Likewise, why can't you subdivide particles and get to an ever less massive particle, perhaps down to the Planck length? Sort of a Fractal Universe Model (I claim that as trademark first!)
I'm sure news reporters like to put a different spin on this.
Fresh food? What, exactly, do you think refrigeration is FOR? I'll give you a hint. It involves freshness. As in retaining it.
In any case, without refrigeration (and freezing, which is just more of the same), billions now alive would die of starvation, and many more of the rest would fall into subsistence farming. Food preservation is integral to civilization.
If you're one of the morons who advocates killing billions, you are invited to volunteer to be first in line to be liquidated.
But that doesn't mean everyone will be happy with no limits. Some people need structure, rules, and expectations. Not everyone is suited for anything goes.
Neither was I until I saw this video by PhD Comics, about three months before Higgs discovery: http://vimeo.com/41038445. I checked with some physics PhD friends and they confirmed that it is an implication of the Standard Model. Protons, for example, are systems of quarks moving around each other, and quarks like electrons have zero volume. In some cases two different fundamental particles can be at exactly the same point in space. (However "different" and "point" and "space" and even "be" is defined by the SM.)
It's the craziest thing. Like when you remember something from a dream, say a car, and know the car wasn't made of anything solid, you can look at anything in reality and know it's essentially the same thing here.
"... is coming from astrophysics these days..."
Especially from radio astronomy. They too have large expensive equipment, but in contrast to HEP they don't need miles of hard vacuum in a pipe, gigawatts of power, or detectors larger than a billionaire's mansion. They get a *lot* of science - and covering several different areas of science - per dollar/euro/yen spent. For example, one radio astronomer at NRAO showed evidence against the existence of strange matter (u+d+s quarks in about equal proportions) in neutron stars, and around the same time we learned something about magnetic fields of exoplanets, and the atmospheres of gas giants, and the motions and composition of gases in the interstellar medium. Very different topics, touching on nuclear physics, geology, atmospheric science, and of course plain vanilla astrophysics, all accomplished with data taken with the same few radio telescope arrays.
Fermilab, SLAC, CERN, and the other particle accelerators have pretty much single-purpose use. You could argue that for example lepton physics is a different specialty than QCD, but still, the range isn't like in radio astronomy. Either kind of facility produces many academic papers (via scientists and their students) but real additions to the body of scientific knowledge seems low in proportion to the costs of building and running the facility for HEP. So, let's find new uses for those accelerators! Hit the moon with a neutrino beam, or something. There is biophysics and material science research going on at SLAC and probably the others. We need to think up a wider variety of things to do with high energy particle beams, besides study the particles themselves.
I mean, they spent billions building LHC only to find out that Higg's isn't a God particle. Now they shut it down for a few years for a few hundred million in upgrades hoping to find out other theories will not hold up.
To think if that money was put into practical science, investigate real solutions to real world problems.
But no, lets build larger colliders and send people to Mars in the hopes that maybe there might be some spin off tech we could all use.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Oh no. It wont cost billions and billions of dollars to continue our studies. Heaven forbid
Refrigeration doesn't maintain freshness, it merely preserves the food from corruption via heat.
The difference; refrigerate vegetables for a few day, then, go to the market and get fresh vegetables, cook them both in separate dishes, taste.
Having to purchase fresh food provides superior meals. The same holds true for meat.
If you want to store leftovers, refrigeration is fine.
Dig a deep hole above the water table, utilizing a pulley/ dumbwaiter system, lower your food into the 40 deg.F Earth. Place the lid on it.
No electric bill either.
I advocate killing what you want to eat , because eating it alive may be freshest , but it's cruel and the spices keep falling off in the struggle.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Stay Tuned!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
He's searching for daft matter!
In reality, there is of course only a percentual difference between having everything be nothing or 'nearly' nothing if you look at atoms as being mostly empty anyway.
My 'Whoa. Déjà vu" was actually a smart ass reference to The Matrix because if everything is essentially non-existant, then what is the difference between our reality and a virtual reality simulation.
Cool stuff!
Karma? What's that again?