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Growing Consensus: The Higgs Boson Exists
It's a long, slow road from tentative discovery, to various forms of peer review, to wide acceptance, never mind theory and experimental design, but recent years' work to pin down the Higgs Boson seem to be bearing fruit in the form of cautious announcements. FBeans writes with excerpts from both the New York Times ("Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.") and from The Independent ("Cern says that confirming what type of boson the particle is could take years and that the scientists would need to return to the Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest 'atom smasher' — to carry out further tests. This will measure at what rate the particle decays and compare it with the results of predictions, as theorised by Edinburgh professor Peter Higgs 50 years ago.")
What is this Higgs Bosun?
The name of the particle is the Higgs Boson. The article title is incorrectly using the possessive form.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
G'day skippa!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Thank's for all your hard work, editor's.
You know we're going to see this headline:
"Scientists prove that God exists."
Scary.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Bigg Bosoms
Consensus (ie. human agreement) isn't part of the scientific method. All you need is that your experiment be repeatable by others and that your measured results be statistically significant within all the relevant bounds of experimental error.
If other teams witness the same results as you then you might be tempted to call that "consensus", but you'd be wrong. Human opinion and agreement doesn't enter into it. The desired level of agreement is a mathematical property of the observations, not the agreement of humans.
I'm not quite sure what that question is. I think the answer you may be looking for is: The Scientific Method!
If I understand this correctly, the Higgs is what gives particles their mass. Is there anyway we could influence them somehow to reduce the mass of a particle?
A testable hypothesis, ?
Have they measured it yet?
Dear Lord... the creature's power comes from electricity | radiation | tachyons | nanobots | god particles!
crazy dynamite monkey
Or would that be putting Descartes before the force?
How does the Higgs Boson giver mass to other particles?
And some other interesting questions:
How is a Higgs Boson produced?
Can we produce these particles at will?
Can we affect gravity with them?
It's just short for Goddamn particle, because it was so hard to find..
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Flying cars, invisibility, peace in the Middle East, FTL travel, consensus on the original lyrics to "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"?
What?
Also, can the Large Hadron Collider be used to find small and medium Hadrons?
[ Seriously CERN, think about multipurpose usefulness once in a while. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
http://xkcd.com/154/
"generally accepted scientific fact" = consensus --- otherwise, what's the "generally accepted" part? There is no stronger scientific definition of "fact" that transcends a general consensus based on a multitude of apparently properly done confirming experiments.
... physicists celebrate mass.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I did not really see that number stated in the various articles. I read that the US Tevatron saw a 'hint" of Higgs with three possible events.
The other thing I read in Physics Today is there are six classes and over thirty ways the Higgs can decay. Some ways are easier to see with current detectors than others. The July 4 announccment was based on at least two decay modes. The more modes the more confidence.
Agreed... wrong way to go on both sides. Religious groups saying "Scientists have proven the existence of God!" and anti-religion groups saying "Scientists have proven that "God" is nothing more than a fluctuation in the energy field of reality!"
Both could be true or false, but are completely outside the issue at hand. What would people have done if we'd called it the Nietzsche particle?
...no, no -- that's not how it's going to be "picked up".
Let's take a look:
NBC News: Particle confirmed as Higgs boson
Associated Press: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson
Reuters: Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN
Wall Street Journal: New Data Boosts Case for Higgs Boson Find
FOX News: Physicists say they have found long-sought Higgs boson
Washington Post: A closer look at the Higgs boson particle that helps explain what gives matter size and shape
Chicago Tribune: Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN
Sky News: Higgs Boson: Experts Sure Of 'God Particle'
New York Daily News: Physicists say they have discovered crucial subatomic particle known as Higgs boson
Boston Globe: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson
BBC (UK): LHC cements Higgs boson identification
BusinessWeek: Case for Higgs Boson Strengthened by New CERN Analysis
The Daily Mail (UK): Scientists say they HAVE found the 'God particle' - but admit they still aren't sure what type of Higgs boson it is
The Independent (UK): Have they found the Higgs boson at last? Cern physicists say they're confident of 'God particle' breakthrough
Telegraph (UK): Higgs boson: scientists confident they have discovered the 'God particle'
News Limited (AU): Higgs boson, the God particle, discovered by CERN
US News and World Report: Physicists Observe Higgs Boson, the Elusive 'God Particle'
None of these articles make any links to "God" other than a few -- mostly UK, not US -- sources referring to it as the so-called "God particle", but even those explain exactly what this particle is theorized to be, not anything supernatural, "proving God exists", or having anything whatever to do with God.
It will probably be in the next version of NetHack.
Bitching about spelling and grammar like Bosun and Higg's with the apostrophe.
This post is still far better written then anything from the Huffington Post, a company of barely literate Gen Y'rs trying to write the "news" on their iPhones in between Tweets and popping Ritalin and Red Bull.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
So we couldn't lower the mass of a spaceship and accelerate it past light speed?
The Higgs (named after Peter Higgs, not Higg, as your use of the possessive apostrophe would suggest) boson gives fermions and several bosons (including itself) their intrinsic mass. Even when discussing relativity, "mass" usually refers to the intrinsic Newtonian-style mass that you mean when you say "rest mass." "Relativistic mass" means the total energy of a system divided by c^2, which includes the intrinsic mass.
I also doubt the OP is referring to relativistic mass because he's talking about reducing mass. It's easy to reduce relativistic mass.
OMG, religious zealots might start believing in god! Uh, wait....
I really don't understand people who get excited over that nickname. Leon Lederman nicknamed the Higgs boson the goddamn particle for his book, and his publisher made him change it. People who aren't zealots know the particle has nothing to do with god and don't care. People who are zealots... will likely remain zealots. The only ones affected are weird edge cases like you who get excited about what you think other people might get excited about.
We can lower the mass of a spaceship already by using lighter construction materials and jettisoning any bits we don't need --- however, that helps nothing to boost the speed past c. Within the framework of our present best scientific understanding (the "Standard Model" that predicted the Higgs Boson), you still can't go faster than light no matter what chicanery you attempt. Perhaps some future discovery (requiring a serious re-write of physics fundamentals) will change this, or perhaps not (the more likely case in my opinion); this present confirmation of old physics theories doesn't present any new physics that would allow wacky radical new things like faster-than-light travel.
Uses improper "graviton", but yes.
Wing commander: the secret missions
McGuffin plot device: Kilrathi invent super gravity intensifying device that increases object rest mass 137fold. Used it on Goddard Colony.
Interestingly enough, it increases gravity, but doesn't alter inertial activity, so planets this happens to don't fly out of orbit or fall into their star.
Also, for some mysterious reason, has no effect on spaceships.
No - you'd need to decrease the mass of the spaceship to zero to do that, relativity and the speed of light limit applies to any object with mass, no matter how small. What you might be able to do is reduce the mass to get closer to the speed of light, but you still can't break it.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
theories can be useful. the standard model is useful for predicting the outcome of experiments. these Higgs boson results are a part of that. there are actually several theories about the Higg boson's properties (such as spin and decay rate & products), and more research will tell which of those models are useful. science is about useful models, you want Truth go next door to Philosophy department.
All these government scientists know they can keep getting grant money toeing the standard modelist line.
And besides, even if the Higgs Field does exist, it doesn't prove the theory is correct, so why should we be spending millions of dollars to change textbooks when there is nothing we can do with this knowledge anyway.
When the electron was discovered, it could have also, and naively been considered useless. However here we are commenting on the latest discovery of science, utilising that very knowledge. The point is, you don't know what will be usefull and what won't be useful. Besides it's fun, interesting and nearly always useful to learn how the universe works. The internet was made at CERN, you could say as a result of this research. So.....
Its not perfect replication, but the LHC has 2 multipurpose exeriments ATLAS and CMS. They a 2 separate teams of people, using different detectors of different designs, different software and different analysis techniques. The do share some systems, ie the same proton beam (so a miss calculation in the beam energy will effect them both (not that it matters a huge amount for proton collisions)), they sometimes work in the same buildings, and they go to the same canteens.
They both see the same bump in their data in multiple channels. scientists dont really use the word proof. but it is fairly clear that there is a particle at ~125 GeV, that behaves very much like the boson predicted by theory. hopefully soon we'll have an e+e- collider that will see the same thing.
well, there are "fermions", after Fermi, and "bosons", after Bose, but those are the two classes of particles. There are "gluons", ending in -on, but from English "glue". Then there are the W and Z bosons, which are just letters, and the quarks...
The Higgs field is part of the a particular formulation of quantum field theory that is often called the Standard Model. There are lots of other quantum field theories, and other theories that are not field theories, not quantum theories, or both, that may or may not have any relation to reality.
The existence of a Higgs particle in a particular energy range, detectable by such and such means, is a hypothesis, motivated by theory called the Standard Model, other more speculative theories which may one day be incorporated into the standard model, and practicality (most of the theorized Higgs particles are simply out of reach of our collider building capabilities).
Making the particular observations specified by the hypothesis supports that hypothesis, and also the theory that originated the hypothesis. These observations have already been replicated, by the way. Making other observations specified by the hypothesis will further support it. Currently we have decent evidence for a particle, but not so much evidence about whether it has the specific properties required to be the Higgs particle predicted by the theory.
Theories are not accepted hypotheses! Particularly not in physics. Unfortunately this erroneous definition seems to have made it into several dictionaries. Of course, people who write dictionaries are almost never scientists.
It links to an AP story with the headline "Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson", which says...
If you've going to posit a "system aboard the ship that increases the energy density of the higgs field in your local vicinity," you might as well posit that you have a magic box that locally increases the value of c. Within our current scientific understanding, the properties of fundamental fields, like the value of c and the gravitational/inertial mass equivalence, are simply facts of the universe that can't be manipulated with some snazzy device. By starting your though experiment with a device that already lies outside scientific understanding, it's no wonder that you can reach conclusions (faster-than-c travel) also outside the same framework. Perhaps this is possible in some future new scientific framework (or perhaps not), but it's idle sci-fi speculation until such a system is rigorously developed.
The Higgs is merely a liberal myth to get funding from big government by Photoshoping particle path photos using smelly hippie open-source software to claim they almost detected it.
Next those commie atheist Sharia liberal hippies will tell you that subatomic particles work the same way inside poor people that they do inside wealthy job creators!
Equality of physics? What's next, free sunshine?
And those damned neutrinos CANNOT go through us Republicans. We have guns! Neutrinos only pass through surrendering cowards!
Table-ized A.I.
relativity and the speed of light limit applies to any object with mass, no matter how small.
Don't they apply to massless objects too?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
> What you might be able to do is reduce the mass to get closer to the speed of light, but you still can't break it.
That's an assumption. People used to assume breaking the sound barrier was impossible at one point too.
No one has proved one way or the other that FTL is (or isn't) possible. The jury is still out. Lowering mass is only one potential way to do it -- there are other theorized ways.
Nothing with mass can go the speed of light.
So, you can "lower" it as much as you want and it will just approach light speed more closely. That is, assuming you could use the Higgs to do that, which there is no evidence you could even do that.
Still, if you could somehow lower mass, or perhaps more accurately, the effects of mass, you would still have quite the advance there, but it still wouldn't be FTL.
The fundamental difference between belief in science and belief in religion:
Lets say somehow the world's scientific knowledge was lost; completely wiped off the face of the world. After the inevitable chaos, death, and destruction from the lack of food, water, medical care, power generation, etc, etc, the world would get going on science again eventually. And after a few thousand years, the body of knowledge would be fundamentally the same as what it is now. There will, doubtless, be areas that are well advanced compared to what we know now, there will also be areas that are seriously degraded compared to what we have now. But the same fundamental truths would be known.
Now lets say somehow the worlds religious knowledge was lost; completely wiped off the face of the world. You'd have a few weeks of peace as several groups forget just what it is that they've been fighting about all these centuries (or more likely, the people in power would simply find a new thing to fight about because once you've been fighting for centuries it isn't easy to stop). Then I suspect that you'd have a long period of turmoil as a few million cults spring up, combine, fight, schism, and reform. And at the end, you'll have a religious landscape that is fundamentally different from what exists today. How do I know that? Because different cultures around the world have fundementally different religious beliefs. Even if you gave everyone a copy of the Bible, in a century you'd have 100 different translations and 50 different sects and I know that because, again, history shows it to be true.
You're trolling right? That's *not* an assumption. It's Relativity, which is the thing Einstein figured out. You'd need some pretty exotic discoveries indeed to overcome that.
You are not going to be able to accelerate any mass, no matter how small, to the speed of light in a vacuum, full stop. The amount of energy needed to accelerate any mass whatsoever to light speed becomes infinite as you approach it.
What you *may* be able to do is functionally overcome the speed of light by altering spacetime or cutting through it somehow with something like wormholes. In that situation, you still are moving at less than light speed, but you actually reduced the distance between the two points, so you don't need to go light speed to get there in a reasonable amount of time. Even that is somewhat unlikely, but you could certainly suggest the jury is still out on that.
Belief and knowledge are different.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Only morons or illiterates believe that this represents "discovering God", and being religious doesn't make you either.
Hell, the new Pope has an M.S. in Chemistry, so that's at least major one religion that isn't going to do something that retarded.
And the "God" particle is being used by the Media, not scientists. They had to shorten, "the Goddamn particle" to something that could be printed, and they realized that calling it the God particle would make a great headline. If you want to blame someone for idiocy and lack of science understanding, start with the Media.
I would have to take issue with your premise. If we were to follow the hypothesis that religion were recreated from scratch, I would posit that it could be taken as a certainty that the rules, Don't lie, don't cheat, don't murder, etc would be present. The trappings will probably be different, but the fundamental rules would remain the same. Esp. in light of the fact that they appear in every major and most minor religions that exist. Don't get so caught up in the begats that you miss the beatitudes.
A bo's'n is a warrant officer in the deck department of Navy ships as well, supervising all sorts of deck activities such as mooring, anchoring, taking on fuel, and standing various watches.
uhm, reading comprehension is hard for you? I am pretty sure I said you couldn't violate c this way, at the very beginning. Only that you could go very fast without normal reaction mass as the source of forward momentum.
As for the mechanism, I was leaning more toward artificially increasing the higgs particle density, rather than increasing particle interaction affinities. Much light bombarding the living fuck out of a uranium atom with neutrinos and electrons will cause it to decay faster, due to increased presense of w boson from that combination interacting with said atom, causing high energy excitation of the higs field to knock off "real" particles could at least in theory increase local higgs boson concentrations, due to the longer particle lives of the excited particles. Increased particle density with the same affinities means more interaction possibilities, means a greater effect of the scalar field. Again, we are not talking about changing the mechanism of the higgs field. We are simply adjusting the concentration slightly by altering decay rate, by injecting energy into the field.
This is just the first step. The next particle they find will be called the "evolution particle".
Every predomently atheist society has the same rules, even those rare cultures that have no concept of religion. You're trying to argue that religion and morality are the same thing, which they need not be. It's true to a certain extent, most religions codify those morals, but then again, so do most governments.
OK, I'll be slightly clearer: Assuming that the equations of relativity are an accurate reflection of how our universe works, nothing with positive mass can travel at c or faster. That's a pretty unambiguous version.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Yes, but in a different way. Nothing with positive mass can travel at-or-faster-than c. Things without mass (photons, basically) must travel at exactly c. There's also wriggle room for things with negative mass, tachyons, which must travel faster than c.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Hmmm, "being replicated at Fermilab" starts out at score +1.
I point out that the Fermilab collider is shut down, and post a link to that effect, and then "being replicated at Fermilab" gets modded up +4.
Great job, moderators!
Sorry, I was reading a bit too quickly, and assuming you were continuing the discussion of the grandparent poster asking "couldn't you lower the mass of a spaceship and accelerate it past light speed?".
Anyway, you're still trying to pull some not-in-known-physics sleight of hand with your higgs-o-matic mass fiddling device. If I'm reading you right, you're saying that particles still have the same rest mass contribution from the existing (unchanged) Higgs field, plus extra interactions with the extra Higgs particles being sprayed about. However, there's nothing "special" about free Higgs that makes their interactions with other particles violate the conservation of energy/mass built into the field equations structure. You don't "increase the rest mass of the system" (without pumping in energy from an external source), or "decouple the parity between inertial mass and rest mass" by this mechanism. You just have particles that are both bouncing off virtual Higgs in the vacuum Higgs field (giving them intrinsic mass), plus extra physical Higgs (nothing more special here than bouncing off photons or protons or anything else).
Adding the extra Higgs is approximately equivalent to filling the spaceship with molasses: you'll notice "gee, I have to push my chair a lot harder to move it across the room than without the molasses." The chair has extra "effective mass" due to the molasses (which you notice when you try to accelerate it through the molasses), but it doesn't actually get any heavier so far as the gravitational pull from the distant star is concerned. The star keeps pulling the whole molasses-filled spaceship together without caring about the added "effective mass" from the surplus Higgs. In solid state physics, you learn that electrons can also pick up extra "effective mass" when moving in certain materials due to additional interactions --- but actual conservation of mass or overall rest/inertial mass equivalence is never violated.
You aren't fat, you're big boson'd
What? Those aren't common to even just the major world religions.
Required reading for internet skeptics
That is correct. The higgs manipulation device would be a monsterous energy hog, and would release a shitton of useless energy as the excited higgs particles decay.
That is not where the ship gets the energy to move forward.
All gravitational attractions are mutual. When you jump off the ground, the earth is ever so slightly attracted to you and moves up, as you fall back down. (This is balanced by the energy you supplied when you kicked off the ground, for a net of 0.)
In this case, the "mollasses" effect makes it "harder" to pull the spaceship, while the distant gravitating planet remains unchanged. This means the same force over time is exerted, but due to the extra higgs being present, the spaceship takes longer to fall, increasing time. This means that while the extra energy is being injected, the ship has a higher potential energy while falling, than it does with the field off, on escape. The energy comes at the expense of the star or planet's current kinetic energy. (The planet or star slows down/changes vector slightly, you gain the difference.)
All energy is accounted for. The energy you expend to excite the higgs bleeds off into space as particle radiation of various kinds, the planet/star slows down appropriate to the energy you gain in the form of momentum, and your ships's mass depletes in accordance with your energy use.
It isn't "normal" reaction mass, because you aren't spraying massed particles out the back. You are expending the energy equivalent of that mass as energy injected into the higgs field instead.
This allows you to make more efficient use of fuel, by using an energy dense fuel source, like fissile uranium, instead of inefficient propellent.
What you seem to be missing is why your plan *doesn't* work if you actually used molasses instead of Higgs --- and that the Higgs aren't particularly different in this respect. So, your ship is embedded in a blob of Higgs molasses. If the free Higgs were somehow pinned stationary to the fabric of spacetime, then it would indeed slow down the ship being pulled by the star's gravity. However, just as with embedding the ship in a molasses ball, the ship and free Higgs cloud are falling *together* under the same gravitational pull of the star --- just as fast as before. In fact, it is a fundamental tenet of Einstein's relativity that there is no such thing as "pinned stationary to the fabric of spacetime" (since spacetime has no fixed reference frame onto which to grab) --- no matter what exotic particle or pancake topping you spread around the ship, the whole ensemble will always tumble in exactly the same way around the star. In the relativity picture, the ship is not even being "pulled" by the star, but moving along a geodesic path in mass-warped spacetime that doesn't depend on the rest mass of the ship at all (hence the apparent gravitational/inertial mass equivalence).
No, because most of the mass doesn't come from the Higgs field.
Specifically, most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from the nuclei of atoms. Those are composed of protons and neutrons, which are in turn composed of a mix of quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons, with 3 "extra" quarks. The Higgs field gives mass to the quarks and anti-quarks (including the extras) but most of the mass of the particle is due to the binding energy of the strong force interaction between the constituent parts. So reducing the strength with which the Higgs field acts wouldn't substantially reduce the mass of the spaceship.
Even if you could lower the mass you couldn't make it 0 or negative, so you'd end up taking infinite energy anyway.
Not a sentence!
If that is true, then explain frame dragging.
The degree to which a reference frame drags in comparison to another reference frame is dependent upon the mass energies of both frames. This mechanism directly futzes with that rest mass energy. It should therefor alter the behavior of the two frames involved.
I don't understand how/why you are involving frame-dragging in this; frame dragging is specifically an effect around spinning objects (if the star is rotating), which wasn't necessarily a part of your earlier considerations. Without understanding your question, I'll venture an answer that may not be useful: while spacetime doesn't have a preferred translational frame, you can tell whether or not you are spinning: if you ever find yourself floating out in empty space, there's no way to feel how fast or in what direction you are going. However, you can tell if you're spinning (just like spinning around in a desk chair). So, a spinning star does create a differently-shaped spacetime around it than a still one, which will move the ship on a different trajectory. But this trajectory is still unchanged whether the ship has molasses or Higgs around it or not. Perhaps another un-helpful answer to the wrong question: to the extent that the ship is heavy enough relative to the star, you do need to include the full bi-directional interactions between both for the motion (not just viewing the ship as moving in an orbit due to the star mass alone). Again, however, the universe doesn't distinguish in this case between carrying along a ball of Higgs or sucrose syrup.
Perhaps a useful thing to keep in mind is that the Higgs is "special" not so much on account of the free particle itself (which you can generate), but on account of the underlying field (which you can't manipulate): the Higgs field has a non-zero "vacuum expectation value," unlike all the other fields. This means that all of "empty space" is effectively already filled with a sea of Higgs (beyond the fluctuation-about-zero-point spontaneous generation of other field quanta virtual pairs) which cause the omnipresent molasses drag we see as particle mass. Again, it's the vacuum-expectation-value-having field which causes this, while extra free Higgs above the vacuum level don't cause any more "special" mass/energy effects than any other interacting particle.
1) there is no such thing as a motionless massive object.
2) all massive particles have spin, which is conserved when you compress it into a singularity. That is why there is no such thing as a rotation-less singularity.
3) said vehicle has spin in relation to other frames, regardlss of arguing semantics of the first two. The entire planetary system is rotating around a sun, and the sun is rotating around a giant supermassive black hole, itself rotating around a mutual barycenter with several hundred other galaxies in the local group. Asserting that the craft does not have rotation is equally as absurd as arguing for a universal reference frame, or for universal time. The craft has a vector of motion, and mass, and therefor, has rotation when measured in at least one other frame, which must be conserved. The vehicle will therefor have a dragging reference frame in relational proportion to its mass energy, and the reference frame(s) it interacts with.
4). I am not aware that significant studies of physical higgs particles had been conducted to rule that physical higgs behave differently than virtual ones at conveying the fundemental force their field represents, anymore than virtual photons and physical photons behave sufficiently differently to prevent physical photons from converying electromagnetic force any differently from virtual ones. That is certainly news to me, because it means long distance radio shouldn't work! Only near field! (Especially in light of the fact that the particle detected at cern has only recently been given the honor of being officially accepted as even BEING a physical higgs to begin with.)
1, 2) yes, every big object will probably have at least some tiny net spin from its Fermion components --- however, most of these spins will (randomly) cancel out in bulk; there will be much larger net angular momentum from overall orbital motions of the mass which will entirely swamp the spin of the system.
3) Yes, there's some small frame-dragging effect from the orbital angular momentum of the ship, too. These are very tiny corrections, and --- most importantly for this line of reasoning --- not effected differently by the Higgs, because generating extra Higgs *does not* increase the mass of your spaceship.
4) A relevant quote from the Wikipedia Higgs Boson page, which sums it up better than I was:
The Standard Model shows how the energy of the Higgs field and vacuum can manifest, in the right conditions, as the property we call 'mass'. But the Higgs field is not actually "creating" mass miraculously out of nothing (which would violate the law of conservation of energy). In Higgs-based theories, mass is a manifestation of potential energy transferred to the particle during interactions ("coupling") with the Higgs field, which had contained that mass in the form of energy.[33]
Extra free Higgs don't behave "differently" from the coupling with vacuum Higgs. However, it is the fact that the vacuum Higgs field coupling is omnipresent that "creates" the mass term. Adding more Higgs is just like adding more of any particles: whatever extra interaction energy you *add* from the excess Higgs comes out of extra energy required to *create* the excess Higgs, so the total mass/energy of your system remains unchanged.
The Higgs (...) boson gives fermions and several bosons (including itself) their intrinsic mass.
The Higgs boson does not give itself or anything else mass.
Interaction with the Higgs field gives fundamental particles, including the Higgs boson, their intrinsic mass. A Higgs boson is just an excitation of the Higgs field that is interesting to us only because it evinces the existence of the field.
There aren't Higgs bosons all over the universe giving everything mass; it takes a hell of a lot of effort to bring a Higgs boson into a brief existence, which is why we need these huge high-energy colliders. In fact it takes so much energy to make a Higgs boson that the Higgs boson has a much higher mass than many of the fundamental particles (mass is just energy, rest mass is just total energy minus kinetic energy), so it wouldn't make any sense for really heavy Higgs bosons to give really light particles their mass.
The Higgs boson isn't even responsible for all or even most intrinsic mass. Most of the mass of ordinary matter is found in the binding energies holding fundamental particles together into the compound particles that most ordinary matter is made up out of. Every time a particle interacts with a field, it loses some of its kinetic energy and gains rest mass. Rest mass comes from interactions between what would otherwise be massless particles moving at light speed. Mass is just energy; when kinetic energy is "lost" in an interaction, and not just transferred to something else, it is converted to rest-mass. Most of the mass of the matter we're familiar with is accounted for by the three known electronuclear interactions (the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces).
What the Higgs field explains is why, after we have accounted for interactions with all known fields, many of the fundamental particles, all by themselves not apparently interacting with anything, still exhibit rest mass and move slower than light. If they weren't interacting with any fields at all, everything should be massless and moving at lightspeed. The Higgs field is the proposed field which massive fundamental particles are interacting with, which slows them down and gives them mass.
(Rather, it's the field with which the truly fundamental particles interact, causing them to manifest as the massive "fundamental" particles we are familiar with. Our familiar fundamental particles aren't "made of" these other particles, like an atom is made of protons and neutrons, so much as in the absence of a Higgs field there would be fundamental particles with completely different properties in the universe, and the presence of a Higgs field forces the ones we end up seeing as massive to behave differently from their constant interaction with it, appearing as the massive fundamental particles with the properties we are familiar with).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
When the electron was discovered, it could have also, and naively been considered useless.
I don't really agree with that. The effects and usefulness of the electron - aka electricity - were "discovered" before anyone knew what the electron was. It was already useful before the exact mechanism (the electron) was even understood. The practical came long before the theory and the full understanding of the physics.
Better known as 318230.
To be brutally blunt, your interjection serves no useful purpose to this argument, not to any other argument. It is a straight up ad-hominem.
As for why you experience resistance, this is very simple: you expect others to simply consume what you tell them, and accept it unquestioningly. That is not the way of science, and instead the way or rhetoric and religion.
It is not enough to say "no, it is like this." Nor is it enough to say "no, it is like this because." You must say "no, it is like this because,... and we know this because of this experiment, which you can read about here."
The first two can be filled in with premium bullshit by even the quackiest of nutters. The last one is how science really works. Nothing is taken for granted, nothing is accepted without question, and results are always verified.
That you don't have the patience to supply sources for your arguments, and are unhappy when people question them shows that you believe others should follow you without question, since "you are an educated scientist." This ignores the fact that scientists have been and continue to be dead wrong, and just haven't been exposed to enough empirical data to realize it yet. Classic examples are things like phlogiston, and the cosmic aether. It isn't enough to say "the cosmic aether was disproven almost a century ago." If your goal is to educate, you have to cite the michaelson-morley experiment. Without the experiment, it is merely an assertion, and your arguing partner rightly asserts that it is such. Your arguing partner may genuinely not know about that experiment, even though it is extraordinarily famous. (Many people you would interview on a street corner would not even have heard of it in fact.) As such, not citing the experiment, and complaining about ignorance is hipocrisy, since you are complaining about the ignorance, while doing nothing to correct it, and lauding yourself for your superior knowledge. That does not often win over intelligent people.
Unless you supply the emprical findings, which is what is the fundemental heart of science, and why it is different from reigion and philosophy, you have no basis to complain when people treat your line of argument as if it were a religious position, since you have supplied exactly the same amount of proof as if it were such. Complaining about people questioning you relentlessly, and asserting that doing so indicates a general lack of scientific exposure does not follow. Science's lifeblood is disbelief, questioning, and verification. If you supply nothing but anectdotes and rhetoric, there is nothing to verify, and you are not behaving like a scientist.
I don't hold scientists in any illusory position of enlightnment. That is why I argue the way I do. Doing so is not incorrect. Your emotional reaction to not having your ego stroked does not make your methodology correct.
If I argue, and am wrong, shut me up with publicly readable citations that don't require my selling my soul to elsevier to read them. That is the proper methodology, and is what I truely need from you to accept an answer. Without that data, you are giving an opinion, and can be wrong. Being a scientist does not make you magically immune, and I won't accept that as a replacement for data.
Now, kindly put up, or shut up.
This is clear proof that god exists
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Discovering that which the maths already shows exists is hardly a great discovery. Or perhaps some of you are dumb enough to think maths (in a fundamental sense) can be wrong.
...or right. As Bertrand Russell said, Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.". The full paragraph in which that appears explains in more detail:
Shorter Bertrand Russell: math is all about making some assumptions for the lulz and seeing what comes out the other end, not about Truth-with-a-capital-T.
(And Gödel's incompleteness theorem indicates that no set of assumptions is sufficient to let you prove or disprove every possibly "this is what comes out the other end" statement.)
Here's a fact. In the early days of nuclear science, the 'neutron' was considered a 'state secret' and its existence was missing from public science books of the time.
I guess by 1932 the "early days of nuclear science" had passed.
I've always wondered why you (US) don't immediately dismiss a person from their position in your legislature at the first occurrence of them mentioning "God" in their official capacity. Surely "separation of Church and State" is sufficient to make sure that only the rational and objective are in positions of power?
Read as snarky if you want, but it's not intended that way. I'm genuinely curious.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Good job, dude. I think your post single-handedly created an even bigger crock!
So.. it only took 300 years, to prove all the alchemists right ..but in order to do so, we needed to make it look "scientific an all, eh?" So we now call "The Ether" the "Higgs-Boson" ....
Like.. er.. wow...
It's just short for Goddamn particle, because it was so hard to find..
Don't mod that as funny, it's the truth!
THINK! It's patriotic