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Years After Shutting Down, Tevatron Reveals Properties of Higgs Boson

Posted by Soulskill on from the only-collides-particles-if-you-throw-a-rock-at-it dept.

sciencehabit writes: A U.S. atom smasher has made an important scientific contribution 3.5 years after it shut down. Scientists are reporting that the Tevatron collider in Batavia, Illinois, has provided new details about the nature of the famed Higgs boson — the particle that's key to physicists' explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass and the piece in a theory called the standard model. The new result bolsters the case that the Higgs, which was discovered at a different atom smasher, exactly fits the standard model predictions.

5 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Scientific setbacks is what allow us to advance scientifically.

  2. they nailed down its mass: 125 giga-electron volts by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Isn't that still too high of an energy level for string theory to be pursued any longer?

  3. A different atom smasher by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The submitter funnily avoids naming the largest and most complex instrument ever built by man, the European Large Hadron Collider, by casually downplaying and referring to it as "a different atom smasher". Methinks the submitter is an envious American.

  4. Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete by Sique · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I would rather disagree. I remember an interview with one of the leading physicists of CERN before the LHC was started, and he said that in some way he hopes that the Standard Model would prove to be incomplete and the Hiiggs Boson either doesn't exists or has different properties than the Standard Model predicts, because it would open a lot of new research into alternative hypotheses around a potential Grand Unified Theory.

    So the results are disappointing in a way, as the most boring of all alternative explanations seems to be true.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  5. Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Given the fact that usually we develop a truckload of new technology, manufacturing and engineering processes and materials, and sometimes even math, in the process of building the "useless" machine, sort of.

    And you actually use these things for other experiments than the main one it was built for, after all. Often to extremely good results.

    It is money well spent. Better spent than the shitload of money the military likes to give to the defense contractors, for sure.