If the mass of the higgs boson likes at the right spot around 125 GeV then this is true, the vacuum may be unstable. I keep hearing people say the Standard Model needs to be fixed in this case, but does it? We are observing the universe undergoing accelerating expansion. Maybe we are already witnessing the result of an unstable vacuum.
In other words, the universe may be exploding right now.
I'm not down playing the significance of the potential assassination of Arafat, but this is one of the biggest scientific discoveries in the past 40 years. A few days coverage is not that crazy. It would be weird to not cover it. As for "what of it?", understanding what sort of universe we live in can have a very powerful effects. For example, understanding that the Earth orbits the sun or that creatures evolve or that space and time are not absolute fundamentally changed how a lot of people see themselves, religion, and their relationship to society. Those discoveries have really shaken up humanity. Does this discovery do that? No, probably not, but it may lead to some other discoveries that might do that. For example, in presentations on Higgs results I've attended, it has been suggested that if the mass of the Higgs is 125 GeV instead of 124 or 126 GeV, the vacuum may be unstable. Let me spell that out a little more clearly, space may be unstable. That's kind of a big deal.
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If the mass of the higgs boson likes at the right spot around 125 GeV then this is true, the vacuum may be unstable. I keep hearing people say the Standard Model needs to be fixed in this case, but does it? We are observing the universe undergoing accelerating expansion. Maybe we are already witnessing the result of an unstable vacuum.
In other words, the universe may be exploding right now.
I'm not down playing the significance of the potential assassination of Arafat, but this is one of the biggest scientific discoveries in the past 40 years. A few days coverage is not that crazy. It would be weird to not cover it. As for "what of it?", understanding what sort of universe we live in can have a very powerful effects. For example, understanding that the Earth orbits the sun or that creatures evolve or that space and time are not absolute fundamentally changed how a lot of people see themselves, religion, and their relationship to society. Those discoveries have really shaken up humanity. Does this discovery do that? No, probably not, but it may lead to some other discoveries that might do that. For example, in presentations on Higgs results I've attended, it has been suggested that if the mass of the Higgs is 125 GeV instead of 124 or 126 GeV, the vacuum may be unstable. Let me spell that out a little more clearly, space may be unstable. That's kind of a big deal.