Perhaps the wages or treatment of staff is particularly poor
If a trade college is similar to a university then the wages will not be great but the treatment of staff will be very good. One of the main attractions of working at a University is that it gives you more freedom to do your own things and show everyone what you really can do. Assuming it goes well you can then get hired by industry with a glowing resume which shows what you can really do or you find that you really like having the freedom and you stay on in academia - at least that's how it generally works in Canada.
However with this sort of entitlement attitude I'd suggest the OP moves into industry ASAP - part of the compensation - and expectation - of an academic environment is flexibility and freedom. If you want a 9-to-5 job with fixed tasks and concrete job descriptions then academia is not for you!
Where parents fit in is discipline and respect for the teacher
While, as a parent, I completely agree with that statement it is not easy given some of the teachers my kids have had. For example we've had primary school teachers who thought that "opaque" was spelt "opague", thought the french for 1,000 was 'cent' (which is 100) etc. These were not one-off accidents of writing but repeated multiple times on handwritten sheets or graded work.
It is exceedingly hard to instill respect for the teacher when you are having to correct what the teacher has told your kids all the time. Afterall, to correct an error we are effectively telling them to ignore what the teacher says because it is wrong and, as kids, the eventual logic is "if we can ignore the teacher for X perhaps we can also ignore them for Y".
As a result I'm always reluctant to correct what the teacher has said (or more often written down since kids are not always reliable at reporting what was said). Fortunately the large majority of the teachers our kids have had have been good but the odd one here and there have been somewhat problematic. However when there is something clearly wrong I feel I have to correct it regardless of the consequences and it is worth noting that generally the less than competent teachers are the ones who have had more trouble maintaining class discipline.
The Boson in question is really a quantized chunk of the fabric of empty space.
Sorry but that is not correct. A "quantized chunk of the fabric of empty space" suggests you are talking about the structure of space-time itself. Gravitational waves a oscillations in the fabric of space-time and these are very different beasts to the Higgs boson - for a start they are massless.
The Higgs is a field which fills space-time - like an electric field but different. You would not refer to a photon of light as "a quantized chunk of the fabric of empty space" because it is a quantized vibration of the EM field, not space-time itself. The same logic applies to the Higgs - it is a vibration of the Higgs field which is a field which exists inside the "fabric of empty space".
I'm not sure I understand how a 115â"130 GeV/c^2 Higgs boson can give mass to a 0.5 MeV/c^2 electron.
That's because the Higgs boson itself does not give the electron mass it is the Higgs field: the Higgs boson is just a quantized vibration of the Higgs field, like a photon is a vibration of the EM field. If you think about it in terms of the surface of a lake then the Higgs boson is a ripple on the surface. However the water in the lake will produce drag even if there are no ripples e.g. if the object is moving very slowly...but things are a little difference because water waves are classical and do not have quantized energy levels.
The "drag" i.e. mass, comes from the fact that the Higgs field does not have zero value. When writing down the equations to describe this physics you end up with two terms: one describing how a Higgs boson couples to the particle and one describing how the non-zero vacuum Higgs field couples to the particle. Since the vacuum value of the Higgs field is constant, and the field is scalar, this last term looks identical to a mass term so the particle behaves exactly the same as a particle with a mass.
The Higgs boson's mass is simply the minimum amount of energy to make the Higgs field vibrate. This is a quantum oscillator effect and so it depends on the shape of the Higgs potential around the vacuum state i.e. how does the energy density in the Higgs field change as you move the field away from the vacuum groundstate.
if mass is caused by Higgs wouldn't that make gravity dependent on Higgs?
No - think of it this way. The Higgs field explains why mass and energy are interchangeable because it explains the mass of the fundamental particles as a binding energy to the non-zero "constant" Higgs field in the universe. Hence all mass is caused by "binding" energy either to the Higgs field e.g. electrons or between particles e.g. quarks in a proton.
Gravity is a force which couples to a particle's 4-momentum NOT just to its mass. This is something Newtonian gravity gets wrong: gravity will bend light which is massless but which has a non-zero 4-momentum. All the Higgs field does is change that 4-momentum. However if we lived in a universe without a Higgs field, so that the fundamental particles have no mass, the mass-less electron would still feel gravitational forces just like the photon does in ours.
The U.S. got to the moon first. What more proof do you need?
Welcome to the 21st century. The moon landing was just over 40 years ago. So, as a non-US person, I'll give you that 40 years ago the US was first by a mile and achieved something truly awe inspiring. But that was 40 years ago and today I think it is far less clear that the US government is first...and even if it is it is barely first.
However I think in terms of the private space sector I think you definitely are in the lead...but it remains to be seen whether you'll keep it or whether the interests of the large global corporations and/or health/safety/environmental issues will end up stifling the new, young innovative space companies that you currently have (I hope not!).
Might be worth checking - I'm sure the Soyuz dimensions are specified in metric since it is a Russian design and it would not be the first time the guys at NASA have got a simple unit conversion wrong!
If you are even going to put workstations into the lab (at the university-level we are starting to think about getting rid of them in favour of student laptops) go virtual. It lets you easily switch the OS to suite the use of the room and there are cheap open source solutions available.
The thing is we have the 'graviton' listed as the force carrier, but we have not seen or don't even really know what a graviton would look like, so the Higgs is almost and alternate / parallel description of the mechanism.
Sorry but this is just wrong. The Higgs mechanism has nothing whatsoever do so with gravity and is definitely not just some alternative description of it. For a start it is a scalar field with spin-0 and so cannot create a force because that requires a direction so there is no way at all that the Higgs can possibly explain gravity - although it does explain very clearly why energy and mass are related. I appreciate that you are trying to simplify things down for a more general audience but you went a little off the rails here!
The Higgs boson is completely different to gravity and is only needed to explain why fundamental particles e.g. electron has a mass. To the OP who claimed there is no Higgs boson lets just say we have a 3.6 sigma peak which suggests otherwise!
The way the Higgs field gives mass is that the lowest energy state of the field is when the field has a non-zero value. This is very strange and very different from e.g. an electric field which has zero energy density when there is no field. This strange property means that, when you take all the energy out of the field, the field reduces to a non-zero value i.e. the Higgs field is not zero in the universe today but has a finite value.
Second the Higgs field is a scalar field which means that it has a magnitude but no direction. Again this is unlike any other known fundamental field: EM is a vector and gravity a tensor field. What this means is that while the Higgs field is not zero it does not have a direction so, unlike the other fields, it cannot cause a force (because these have a direction). Hence the Higgs field is not really at all like the poles of a magnetic field because there are no field lines as this would imply a direction and so are meaningless for a scalar field and there are no negative charges so no dipoles. When a particle is created it binds itself to the non-zero Higgs field filling the Universe and it is this "binding energy" which gives the particle its mass.
Gravity is a different force which couples to the 4-momentum (energy and linear momentum) of a particle. As you correctly state it is presumably transmitted by a massless spin-2 particle which is why it is a tensor field. However quantum theories of gravity don't work (you can make them but you have to put an arbitrary energy cut-off into them).
Note that the above is only a very brief discussion of the Higgs and misses out all the complexity, and beauty, of the spontaneous symmetry breaking process...but this post is already long enough!
Do you really expect the members of Congress, elected from the general public, to be experts in all of those areas?
No but you do expect elected politicians to be good at talking to people, specifically people who ARE experts in an area. Plus you also expect them to have enough brains to be able to weigh what they are being told against the interests of the person talking. The problem is that very few politicians, at least in the UK, come from any sort of science background. Hence they typically lack the basic tools with which to understand technical issues, even if they are properly briefed.
Worse I bet if you looked at politicians' staff you would find a similar utter lack of science backgrounds so they don't any one to give them that briefing since their staff are probably as clueless about it as they are. So while I would agree that they do not need to know specifically how X works they DO have a responsibility to make sure that they have someone they can trust who can explain technical stuff to them BEFORE they vote to pass laws on it and this part of their duty is something they are clearly failing on.
I'm not a biologist but I would imagine the set of experiments where one cannot use rodents and which are too dangerous for human trials would be relatively small.
How could you reliably know that the drug was not too dangerous for human trials without trying it on animals first? However since trials for human health where there is no suitable alternative still get funding it seems that the balance is acceptable although it seems a little dangerous that they are going to start putting relative values on animal life. For example why is an orang-utan apparently less important than a chimp? At what threshold is the risk to a human being (assuming that an alternative animal is less likely to catch a drug complication) makes it worth risking chimp for?
It doesn't help that buying things as simple as labware probably get you thrown on some 'suspected meth cook' list, either.
Labware? In Canada just trying to buy nasal decongestant tablets is enough to require asking the chemist (the tablets are behind the counter), showing photo-ID and having your name recorded. When I asked why I had to do this when tablets with exactly the same decongestant, but including paracetamol (acetaminophen) as well, were on the shelves the reason given was that without the paracetamol the tablets can be used to make meth.
So by the time you are up to labware I'm sure you are being added to a terrorist watch list!
Sorry, but I still don't get it. Before spontaneous symmetry breaking, the electron has no mass so it should not appear in the calculation.
I think you are getting a little confused between the Higgs mass and the spontaneous symmetry breaking scale. The latter is many times higher in energy than the Higgs' mass - exactly how much higher depends on the precise shape of the Higgs' potential. If you think of the bottle-bottom potential the height of the dimple in the middle determines the spontaneous symmetry breaking scale and the width of the circular valley determines the mass of the Higgs (the steeper/narrower the valley the larger the mass of the Higgs).
Even above the symmetry breaking scale the electron still has a charge so the electron diagrams will still be there (the electron can annihilate and make W bosons) but, without a mass term there is no term left over: all the diagrams cancel in the high energy limit so the cross-section does not diverge.
However below the symmetry breaking scale the non-zero vacuum expectation value (vev) of the Higgs field means that the electron will have a mass. In this regime, without a Higgs diagram, there is a left over mass term which only cancels when there is a Higgs propagator diagram. However below the Higgs mass the Higgs diagram is heavily suppressed and has a very tiny contribution. Hence if the Higgs mass is very large, say 10 TeV/c^2, then this diagram will not cancel the electron mass term from the other digrams until after the cross-section has grown past the unitarity bound.
If you assume no Higgs then you end up with a Lagrangian without any mass terms (because if you put those in you break the local gauge symmetries). However when you do the calculation of e.g. e+e- --> W+W- you have to use the fact that the electron has a mass in the Feynman calculation. This non-zero mass causes you you have a "left over" term which does not cancel in the high energy limit and causes you to break unitarity.
The Higgs mechanism gets around this by adding a new diagram e+e- --> H --> W+W- which precisely cancels the electron mass term. The reason the cancellation is perfect is because the electron gets its mass from coupling to the non-zero Higgs vacuum expectation value.
So effectively you are correct in that the reason the model fails at high energy is because you use the electron mass in the cross-section calculation but have no electron mass term in the Lagrangian so you are not being consistent....but you cannot simply stick a mass term in there without adding symmetry breaking interactions which are not observed in nature. Hence you have to add a Higgs field with a non-zero vacuum expectation value which in turn adds more than just the effective mass terms.
Hope that is comprehensible - it is hard to explain in just typed text!
You'll note that I was very careful to call it "the Standard Model Higgs". If there is. e.g. Supersymmetry, then things can be different....but something still has to happen before 1 TeV. So you can disprove the Standard Model Higgs boson but not all Higgs bosons. However if you find that nature solves the mass problem in a different way then there would be no need for a Higgs boson.
If they meant non-existence within a specific energy band, fine but that isn't what they said in the release.
The Standard Model Higgs is constrained to lie within a particular energy band due to certain scattering processes becoming more than 100% likely to occur around 1 TeV/c2 if there is no Higgs (or something else). I have not seen our ATLAS predictions for the reach with twice the 2011 data (which is what we expect in 2012) but I would be surprised if it is enough to exclude all the way to 1 TeV/c2. However if it occurs at the top end of the mass range, then it becomes hard to reconcile with the existing Standard Model parameters.
The LHC is incapable of operating at the upper energies of the predicted spectrum of the higgs boson.....(this was known before construction even started)
Sorry but we certainly are capable of probing the ENTIRE allowed mass range for the Standard Model Higgs. The upper bound is ~1 TeV/c2 because at this level, without the Higgs boson, some Standard Model processes e.g. e+e--->W+W- "break unitarity" i.e. have a more than 100% chance of happening. Since this is clearly wrong it means that the Standard Model without a Higgs breaks down. Hence we only have to cover up to 1 TeV/c2 in allowed mass and either we find the Higgs or at least see a clear deviation from the SM and possibly see what causes that deviation.
There are ways to hide the Higgs, so-called "invisible Higgs" models, but these all require physics beyond the Standard Model. Also you can fit the existing SM parameters to find a prediction for the Higgs mass and this indicates that it should be below ~200GeV/c2 with a 95% confidence - although I'd take this with a pinch of salt. Now to get to the high mass range we will certainly need the full LHC energy i.e. 14 TeV. We currently have 7 TeV but this is NOT what the LHC was designed to run at - we are just limited to this energy due to the superconducting power bar problems. So to say that it was known that we cannot reach the upper energies before construction even started is simply wrong - the LHC was specifically designed to cover the entire energy range and, once we reach the design energy, we'll be able to do just that....although it is looking like the Higgs is there just at the low end of the mass range.
A computer can store and replicate information without involving chemical processes.
Correct but it still works on the same basic principle: you can store energy in an ordered manner so that it represents information and then come back and retrieve the data later. You cannot do this in a star because the energies of the particles are too high so their random motion will rapidly destroy any information stored. For life you need to be able to both store and transport information.
Seems a bit bizarre - we have a concept of a sun so it stands to reason that they would have observed planets and at least understood what they are even if they were uninterested in them.
He didn't get a real science degree. His Bachelor of Science degree was in education. And his Master's degrees are in education and educational psychology.
So from this we can conclude that he has somehow managed to learn about all the benefits of having an education without actually managing to get one himself!
You can convert it in Calibre but, apart from the pain of having two files per book lying around, I have no idea how good the conversion is....and there is still the issue that they do not properly sell the Kindle in Canada.
Amen to that... ended up adding a 3rd party PDF reader from the app store
Nevermind PDF what about epub? The lack of support for epub is my main reason for not buying a Kindle...well that and the fact that the only way to get them in Canada is to order them from the US, paying import duties exchange commission etc. and ending up with an unsupported device.
We already have the technology to escape our solar system if we put our minds and money to it
Sorry - forgot to comment on this! We have the technology to get to another planet in the solar system but not to another solar system. This would require a trip of many thousands of years. We have NO way to make complex, continuously operating machines that last that long (to support human life) let alone any clue how to create a self-sustaining colony in space (solar flares at start/end) and zero-g (bone loss) plus the psychological and sociological issues. Just remember we are talking about a travelling colony which would have to last for at least as long as all recorded human history - we have NEVER made a society last that long, even on Earth!
We could probably send a probe to another solar system with our current tech but I see no way to send humans there nor do I see any future technologies which would even come close. To get a ship to the speed where it would take less than the functional part of a human lifetime to get there will require a sizeable fraction of the mass of the ship to be converted into kinetic energy assuming a 100% efficient mass-to-energy conversion process....and that is just to get it up to that speed - you have to decelerate again too! Even then you have to consider shielding from solar flares at the start and end of the trip, bone loss, packing enough supplies or going self sustaining without any solar power in the interstellar void.
One day I certainly hope we get there but this relies of making several major breakthroughs in different fields and so I see no way to be able to predict when those might, or might not, happen. If could be 100+ years, 10,000+ years or never.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the wages or treatment of staff is particularly poor
If a trade college is similar to a university then the wages will not be great but the treatment of staff will be very good. One of the main attractions of working at a University is that it gives you more freedom to do your own things and show everyone what you really can do. Assuming it goes well you can then get hired by industry with a glowing resume which shows what you can really do or you find that you really like having the freedom and you stay on in academia - at least that's how it generally works in Canada.
However with this sort of entitlement attitude I'd suggest the OP moves into industry ASAP - part of the compensation - and expectation - of an academic environment is flexibility and freedom. If you want a 9-to-5 job with fixed tasks and concrete job descriptions then academia is not for you!
Where parents fit in is discipline and respect for the teacher
While, as a parent, I completely agree with that statement it is not easy given some of the teachers my kids have had. For example we've had primary school teachers who thought that "opaque" was spelt "opague", thought the french for 1,000 was 'cent' (which is 100) etc. These were not one-off accidents of writing but repeated multiple times on handwritten sheets or graded work.
It is exceedingly hard to instill respect for the teacher when you are having to correct what the teacher has told your kids all the time. Afterall, to correct an error we are effectively telling them to ignore what the teacher says because it is wrong and, as kids, the eventual logic is "if we can ignore the teacher for X perhaps we can also ignore them for Y".
As a result I'm always reluctant to correct what the teacher has said (or more often written down since kids are not always reliable at reporting what was said). Fortunately the large majority of the teachers our kids have had have been good but the odd one here and there have been somewhat problematic. However when there is something clearly wrong I feel I have to correct it regardless of the consequences and it is worth noting that generally the less than competent teachers are the ones who have had more trouble maintaining class discipline.
The Boson in question is really a quantized chunk of the fabric of empty space.
Sorry but that is not correct. A "quantized chunk of the fabric of empty space" suggests you are talking about the structure of space-time itself. Gravitational waves a oscillations in the fabric of space-time and these are very different beasts to the Higgs boson - for a start they are massless.
The Higgs is a field which fills space-time - like an electric field but different. You would not refer to a photon of light as "a quantized chunk of the fabric of empty space" because it is a quantized vibration of the EM field, not space-time itself. The same logic applies to the Higgs - it is a vibration of the Higgs field which is a field which exists inside the "fabric of empty space".
Even at 1:50 scale it would be a mile in circumference.
Actually the LHC has a 27km circumference which, at 1:50 scale, would become a 540m circumference which is only about a third of a mile.
Actually it is the ATLAS Experiment (not module) which is an experiment on the LHC. The LHC actually passes through the middle of the detector.
I'm not sure I understand how a 115â"130 GeV/c^2 Higgs boson can give mass to a 0.5 MeV/c^2 electron.
That's because the Higgs boson itself does not give the electron mass it is the Higgs field: the Higgs boson is just a quantized vibration of the Higgs field, like a photon is a vibration of the EM field. If you think about it in terms of the surface of a lake then the Higgs boson is a ripple on the surface. However the water in the lake will produce drag even if there are no ripples e.g. if the object is moving very slowly...but things are a little difference because water waves are classical and do not have quantized energy levels.
The "drag" i.e. mass, comes from the fact that the Higgs field does not have zero value. When writing down the equations to describe this physics you end up with two terms: one describing how a Higgs boson couples to the particle and one describing how the non-zero vacuum Higgs field couples to the particle. Since the vacuum value of the Higgs field is constant, and the field is scalar, this last term looks identical to a mass term so the particle behaves exactly the same as a particle with a mass.
The Higgs boson's mass is simply the minimum amount of energy to make the Higgs field vibrate. This is a quantum oscillator effect and so it depends on the shape of the Higgs potential around the vacuum state i.e. how does the energy density in the Higgs field change as you move the field away from the vacuum groundstate.
if mass is caused by Higgs wouldn't that make gravity dependent on Higgs?
No - think of it this way. The Higgs field explains why mass and energy are interchangeable because it explains the mass of the fundamental particles as a binding energy to the non-zero "constant" Higgs field in the universe. Hence all mass is caused by "binding" energy either to the Higgs field e.g. electrons or between particles e.g. quarks in a proton.
Gravity is a force which couples to a particle's 4-momentum NOT just to its mass. This is something Newtonian gravity gets wrong: gravity will bend light which is massless but which has a non-zero 4-momentum. All the Higgs field does is change that 4-momentum. However if we lived in a universe without a Higgs field, so that the fundamental particles have no mass, the mass-less electron would still feel gravitational forces just like the photon does in ours.
The U.S. got to the moon first. What more proof do you need?
Welcome to the 21st century. The moon landing was just over 40 years ago. So, as a non-US person, I'll give you that 40 years ago the US was first by a mile and achieved something truly awe inspiring. But that was 40 years ago and today I think it is far less clear that the US government is first...and even if it is it is barely first.
However I think in terms of the private space sector I think you definitely are in the lead...but it remains to be seen whether you'll keep it or whether the interests of the large global corporations and/or health/safety/environmental issues will end up stifling the new, young innovative space companies that you currently have (I hope not!).
No Soyuz for me :(
Might be worth checking - I'm sure the Soyuz dimensions are specified in metric since it is a Russian design and it would not be the first time the guys at NASA have got a simple unit conversion wrong!
If you are even going to put workstations into the lab (at the university-level we are starting to think about getting rid of them in favour of student laptops) go virtual. It lets you easily switch the OS to suite the use of the room and there are cheap open source solutions available.
The thing is we have the 'graviton' listed as the force carrier, but we have not seen or don't even really know what a graviton would look like, so the Higgs is almost and alternate / parallel description of the mechanism.
Sorry but this is just wrong. The Higgs mechanism has nothing whatsoever do so with gravity and is definitely not just some alternative description of it. For a start it is a scalar field with spin-0 and so cannot create a force because that requires a direction so there is no way at all that the Higgs can possibly explain gravity - although it does explain very clearly why energy and mass are related. I appreciate that you are trying to simplify things down for a more general audience but you went a little off the rails here!
The Higgs boson is completely different to gravity and is only needed to explain why fundamental particles e.g. electron has a mass. To the OP who claimed there is no Higgs boson lets just say we have a 3.6 sigma peak which suggests otherwise!
The way the Higgs field gives mass is that the lowest energy state of the field is when the field has a non-zero value. This is very strange and very different from e.g. an electric field which has zero energy density when there is no field. This strange property means that, when you take all the energy out of the field, the field reduces to a non-zero value i.e. the Higgs field is not zero in the universe today but has a finite value.
Second the Higgs field is a scalar field which means that it has a magnitude but no direction. Again this is unlike any other known fundamental field: EM is a vector and gravity a tensor field. What this means is that while the Higgs field is not zero it does not have a direction so, unlike the other fields, it cannot cause a force (because these have a direction). Hence the Higgs field is not really at all like the poles of a magnetic field because there are no field lines as this would imply a direction and so are meaningless for a scalar field and there are no negative charges so no dipoles. When a particle is created it binds itself to the non-zero Higgs field filling the Universe and it is this "binding energy" which gives the particle its mass.
Gravity is a different force which couples to the 4-momentum (energy and linear momentum) of a particle. As you correctly state it is presumably transmitted by a massless spin-2 particle which is why it is a tensor field. However quantum theories of gravity don't work (you can make them but you have to put an arbitrary energy cut-off into them).
Note that the above is only a very brief discussion of the Higgs and misses out all the complexity, and beauty, of the spontaneous symmetry breaking process...but this post is already long enough!
Do you really expect the members of Congress, elected from the general public, to be experts in all of those areas?
No but you do expect elected politicians to be good at talking to people, specifically people who ARE experts in an area. Plus you also expect them to have enough brains to be able to weigh what they are being told against the interests of the person talking. The problem is that very few politicians, at least in the UK, come from any sort of science background. Hence they typically lack the basic tools with which to understand technical issues, even if they are properly briefed.
Worse I bet if you looked at politicians' staff you would find a similar utter lack of science backgrounds so they don't any one to give them that briefing since their staff are probably as clueless about it as they are. So while I would agree that they do not need to know specifically how X works they DO have a responsibility to make sure that they have someone they can trust who can explain technical stuff to them BEFORE they vote to pass laws on it and this part of their duty is something they are clearly failing on.
I'm not a biologist but I would imagine the set of experiments where one cannot use rodents and which are too dangerous for human trials would be relatively small.
How could you reliably know that the drug was not too dangerous for human trials without trying it on animals first? However since trials for human health where there is no suitable alternative still get funding it seems that the balance is acceptable although it seems a little dangerous that they are going to start putting relative values on animal life. For example why is an orang-utan apparently less important than a chimp? At what threshold is the risk to a human being (assuming that an alternative animal is less likely to catch a drug complication) makes it worth risking chimp for?
It doesn't help that buying things as simple as labware probably get you thrown on some 'suspected meth cook' list, either.
Labware? In Canada just trying to buy nasal decongestant tablets is enough to require asking the chemist (the tablets are behind the counter), showing photo-ID and having your name recorded. When I asked why I had to do this when tablets with exactly the same decongestant, but including paracetamol (acetaminophen) as well, were on the shelves the reason given was that without the paracetamol the tablets can be used to make meth.
So by the time you are up to labware I'm sure you are being added to a terrorist watch list!
Sorry, but I still don't get it. Before spontaneous symmetry breaking, the electron has no mass so it should not appear in the calculation.
I think you are getting a little confused between the Higgs mass and the spontaneous symmetry breaking scale. The latter is many times higher in energy than the Higgs' mass - exactly how much higher depends on the precise shape of the Higgs' potential. If you think of the bottle-bottom potential the height of the dimple in the middle determines the spontaneous symmetry breaking scale and the width of the circular valley determines the mass of the Higgs (the steeper/narrower the valley the larger the mass of the Higgs).
Even above the symmetry breaking scale the electron still has a charge so the electron diagrams will still be there (the electron can annihilate and make W bosons) but, without a mass term there is no term left over: all the diagrams cancel in the high energy limit so the cross-section does not diverge.
However below the symmetry breaking scale the non-zero vacuum expectation value (vev) of the Higgs field means that the electron will have a mass. In this regime, without a Higgs diagram, there is a left over mass term which only cancels when there is a Higgs propagator diagram. However below the Higgs mass the Higgs diagram is heavily suppressed and has a very tiny contribution. Hence if the Higgs mass is very large, say 10 TeV/c^2, then this diagram will not cancel the electron mass term from the other digrams until after the cross-section has grown past the unitarity bound.
I hope this helps - it is a very complex topic!
If you assume no Higgs then you end up with a Lagrangian without any mass terms (because if you put those in you break the local gauge symmetries). However when you do the calculation of e.g. e+e- --> W+W- you have to use the fact that the electron has a mass in the Feynman calculation. This non-zero mass causes you you have a "left over" term which does not cancel in the high energy limit and causes you to break unitarity.
The Higgs mechanism gets around this by adding a new diagram e+e- --> H --> W+W- which precisely cancels the electron mass term. The reason the cancellation is perfect is because the electron gets its mass from coupling to the non-zero Higgs vacuum expectation value.
So effectively you are correct in that the reason the model fails at high energy is because you use the electron mass in the cross-section calculation but have no electron mass term in the Lagrangian so you are not being consistent....but you cannot simply stick a mass term in there without adding symmetry breaking interactions which are not observed in nature. Hence you have to add a Higgs field with a non-zero vacuum expectation value which in turn adds more than just the effective mass terms.
Hope that is comprehensible - it is hard to explain in just typed text!
The standard model being correct
You'll note that I was very careful to call it "the Standard Model Higgs". If there is. e.g. Supersymmetry, then things can be different....but something still has to happen before 1 TeV. So you can disprove the Standard Model Higgs boson but not all Higgs bosons. However if you find that nature solves the mass problem in a different way then there would be no need for a Higgs boson.
If they meant non-existence within a specific energy band, fine but that isn't what they said in the release.
The Standard Model Higgs is constrained to lie within a particular energy band due to certain scattering processes becoming more than 100% likely to occur around 1 TeV/c2 if there is no Higgs (or something else). I have not seen our ATLAS predictions for the reach with twice the 2011 data (which is what we expect in 2012) but I would be surprised if it is enough to exclude all the way to 1 TeV/c2. However if it occurs at the top end of the mass range, then it becomes hard to reconcile with the existing Standard Model parameters.
The LHC is incapable of operating at the upper energies of the predicted spectrum of the higgs boson.....(this was known before construction even started)
Sorry but we certainly are capable of probing the ENTIRE allowed mass range for the Standard Model Higgs. The upper bound is ~1 TeV/c2 because at this level, without the Higgs boson, some Standard Model processes e.g. e+e--->W+W- "break unitarity" i.e. have a more than 100% chance of happening. Since this is clearly wrong it means that the Standard Model without a Higgs breaks down. Hence we only have to cover up to 1 TeV/c2 in allowed mass and either we find the Higgs or at least see a clear deviation from the SM and possibly see what causes that deviation.
There are ways to hide the Higgs, so-called "invisible Higgs" models, but these all require physics beyond the Standard Model. Also you can fit the existing SM parameters to find a prediction for the Higgs mass and this indicates that it should be below ~200GeV/c2 with a 95% confidence - although I'd take this with a pinch of salt. Now to get to the high mass range we will certainly need the full LHC energy i.e. 14 TeV. We currently have 7 TeV but this is NOT what the LHC was designed to run at - we are just limited to this energy due to the superconducting power bar problems. So to say that it was known that we cannot reach the upper energies before construction even started is simply wrong - the LHC was specifically designed to cover the entire energy range and, once we reach the design energy, we'll be able to do just that....although it is looking like the Higgs is there just at the low end of the mass range.
A computer can store and replicate information without involving chemical processes.
Correct but it still works on the same basic principle: you can store energy in an ordered manner so that it represents information and then come back and retrieve the data later. You cannot do this in a star because the energies of the particles are too high so their random motion will rapidly destroy any information stored. For life you need to be able to both store and transport information.
these creatures had no concept of "planets".
Seems a bit bizarre - we have a concept of a sun so it stands to reason that they would have observed planets and at least understood what they are even if they were uninterested in them.
He didn't get a real science degree. His Bachelor of Science degree was in education. And his Master's degrees are in education and educational psychology.
So from this we can conclude that he has somehow managed to learn about all the benefits of having an education without actually managing to get one himself!
You can convert it in Calibre but, apart from the pain of having two files per book lying around, I have no idea how good the conversion is....and there is still the issue that they do not properly sell the Kindle in Canada.
Amen to that... ended up adding a 3rd party PDF reader from the app store
Nevermind PDF what about epub? The lack of support for epub is my main reason for not buying a Kindle...well that and the fact that the only way to get them in Canada is to order them from the US, paying import duties exchange commission etc. and ending up with an unsupported device.
We already have the technology to escape our solar system if we put our minds and money to it
Sorry - forgot to comment on this! We have the technology to get to another planet in the solar system but not to another solar system. This would require a trip of many thousands of years. We have NO way to make complex, continuously operating machines that last that long (to support human life) let alone any clue how to create a self-sustaining colony in space (solar flares at start/end) and zero-g (bone loss) plus the psychological and sociological issues. Just remember we are talking about a travelling colony which would have to last for at least as long as all recorded human history - we have NEVER made a society last that long, even on Earth!
We could probably send a probe to another solar system with our current tech but I see no way to send humans there nor do I see any future technologies which would even come close. To get a ship to the speed where it would take less than the functional part of a human lifetime to get there will require a sizeable fraction of the mass of the ship to be converted into kinetic energy assuming a 100% efficient mass-to-energy conversion process....and that is just to get it up to that speed - you have to decelerate again too! Even then you have to consider shielding from solar flares at the start and end of the trip, bone loss, packing enough supplies or going self sustaining without any solar power in the interstellar void.
One day I certainly hope we get there but this relies of making several major breakthroughs in different fields and so I see no way to be able to predict when those might, or might not, happen. If could be 100+ years, 10,000+ years or never.