'God particle' confirmation

[Super Nova]

In the paper by GHK they proposed a massless decoupled boson. The one found by CERN is massive and coupled. EBH will probably get the prize.

EBH are currently getting the recognition so if history is any guide... they will win it.

Perception and politics counts. I suspect this has been positioned for years now.

[annielaurie]

Who gets the Nobel prize?

This Higgs breakthrough is "good news for physicists, but one dreadful headache for the Nobel committee," says Ian Sample in Britain's The Guardian.

Traditionally, each Nobel prize in the sciences is awarded to no more than three individuals, but literally thousands of people made this new discovery possible. "All deserve credit," but even the leaders of the CERN teams should hold off on writing their acceptance speeches:

The likely laureates will be Peter Higgs and two of the other four living theoretical physicists whose 50-year-old work was just validated.

This isn't the first time the Nobel judges have faced this quandary: "Restricting those honored with a Nobel helps maintain their prestige. But in modern science, few discoveries are born in final form from so few parents."

http://news.yahoo.com/glimpsing-god-par ... 00913.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[boxy]

Perhaps the most important scientific advance in my lifetime.

And it's the "god" particle. Ironic.

Fuck.the.media.

[Super Nova]

Now they are moving onto Dark Matter at CERN.

After the Higgs boson, scientists at Cern aim for super LHC turn their sights on dark matter
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9383 ... atter.html

The Large Hadron Collider is to be given a £1.2 billion upgrade as scientists at the Cern laboratory turn their attention to finding dark matter.

Physicists believe dark matter is what holds the universe together. Yet while it makes up 84 per cent of all matter, and is all around us, it has never been seen as it does not produce or reflect light.

Now scientists hope that a 10-fold boost to the power of the beams of particles being smashed together inside Cern’s 17-mile tunnels will allow them to create and detect dark matter.

Plans approved by the governing body of Cern will involve its £6.6billion particle smasher being closed down for at least two years.

The move comes after Cern physicists last week announced the discovery of the particle they believe could be the elusive Higgs boson, thought to be responsible for giving other particles mass.

Although there is still much work to be done on the Higgs boson, the milestone has left many at Cern worried that the public and funders will feel their work is now complete. But other experiments will continue until the end of this year, when the LHC will close for 20 months for repairs.

The LHC works by smashing protons – the particles found at the heart of all atoms – together to produce temperatures of more than four trillion degrees Celsius, 250,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun. Detectors around the ring identify the debris thrown out from these collisions. Scientists hope that the 2020 upgrade, dubbed “super-LHC”, will let them see some of the rarest particles of all.

Phil Allport of the University of Liverpool, UK lead for one of Cern’s detectors, ATLAS, said: “It will allow us to greatly extend the reach to search for new physics as well as make some very precise measurements, for example, to potentially address the nature of dark matter.

“Essentially we will be looking for a major imbalance in the particles being emitted after a collision."

What theory is there that predicts it's existence and at what energy do they expect to find it. What characteristics do they predict. I don't know much about it, had a look and here is the best description I could find.

This paper is intended as a brief overview of the dark matter problem and a progress report on efforts to actually identify the galactic dark matter objects.

ABSTRACT: After two decades of efforts to identify the enigmatic dark matter that comprises the dominant form of matter in our galaxy, the mass range for viable candidates appears to have been reduced by more than 50 orders of magnitude. Positive results have thus far been confined to the range: 10-7 M¤ to 1.0 M¤, with apparent clustering within the ranges 10-5 M¤ to 10-3 M¤ and 0.08 M¤ to 0.5 M¤. Positive and negative results are compared with specific predictions of cosmological models.

The paper: http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw/TWIN.HTM

[Super Nova]

The Higgs boson-like particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July looks significantly more certain to exist.

The particle has been the subject of a decades-long hunt as the last missing piece of physics' Standard Model, explaining why matter has mass.

Now one Higgs-hunting team at the Large Hadron Collider report a "5.9 sigma" levels of certainty it exists. That equates to a one-in-300 million chance that the Higgs does not exist and the results are statistical flukes.

Particle physics has an accepted definition for a "discovery": a five-sigma level of certainty The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin. The "three sigma" level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row. Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
Unlikely results can occur if several experiments are being carried out at once - equivalent to several people flipping coins at the same time. With independent confirmation by other experiments, five-sigma findings become accepted discoveries

The formal threshold for claiming the discovery of a particle is a 5-sigma level - equivalent to a one-in-3.5 million chance.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19076355


Interesting how the level of certainty and the standards for the experimental evidence that must obtained to be considered a "discovery". A one-in-300 million chance is getting to the level of me being certain to win the lottery everytime.

So we can conclude it has been a verified discovery now.

[boxy]

[Rorschach]

Shouldn't this be in SCIENCE??????

[Super Nova]

Wow, looks like there is more to come. This could be an endless journey as we get smaller and heaver particles.

Mystery particle may show the universe in a whole new light

In Cern, some light particles have been spotted where no light particles are meant to be — and the physicists are very excited indeed. If they keep on turning up for a few more months it can mean only one thing: the discovery of a particle more significant for science than the Higgs boson.



The light particles began life in December as a statistical blip, a few extra photons made by the particle smashers deep below Geneva. Physicists are accustomed to blips and thought little of it — in the process of bashing protons together at approaching the speed of light, a lot of statistical “noise” is created.

Over the months that followed, however, the blip persisted. It was seen separately, in independent experiments.

Now scientists think it could be the signature of a completely new particle that will offer a window into some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. If confirmed — they will know the answer by the summer — it will represent arguably the most significant discovery by Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research.

Since the confirmation of the Higgs boson, Cern’s particle accelerator has been smashing together protons at even higher energies. In doing so, the hope has been to create even heavier particles, so far unknown to science. Could this be one?

John Ellis, a King’s College physicist and former head of theory at Cern, said: “Until last week I’d been saying, ‘No, it probably doesn’t exist, we shouldn’t get too excited, etc etc. But last week the information solidified, it didn’t go away.”

The reason physicists are so excited is because if the particle exists, they haven’t a clue what it is. Tara Shears, professor of experimental particle physics at Liverpool University said: “Every particle physicist’s dream is to see something in the data they can’t explain. That’s the moment you challenge the existing theory.”

The problem with particle physics at the moment is that scientists know it is wrong. It can’t explain gravity of dark matter, the substance that makes up most of the mass in the universe. “We know particle physics can’t explain the universe,” said Professor Shears. “So we are looking for cracks in it. This is just a hint, but a hint that could grow.”

Professor Ellis concluded: “The night before the discovery of the Higgs boson, I had Peter Higgs to dinner and we opened a bottle of champagne. I can promise you if this particle proves to be real I’m going to be opening a whole truckload of champagne.”

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/a ... 719161.ece

[Chardok]

New Particle may show that average forums user knows fuck-all about physics.

There's your thread title if you people were honest.

So, what does this discovery really mean?

It means we've discovered the Higgs Field. That's a field around you, me, your car, your moms while I fuck them, and everything else in the universe, and this field gives all that baryonic matter "Mass". This is especially true of your mother's ass, because that shit is massive, yo.

For you fucks and myself, this means not a goddamn thing. Reality will not shift, existence will not end, you will all go on living your lives of content shitheadedness. This just means we now kinda know why "mass" is a thing.

Carry on, keep calm, and don't stop sucking at reality like you always do.