Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 90 posts

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#21

Post by cpa »

berntb wrote: post #16
eranation wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To those who forgot, the web as we know it was also pretty much invented at CERN [1] so anyone who is against "science for science's sake" is indeed missing a major point. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#1...

I agree with your general point, but your example is doubtful. Gopher existed before WWW and filled the same niche. It wasn't as elegant, but it (or something else) would have grown up without WWW. The reason, in my cynical opinion, why the web took over from Gopher was not that it was technically superior, but that it allowed people to add pictures to their documents.

> it allowed people to add pictures to their documents.

Which very well may be a good definition of technical superiority for the lay man :)

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#23

Post by randomdrake »

harshreality wrote: post #19
randomdrake wrote: post #7

With big science news like this, it's always best to go to the source[0] to avoid sensationalism. Of note, is the following statement which isn't getting repeated much in the mainstream news sources: " It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model.…

Science is pretty boring to most people, who aren't interested in science per se but only want news bites for use in casual conversation. Media distorts scientific claims in order to appeal to a wider audience and make more money. God Particle Found! News at eleventy eleven!eleventy!

I find your statement regarding people wanting nothing more than news bites for casual conversation to be intriguing. I wonder how much consumption of information is for nothing more than to be able to converse about it.

When I was a bartender, I would often consume tidbits of popular sporting events or news just so I could hold conversations with my patrons. I had absolutely 0 interest in who crashed at Daytona that day.

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#24

Post by bmuon »

huhtenberg wrote: post #3

A physicist friend of mine said, half jokingly, that with that much money poured into the project they had no other option but to find that damn boson.

It's actually very interesting to see how seriously confirmation bias taken by CERN/the collaborations. Not only do they carefully look at the properties of what they find to see if they found something else, but they also take into account other statistical details like the look-elsewhere effect [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#26

Post by mcintyre1994 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #3

A physicist friend of mine said, half jokingly, that with that much money poured into the project they had no other option but to find that damn boson.

Sort of related question, which may sound a bit rubbish since I don't really know the physics or their scientific method at that scale, but were they doing enough experiments that they'd have eventually said it couldn't exist if they never found it for some amount of time? Or was it always something that could only be proven, not disproven?

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#27

Post by sid6376 »

There was a fascinating series of articles on New York times on the search for the Higgs Boson.[1]

There was also an attempt to explain what is the Higgs Boson , by means of some drawings and analogies in the second part of the series. Perhaps someone knowledgeable could comment how accurate the explanation is.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-higgs-...

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#28

Post by RockofStrength »

"The particle's existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, so the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be."

So does this mean that an ether really does permeate space?

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#29

Post by micampe »

berntb wrote: post #16
eranation wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To those who forgot, the web as we know it was also pretty much invented at CERN [1] so anyone who is against "science for science's sake" is indeed missing a major point. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#1...

I agree with your general point, but your example is doubtful. Gopher existed before WWW and filled the same niche. It wasn't as elegant, but it (or something else) would have grown up without WWW. The reason, in my cynical opinion, why the web took over from Gopher was not that it was technically superior, but that it allowed people to add pictures to their documents.

The most important difference between Gopher and HTTP were not images, it was hyperlinks instead of a hierarchical structure.

Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

#30

Post by elwin »

RockofStrength wrote: post #28

"The particle's existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, so the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be." So does this mean that an ether really does permeate space?

The Higgs field is something like the idea of an ether, pervading all space, but it is not related to the propagation of light.
Post reply on HN