As it happens, about a fortnight ago I was talking to a recently retired but still active professor at CERN (he is the father of a friend of mine). I asked him where things stood with the Higgs Boson, and his reply was that they are definitely seeing a pretty strong signal in the data they've gathered, but they're not sure what it is yet exactly. In particular, it could match any one of a number of different competing theories (Disclaimer: I am not a particle physicist so I might have misremembered the precise terminology he used).
Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
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Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#42With 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.…
Well, to be fair, does the sourced NYT article not say exactly what the quote indicates--specifically to the point of referencing the quote itself? Even the article's title says it is a , not the , Higgs boson that is found. Moreover, the article also says " it remains an "open question," CERN said in a statement, whether this is the Higgs boson that was expected in the original formulation, or possibly the lightest…
I wasn't speaking directly to the NYT article. I was speaking to the multitude of sites that came up when I was searching for the source. Many of the headlines were along the lines of "god particle found."
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#43> It [the LHC] has been creating high-energy collisions to smash protons and then study the collisions and determine how subatomic particles acquire mass — without which the particles would fail to stick together.
Too bad -- a science writer wouldn't have made this elementary error.
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#44With 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.…
You're misunderstanding the quoted passage. In either case it would be the Higgs that they were searching for. The uncertainty is about the structure that exists beyond the standard model. Some sort of Higgs is still necessary in almost any extension to this model, which is why everyone was so damn certain it would be found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models
I am not a physicist, only someone who enjoys physics, so
I may be. I would love to be enlightened if I did misunderstand.
My understanding from the statement is that they know there is the effects of a Higgs has been observed. But that this isn't necessarily the Higgs which fits into the Standard Model. I understand there are other models which may be considered but I thought that there were specific conditions which would satisfy the Standard Model.
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#45Earlier 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.
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Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#46A 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
> 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 ...
If psychology adopted this level of scientific discipline, it would destroy the field -- most psychological "discoveries" are based on votes, not experiments: http://arachnoid.com/building_science
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#47A 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?
> 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?
No, that's called "proving a negative" -- in most cases it's an impossible evidentiary burden. For example, no one will ever be able to say that Bigfoot doesn't exist for lack of evidence. This is why the null hypothesis is the default scientific precept -- that something without evidence is assumed not to exist (but by no means proven not to exist).
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the parameters are actually not specified by the theory, and have to be fitted by experiment. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization for one of the reasons why.
I don't think that renormalization has much to do with this! :P It's enough to say that the standard model has to have some input from the real world -- mostly the masses of the particles and their mixing angles. Renormalization just makes it harder to talk about what a particle's mass "really" is; it doesn't really increase the number of parameters in the theory.
Oops, you're right.
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#49I wonder. If this adds one more trust factor to the standard model, does that mean it'll hold forever? Maybe? There must be some level on which we can baseline our understanding of the universe. Maybe this is it? maybe [1]? [1] http://news.discovery.com/space/we-might-not-live-in-a-holog...
> If this adds one more trust factor to the standard model, does that mean it'll hold forever?
Do you mean the Standard Model? Well, to answer, look at the history of scientific theories -- every scientific theory ever put forth has eventually been proven either flat wrong or been shown to be an approximation, without exception.
The Standard Model more or less includes General Relativity, and General Relativity conflicts with quantum theories, so there's already a basis for further work. That work is being addressed by (among other things) string / superstring / M theories, unfortunately without any experimental testable predictions yet.
Re: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson
#50The Nobel Committee will only give out the Prize to three or less people at once ( http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/commit... , heading "From Nomination to Ceremony ). So will one be given out at all?