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CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

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Re: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

#3
post #2

Amazing, I wonder what this means for creationists and more importantly - our understanding of our universe?

Nothing at this stage.

From what I've gathered this is so expected result that nothing really changes, right now atleast. It'll take a while until something new will come out of this.

As an example this could be summarized like someone showing that P!=NP, it would be totally expected and nothing would really change.

p.s P!=NP would be a bigger result though, the comparison was just for something that is overwhelmingly expected.

Re: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

#6
post #2

Amazing, I wonder what this means for creationists and more importantly - our understanding of our universe?

I don't mean any offense, since the question itself is valid, so I'll offer one of my own: Why does it matter what creationists make of it?

Re: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

#7
post #5

Can someone please dummify this result a little bit? what does this mean for particle physics in the future? does it confirm any theories?

Here's a pretty good Q&A that talks about this: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/particle-consistent-with-...

Re: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

#9
post #8
post #2

Amazing, I wonder what this means for creationists and more importantly - our understanding of our universe?

Given that this is science, it doesn't mean anything to creationists.

On the contrary, some creationists make great efforts to engage science on it's own terms, with hilarious results: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/C-decay

Re: CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

#10
What stood out to me from watching the presentation was the incredible integrity of the physicists involved. The CMS group had 2 sets of data with > 5 sigma significance, but chose to also show weaker data that actually reduced the significance slightly. Consider the enormous effort spent to show that the result was not some background fluke - two separate detectors, running 2 completely different means of detection, each with their own sets of computer programs verifying the results. Finally both show almost exactly the same result (although the masses are slightly different at this point)!

Given that tevatron also sees similar (although weaker) results, the confirmation is beyond doubt. And what an achievement - the first fundamental particle observed since the quarks in the 1980's! An incredible victory for theoretical models developed almost 50 years ago (no wonder Peter Higgs had tears in this eyes)!

Combining the brilliance of the theoreticians with the integrity of experimentalists is what makes science the pinnacle of human achievement (IMO), and makes me proud to be human today.

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