Physics Community Afire With Rumors of Higgs Boson Discovery

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Hopefully there is a little more to this rumor than there was the last time they had a "huge" discovery. This picture is pretty damn cool though. :cool:

“The bottom line though is now clear: There’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look,” wrote mathematician Peter Woit on his blog, Not Even Wrong. According to Woit, there are rumors of new data that would be the most compelling evidence yet for the long-sought Higgs.
 
I think the big news they are going to announce in Sydney isn't the Higgs, as some speculate, but the invention of the Stargate.
 
samgod.JPG


Pretty crazy if true. Now if only they can explain why the tide goes up and tide goes down. Can't explain that!
 
Of course, Gibbs reminds us that the rumors come with some caveats, such as the fact that they are vague and not completely reliable. Scientists outside the experiment also don’t yet know how much data has been analyzed from this year, meaning that the rumored results could disappear with further scrutiny.

Its going to be at least a few more years I think before we can finally and without significant doubt say we've found the Higgs. Still an incredible achievement. We've tapped the fabric of the Universe and come out with results predicted in a paper proposed long ago. A great achievement for science and another notch on the belt for man kind.

Well done CERN.
 
This is truly amazing news, i can't wait for the official announcement, its going to be the biggest discovery since the theory of relativity.
 
Let's beging by making a hole in space time and start pulling on that thread till we unravel the mystery of the unknown. I'm sure that will make a wonderful sweater.
 
Kind of hoping they found something else... or at least new questions pop up. I mean that is what science is all about, answering questions just to find a handful more emerge. If they say "We found the Higgs, now we got all the elementary particles nailed down" kind of anticlimactic.
 
Meh, I don't care so much whether or not it exists...I just want to know, what can we do to exploit it for awesome technological breakthroughs? :D
 
Well done CERN.

Didn't the Tevatron claim to have found Higgs in the 125 range just before it was shut down? And that was kinda dismissed because they were being shut down? If so, they should get some sort of brownie points as well.
 
Didn't the Tevatron claim to have found Higgs in the 125 range just before it was shut down? And that was kinda dismissed because they were being shut down? If so, they should get some sort of brownie points as well.

No. There was some gossip in December that the desire range of what everyone thought the Higgs would fall into (in atomic mass and in this case at the 125 GeV) but at the time it was considered to be unlikely to be the Higgs because it was slightly heavier. Now after repeated testing (LHC runs hundreds of millions of times per day) they are finding that the Higgs may in fact be slightly heavier than previously thought. Now if they can keep detecting it and knocking out other variables at the same time than the sigma status will be upgraded and the likelihood of it not being the Higgs will be nearly inconsequential.

At that point the data will be published in a study and the announcement will be made. Many people think that finding the Higgs is a mere PR push for CERN because they had to justify the cost by basically claiming that the LHC would have enough power to find it. But in reality understanding how anything is given mass will lead to new branches of physics and a major leap forward in our understanding of the development of possibly Dark Matter which is virtually invisible to us in this Universe but obviously contains about 80 percent of the mass inside our Universe locked inside its secrets.
 
Those tiny little Black Holes would last a few billionths of a second and suck in exactly 5 protons :p

I think we're safe!

Do you have any idea how disappointed I was when I found out that I still had to go to work the day they started using the LHC at full power? :( Let's not go opening up old wounds.
 
can these guys go help NASA and all the other people working on LENR now?
 
This will be akin to going from gaming on an Atari 2600 to a sweet modern rig w/ dual 690s.
 
Meh, I don't care so much whether or not it exists...I just want to know, what can we do to exploit it for awesome technological breakthroughs? :D

this will be used to make a weapon long before its made into anything useful. :(
 
this will be used to make a weapon long before its made into anything useful. :(

Doubt it. It'll be decades before any kind of application could be weaponized and even then the question is into what?

At this moment in time it'll help physicists get a step closer to the unifying theory and perhaps a nice short equazion that explains the forces of the Universe (of course I do not believe such an equazion exists).
 
Doubt it. It'll be decades before any kind of application could be weaponized and even then the question is into what?

At this moment in time it'll help physicists get a step closer to the unifying theory and perhaps a nice short equazion that explains the forces of the Universe (of course I do not believe such an equazion exists).

They'll make it into a black hole-inator and I won't have to go to work after they use it! Mwa ha ha!!!
 
Even if the higgs is found and i think that would be a great thing, but this is clearly not the end of putting the particle zoo together. Not even close.
 
Pretty crazy if true. Now if only they can explain why the tide goes up and tide goes down. Can't explain that!

I remember when I read a book by Issac Asimov,in which he explained tidal lock and how the waves were related to the "dark side of the moon". The concept really blew my mind. Stuff like that makes you think on a grander scale.
 
According to a mathematical theory that has never been observed anywhere in the universe. ;)

Mathematical theory proved the existence of the Stellar and Super massive black holes , I feel safe that micro-black holes likely exist since the math behind them seems sound. If we could find micro-black holes and observe there life spans than we could also prove Hawking Radiation as well since the evaporation of those micro-black holes would point toward the theory being sound.
 
Doubt it. It'll be decades before any kind of application could be weaponized and even then the question is into what?

Oh and don't doubt history. Give me one advanced technology that was not used for military purposes. From fire, to calvary, to rockets, to computers, everything that has given man an advantage has been used as an advantage.
 
So once we turn off mass does that mean we can travel at the speed of light????

In short no. Maybe in the lab we could do this to particles for billionth of a second until that particle which no longer has mass gets converted to pure energy in the process. Our "stuff" must exist as mass or energy. If you forced one into the state of the other you would create an incredibly powerful transfer of energy that would likely destroy it in the process. This would be bad for a 180 pound human being since the average human being has enough potential mass if converted into pure energy to equal over 20 Hydrogen bombs.
 
Oh and don't doubt history. Give me one advanced technology that was not used for military purposes. From fire, to calvary, to rockets, to computers, everything that has given man an advantage has been used as an advantage.

Yea its not the same as unlocking the fission power of the atom. Its a different kind of discovery. If it is weaponized it won't be in my lifetime or yours or your kids.
 
I have to confess that as someone who was a physics major for 2 years (before the differential equations started making me want to jump out of a window), I still don't intuitively understand what the hell a Higgs is supposed to be. Particle for mass? Uh, sure. Sounds nice, I can't picture it.

TBH I can't figure out what the hell a virtual particle is supposed to be either.
 
I have to confess that as someone who was a physics major for 2 years (before the differential equations started making me want to jump out of a window), I still don't intuitively understand what the hell a Higgs is supposed to be. Particle for mass? Uh, sure. Sounds nice, I can't picture it.

TBH I can't figure out what the hell a virtual particle is supposed to be either.

A Higgs field is essentially theorized to "give" all particles mass. The Higgs Boson is particle that the Higgs field is made up of. Finding the Higgs Boson particle would validate more of the Standard Model and help secure its current place among the foundation of physics (despite the Standard Model's popularity it is heavy debated and widely scrutinized). There are an estimated (give or take depending on which part of the theory you subscribe to) 36 particles in the Standard Model that have yet to be found , they are thought to be of an anti nature ( again highly debated) to other particles in the Standard Model. Of course there is so much data to go through with the LHC we could be years off from confirming/disproving more of them. And the LHC isn't even at full power yet , its said that it should be at full power sometime maybe in 2013 at a full 14 TeV which after a year of running at full power could reveal even more insight.


That would be the basic version of what the Higgs is.
 
so how far back will we able to see now? btw is hardforum black and grey or just black
 
There's a video of a recent forum about Higgs with Brian Greene and a guy from the ATLAS experiment for anyone who's interested. At the beginning, the explain about the ATLAS experiment and how they are looking for the Higgs particle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0rBKyU1vu0

Basically we can't detect the particle directly, so what they are doing is detecting the decay of a Higgs and its not taking just one snapshot either. They have to take many of them until it statistically show that yes, we may be looking at it. The experiment will be running for the entire 2012 so I doubt we'll hear any confirmation anytime soon.
 
Yea they need a 5 Sigma before the likelihood is so small that its wrong that its negligible.
 
A Higgs field is essentially theorized to "give" all particles mass. The Higgs Boson is particle that the Higgs field is made up of. Finding the Higgs Boson particle would validate more of the Standard Model and help secure its current place among the foundation of physics (despite the Standard Model's popularity it is heavy debated and widely scrutinized). There are an estimated (give or take depending on which part of the theory you subscribe to) 36 particles in the Standard Model that have yet to be found , they are thought to be of an anti nature ( again highly debated) to other particles in the Standard Model. Of course there is so much data to go through with the LHC we could be years off from confirming/disproving more of them. And the LHC isn't even at full power yet , its said that it should be at full power sometime maybe in 2013 at a full 14 TeV which after a year of running at full power could reveal even more insight.


That would be the basic version of what the Higgs is.
Yeah dude I get that. My point is that this stuff is all far beyond the ability to understand it intuitively. A cannonball flying out of a cannon, yeah. Even a magnetic field or nuclear fission, sure. But virtual particles and elusive particles that confer mass, no.
 
Yeah dude I get that. My point is that this stuff is all far beyond the ability to understand it intuitively. A cannonball flying out of a cannon, yeah. Even a magnetic field or nuclear fission, sure. But virtual particles and elusive particles that confer mass, no.

Many students/professors don't understand virtual particles due to the uncertainty principle. Even less truly understand the uncertainty principle. For the very few of us gifted enough to even understand it , it's still quite complex.

You saying you couldn't grasp it like everyone saying they also couldn't get a ride to the moon. :cool:
 
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