Hello, Higgs Boson: LHC's New Particle Looks Like the Real Thing

Happy 4th of July, science :)

If it pans out, I have only one word.

Incredible!

One step closer to finding the Mass Effect?

This is nice to wake up to! Looking forward to hearing more.

Warp Engines, Flying Cars here we come? Well at least we know the other forces like electromagnetism completely reshaped our species. From electricity itself to electric engines to computers to Light bulbs and Mobile phones. Who knows what the understanding of gravity at the most fundamental level will bring us. Of course it might still take years or decades before they fully understand gravity let alone can manipulate it.

Greenmatrix
If this boson matches the description of the theoretical Higgs, and the Standard Model, then FTL travel is still beyond us. At least beyond any idea we have come up with so far. The Alcubierre drive, the best, i believe, model for FTL, would require overcoming several technical difficulties, not the least of which would be harvesting and distributing exotic matter. Even if we fully understood gravity, making an engine that manipulates it in any significant way would probably require amounts of energy that would be utterly impractical, if not completely beyond us.
However, this is still a cool find, Cheers to the guys and gals at the LHC!

"125-126 gigaelectronvolts"

Is this the scene from Back to the Future?

How can I make money off this particle exactly? I kind of need it in a few years. Actually I'd be wanting it before the Mayan calander ends.

Why are humans intelligent? What gives us the right to know anything. We didn't earn our lives

The wonderful picture of the cosmos in its great mass and particles, always puts me in AWE! It is such a wonderful painting as we humans create our knowledge as we observe what our dear Lord has made! We humans were giving free will, artistic ability, intellect to expand and multiply ourselves in vision, our souls and the descovery of the cosmos. We are so blessed! With our faith in a mustard seed, we can move mountains!

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"God does not play dice with the universe."
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." ~ Albert Einstein

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Cool! I think it is great they found the Higgs Boson! Beautiful!

Thank you Peter Higgs!!
There are so many people who dont appreciate the work that scientists do.

An interesting fact emerges along a different track.
That, when something is around for long enough, praised enough, monopolized discussion enough, many are tempted to assume it must be the most efficient way of doing something or even is the only way of doing them.
There used to be times when collision experiments were used with antiparallel beams of antiparticles, usually electrons and positions. These completely annihilated, supposedly, and the resulting energy, presumably, could form any of a number of quantum stochastically rqandom particles. Proton-proton beam collisions supposedly produce new particles from excess energy of motion of particles, but often through various more exotic interactions of fields between quarks, and, then, only certain types of particles seem to be possible.
In a matter-antimatter collision, all the energy could be put to particles, and particles presumably of any type. In proton-proton collisions, not all the energy is converted to new particles. In fact, much of the energy is expended just in overcoming electrostatic repulsion, getting protons close enough for exotic interactions. Too, almost no particles should remain in annihilation collisions, whereas all the original particles or their fragments should remain in proton-proton collisions.
It can be a good question why the evidently less efficient proton-proton method is being used rather than the matter-antimatter method.

I find it quite amazing seeing the ever expanding reaches of both the micro and macro worlds. It would be extremely funny to one day see so far into a particle or out into the grand vastness of space, that you find yourself looking at your own universe with total cyclic redundency.

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

The Higgs bit we know. But the boson? Western science is overlooking India’s contribution

With yesterday’s announcement of the latest findings in the search for the Higgs boson, the elusive particle is on everyone’s mind. This kind of fame is relatively rare, even for important scientific discoveries; but the Higgs boson has been called, or miscalled, the God particle, enabling it to pass into the realm of popular scientific lore, like the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, the structure of DNA, or the theory of relativity.

It would be difficult for most people to understand its significance, just as it would be to comprehend the notion of relativity, but such problems are overcome by locating science in personalities as well as cultural and national traditions. The first thing that you and I know about the Higgs boson is that it’s named after Peter Higgs, a physicist at Edinburgh University who made the discovery — although the original insight, in one of those recurrent back stories of science, was Philip Anderson’s.

Still, we have Higgs, and Edinburgh, and western civilisation to fall back on. The rest — “the Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons ...” — we needn’t worry too much about. But maybe we should worry just enough to ask, “What is a boson?” since the word tends to come up as soon as Higgs does. Is it, an ignoramus such myself would ask, akin to an atom or a molecule? It is, in fact, along with the fermion (named after Enrico Fermi), one of the two fundamental classes of subatomic particles.

From Bose

The word must surely have some European genealogy? In fact, “boson” is derived from Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist from Kolkata who, in 1924, realised that the statistical method used to analyse most 19th-century work on the thermal behaviour of gases was inadequate. He first sent off a paper on quantum statistics to a British journal, which turned it down. He then sent it to Albert Einstein, who immediately grasped its immense importance, and published it in a German journal. Bose’s innovation came to be known as the Bose-Einstein statistics, and became a basis of quantum mechanics. Einstein saw that it had profound implications for physics; that it had opened the way for this subatomic particle, which he named, after his Indian collaborator, “boson.”

Still, science and the West are largely synonymous and coeval: they are words that have the same far-reaching meaning. Just as Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings digest the Japanese prints they were responding to so we don’t need to be aware of Japanese prints when viewing the post-impressionists, western science is pristine, and bears no mark of what’s outside itself.

Other Indian contributions

The last Indian scientific discovery that is universally acknowledged is the zero. Indians are very strong at maths, and the only modern Indian who’s remotely part of the western mythology of science is Srinivasa Ramanujan, equally well known for his Hindu idiosyncrasies and his agonised stay in Cambridge as he is for his mathematical genius.

Indians can be excellent geeks, as demonstrated by the tongue-tied astrophysicist Raj Koothrappalli in the U.S. sitcom Big Bang Theory; but the Nobel prize can only be aspired to by Sheldon Cooper, the super-geek and genius in the series, for whom Raj’s country of origin is a diverting enigma, and miles away from the popular myth of science on which Big Bang Theory is dependent. Bose didn’t get the Nobel Prize; nor did his contemporary and namesake, J.C. Bose, whose contribution to the fashioning of the wireless predates Marconi’s. The only Indian scientist to get a Nobel Prize is the physicist C.V. Raman, for his work on light at Kolkata University. Other Indians have had to become Americans to get the award.

Conditions have always been inimical to science in India, from colonial times to the present day; and despite that, its contributions have occasionally been huge. Yet non-western science (an ugly label engendered by the exclusive nature of western popular imagination) is yet to find its Rosalind Franklin, its symbol of paradoxical success. Unlike Franklin, however, these scientists were never in a race that they lost; they simply came from another planet.

keep great discoveries coming!!!

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

Readers, please keep in mind that what they've so publicly announced is actually more like a 4.9 sigma level of confidence. Neither the Tevatron finding of a potential heavy particle between 115 and 134 GeV, nor this two group finding at LHC, have the refinement to fully analyze in that high an energy field in full confidence. The margin of error at LHC is much lower than the Tevatron, but still significant enough to be an error here. Also, the Higgs boson would seem to require evidence of decay in differing voltage environments; and while it's certainly possible that this is what was observed, for it to be defined as a real Higgs boson, it's interaction with other particles at other energy levels will define whether this is actually what Higgs predicted. They apparently have no evidence that any mass was generated either at Tevatron or at LHC.
Risky business, these public declarations. The head of OPERA was fired for doing this same thing.

If it's true that the Higgs boson has been confirmed at CERN, then one must ask whether such an elusive and strange particle really exists in our dimension, at all - or in another, higher dimension.

Gardner Brooks, in his insightful novel The Gensis Project, explores this question from an interesting and provocative point of view. Paraphrasing his God-character, “Human scientific discoveries have advanced to the point where they are literally bumping up against the edge of reality, the boundary between your dimension and mine. When you finally figure out that your dimension - your reality - is simply the result of computer code running in my dimension, a lot of what you consider weird or incomprehensible may begin to make sense.”