Puny US particle punisher finds strong evidence for God particle The US particle collider Tevatron has jumped in just ahead of the Large Hadron Collider's results announcement this week to say that their machine has found the "strongest indication to date" of the God particle. The LHC's baby American cousin stopped bashing particles off each other back in March 2001 but the scientists have …
As said in the comment section of the earlier iteration of this article...
Details on Tevatron data mining and compositing:
http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654
Ivory-tower uponfrowned rumormongering details on the upcoming 4th of July PRESENTATIONFEST at:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
Weren't "strong indications" the reason d'etre for building the LHC in the first place. And if anyone announces further "strong indications" from the LHC team this week, won't it all mean that they've just been going round in circles - very, very big expensive circles !!
And those strong indications have been getting stronger and stronger. Sooner or later someone's going to spot some of them Higgs bosons and then we'll be able to replicate the results and start working on practical applications. Expect anti-gravity within a few millennia!
I do not think that everything I see on the Internet is true, but if you search for "physicists hate term god particle" you get plenty of results, if you search for "physicists love term god particle" you get results with the words scrambled in the text...
Using Google, for example, the second search, with "love" returns "Particle physicists searching for the Higgs boson hate the term "God Particle," ... Physicists love the Higgs boson, but they hate the God particle."
I only thought it would be more appropriate to use the name chosen by those working on it, rather than mentioning some random magical entity...
Windows, Linux, BSD and many others are "Operating Systems", rather than the "Souls of the computer".
Take that back, filthy heathen!
We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells!
APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL APPLY EVAL
We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells!
So how is it heavier?!?
Because the human-scale concept of "heaviness" doesn't really scale down to the sub-atomic level. Protons are not built of Higgs bosons, they are built of quarks and gluons. Sort of. The lego brick concept of "building" stuff doesn't really work at the sub-atomic level either. If you bind some quarks together with some gluons the resulting object doesn't have the same mass as its constituent parts. It has some characteristics that can be derived from the characteristics of its constituent parts but those characteristics are so far removed from the characteristics of human-scale objects that the only sensible way to approach them is through mathematics. It would probably be less confusing if we dropped the idea of "mass" or "heaviness" and used something like "Higgsiness".
Protons are not very Higgsy. Higgs bosons are (probably) fairly Higgsy.
Well the theory goes that mass is a function of how a particle interacts with the Higgs "field". An electron zips through no worries and therefore obtains little mass but for heavy particles like the top quark the Higgs field will be like wading in mud - it has a far greater interaction with the field and so has more mass. I can only assume the the Higgs particle interacts with the Higgs field to en even larger extent.
No part of an airplane is lighter than air, but the whole caboodle can fly.
I understand aerodynamics only slightly better than I understand Higgs field equations, but I am happy to share my Idiot's Guide to Simplification of really difficult stuff down to the level a child can understand for you...
Actually to try to answer the question my limited understanding is that mass is determined by how much a particle interacts with the Higgs field. Therefore if the Higgs bosun interacts more strongly with the Higgs field than the proton then it will have greater mass. This interaction is independant of size.*
*Note I'm no expert, just paraphrasing a Metro article from a couple of days ago.
this level of interactions is hard to visualise
I'd go further than that. I'd say it is impossible to visualise. Our puny human brains evolved to make us cunning hunters on the African savannah. We're pretty well equipped to lob rocks at goats and out-smart lions. We are very poorly equipped to intuitively grasp things at very different scales.
(there might be a handful of asperger megabrains at CERN who can hold this sort of weirdness in their heads ... I'm not sure you'd want to invite them to dinner)
"(there might be a handful of asperger megabrains at CERN who can hold this sort of weirdness in their heads ... I'm not sure you'd want to invite them to dinner)"
They are all more than welcome to dine at my place anytime they are in town. If they *ALL* showed up I would also invite all the local farm folk and supply liberal amounts of alcohol. Would be a rockin' good time I suspect. ;)
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"Scientists are very careful about announcing a discovery, preferring to be absolutely sure before they say anything..."
Except climate change scientists who seem to be very keen on using models and announcing the results without actually doing any checking any real results from reality.
Mines the coat next to Lewis Page's.
These posts (most of them) sum up why I read the Reg. Once you get past the fanboi/ non-fanboi and similar bollocky arguments going on, there are some genuinely smart people out there.
Thanks for the education today, I learnt a lot from this one.
That was actually quite sincere. Unusually so.
Has anyone had any idea what a Reg article is about before reading it in the last couple of years? Granted this one is ok, the "god particle" in this title is a well known term now (even if it's a ****** term used by idiot hipsters). But it's been a long time since I've seen a title make a lot sense now: "Dell drowns competition with defective ducks..." WTF!?
«The LHC is due to announce its results at a scientific seminar at 7am GMT on July 4 ...» Wonder where you live, Brid-Aine - in my neck of the woods, Sweden, which lies one hour ahead of the UK and Ireland, 4 July 2012 is a Wednesday, not a Thursday....
By the way, the LHC does seem to have delivered a well-formed Higgs boson....
Henri
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