Thread: CERN set to report probable Higgs Boson sighting this week (Reuters)

Yeah, there's still a lot to find out with the LHC besides this.

Oh BBC:

BBC News - LHC: Higgs boson 'may have been glimpsed'

Originally Posted by Ignorant BBC Science Editors

Finding the Higgs would be one of the biggest scientific advances of the last 60 years.

Fail. No wonder the general public is so ignorant about science when you have this kind of shitty reporting.

First hint of new physics at the LHC... and it's not from ATLAS or CMS - The Something Awful Forums

This thread is made by somebody who works at CERN, specifically at the LHCb. He was among the people who discovered the new anti-matter knowledge.

Here's another thread by the same guy, about the whole Higg's Boson matter.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=345481

edit: ah, I have a feeling the second thread might be inaccessible.

Can anybody provide a basic explanation of how the Higgs was predicted?

Wasn't it done out of symmetry considerations; I get the impression that the current model points towards a simple mathematical structure of which the Higgs is an unseen part?

It'd be very philosophically interesting that this approach works.

Pretty sure there's a massive equation, where they basically had a few unknowns.

Being woefully uneducated in everything considered physics, Phil Plait helped me wrap my head around this stuff: Mass effect: Maybe Higgs, maybe not | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Originally Posted by Xei

Can anybody provide a basic explanation of how the Higgs was predicted?

I'll take a stab your question. If we look at certain fundamental forces, particularly the electromagnetic and weak nuclear force we notice that they are fairly different in appearance, whereas the electromagnetic force extends over great distances, [actually it appears to have an infinite range] and the weak nuclear force has an extremely short range confined to the nuclei. The electromagnetic force is mediated by a zero mass photon particle and the weak nuclear force is mediated by 3 very massive bosons.

What becomes interesting is that we can unify or bring into a common umbrella, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear reactions and what actually confirms this is the discovery of the +/- W and Z bosons back sometime in the 80's which further supports that this was a very good way to look at things in physics. However, this being the case then this begs the question as to why is it that these two interactions (electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions) are within a common umbrella, why then is the particle mediator for one force extremely massive while the other has zero mass today? If we go back to the early part of the Universe, we can see that the temperature was hot enough that these two forces were virtually indistinguishable from one another.

Originally Posted by Xei

Wasn't it done out of symmetry considerations; I get the impression that the current model points towards a simple mathematical structure of which the Higgs is an unseen part?

You're absolutely correct in your thinking. Once the Universe cooled down, the symmetry between the two forces were apparently broken. If we go back before this symmetry was broken we will discover that the particles that mediates all of the forces has zero mass. The photon still appears the same today but the W and Z bosons have apparently put on some significant weight..lol. So the question remains, how?

If there is a Higgs-field that all of these particles interact with, then this could explain the differences in masses pertaining to these particles because they would apparently be different from interactions with the Higgs-field. If the Higgs-field exist this will not only explain why the W and Z bosons are so massive it will also add to the completion of the Mendeleev periodic table, not to mention this will also predict that there is a Higgs-boson and give it a kind of range of energies that would pretty much reaffirm all the stuff that we knew before. So The Higgs is the final undiscovered piece out of the standard model. We've found the top quark, I think about 5 or 6 years ago, I can’t remember exactly, but that left the Higgs boson as the one remaining standard model of particle physics particle that we haven’t discovered.

I'm pretty optimistic on the future discovery for this particle. I wonder if it's a super-symmetry boson or standard. The LHC will more than likely be shut down over the winter months and things will resume sometime March or April but they will probably reach a Sigma 5 late fall 2012 or early spring 2013.