Alright, let's try this again. Keep it civil, gentlemen. :P
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BA0N520111211
Alright, let's try this again. Keep it civil, gentlemen. :P
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BA0N520111211
"vital to support Einstein's ideas on the working of the universe"
Ugh. Classic science reporting. Seriously, why do they even bother writing stuff like that. -_-
Apparently they've found it with a certainty of 1/400. Now they are just refining it; there's a set certainty they have to reach to declare it.
Sensationalism sells.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
Do you have any insight into what implications for science would come with finding the Higgs? I've heard some pretty vague things about how it would reshape physics, and possibly open up further understanding of things like dark matter - but how? :-?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
True, but you expect there to be at least some basis in fact. It constantly bemuses me that people who have jobs as science journalists have somehow never picked up a book and learned basic science. Not even the nitty gritty, just some basic picture of what's been discovered and when.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneironaut Zero
Not the faintest clue.Quote:
Do you have any insight into what implications for science would come with finding the Higgs? I've heard some pretty vague things about how it would reshape physics, and possibly open up further understanding of things like dark matter - but how? :-?
Although I don't think it'd reshape physics as such, because theoretical physicists have used this as the standard model (that is, the Standard Model) for some time. They needed empirical justification though; it could have all been wrong.
Cool. Though I was secretly hoping they wouldn't find it, so all the current thinking would be wrong.
Yeah, it would be cool to hear something about that. The most interesting things about threads like this are the implications people with more knowledge (and possibly brains) see from the discoveries.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneironaut Zero
This is actually very fascinating. It's nice to see all that theoretical physics work pay off, if it is actually true. I hope some more news will come up about the breaking of light speed though, in relation to neutrinoes.
This can't be right...do you mean a p-value of 1/400?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
Yeah, some CERN people have been quoted as basically saying that finding the Higgs in the expected mass range would be the worst outcome of the LHC. It would mean that the Standard Model as we know it was right all along, and the LHC was nothing but a 7 billion euro circle jerk.Quote:
Originally Posted by khh
Yeah I think that the Higgs would confirm that we're on the "right track" with the Standard Model of particle physics. We've been assuming it exists for years, and if it in fact didn't, we'd have to rewrite the book on particle physics.
I'm quoting from the Times. If it can't be this for whatever reason then they botched it, which is not unlikely.Quote:
Originally Posted by cmind
Cool, but I don't know why they don't just wait until CERN reports it.
It's like having a sign telling you there's a sign saying there's roadworks up ahead.
Unnecessary and confusing. Plus the author probably misunderstood most of the discovery, since they obviously wouldn't have 99% of the details.
So I'm not even going to bother to read anything about it yet.
Then it's probably p-value, which is the probability of the conclusion Higgs exists at that mass being a Type I error (a false positive). The same as saying there's a 99.75% chance that it is the Higgs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
When I say they found it with a certainty of 1/400 I'm obviously just being colloquial... there's a 1 in 400 chance that it's not the Higgs given their data.
The curse of being pedantic with others is that others are pedantic with you, Xei.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
That makes it okay then. :)
I'm definitely not a particle physicist but as far as I can tell this doesn't reshape anything. However it is a major plus for the standard model because it was predicted to exist a long time ago, and it hadn't been found until now (if this is in fact true).Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneironaut Zero
If they hadn't found it though then that would have caused a huge chunk of physics to need to be thrown out the window.
Of course, who knows where the increased understanding will lead in the future?
Actually, let me rephrase. I believe "reshape" is the wrong word. What I meant to say is that it reshapes the course in which a physical studies and endeavors can take. It opens up new possibilities for science, in ways that were previously not feasible. I'm really asking if anyone knows what kind of implications it might have for the future of physics, standard or otherwise. Of course, the answer is likely 'no', but I was just curious. :)
No, it doesn't really offer anything for physics. Like I said, finding the Higgs in the predicted mass range is the least useful thing that could have happened. It means that the Standard Model is essentially correct, and there's no real hope of "grand unification" until we get a particle accelerator the size of the solar system.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneironaut Zero
Ah, ok. I just now saw your previous post. Lol.Quote:
Originally Posted by cmind
So.... least exciting piece of Science news ever?
:lol:
In a sense it would probably have been better news if it weren't true, because the hope is that discoveries at CERN will trigger a change in our understanding that eventually makes some sense of the big cosmological puzzles... but there was some news a while back where they had findings that don't seem to fit in with current models of antimatter.
^ could you link me to something about that by any chance?
Yeah, there's still a lot to find out with the LHC besides this.
BBC News - LHC reveals hints of 'new physics' in particle decaysQuote:
Originally Posted by Wayfaerer
Bare bones.
At the risk of further increasing the pedantry level, I have some comments on the "certainty" issue.
I was confused by the 1/400 figure (what the hell does it mean to be "1/400 certain"?) so I poked around a bit to see where that figure comes from. Apparently theory holds that the presence of a Higgs should manifest itself as an excess of energy in the "gamma-gamma channel" (whatever that is), and the event that is causing all this fuss was the observation of an excess of energy in the expected channel of about 3 or 3.5 standard errors above what is normally expected in that channel. In other words, if you think about the range of energy levels that one would expect to observe in that channel--when nothing is actually going on!--as a normal distribution or "bell-shaped curve" of energy levels, then this excess was about 3 standard deviations (or sigma, which the authors of the article in the OP amusing spell "sygma") above the mean of that sampling distribution, which is starting to get pretty far out into the positive tail. The area under the curve (or probability density) of an event greater than 3 sigma or less than 3 sigma is about .00269, or about 1/369. As far as I can tell, this is where the 1/400 figure comes from.
Let's be careful about how we interpret this 1/369 figure. Assuming that what I wrote above is indeed where the figure comes from, then this figure is basically a "p-value," as cmind noted. That is, it is the probability of the observed data, conditional on the hypothesis being false. In other words, if it is in fact the case that there was no Higgs at all, then the odds of seeing an excess of energy of the magnitude that we did are about 369 to 1 against. What is very important to realize is what this figure is not. It is not--and this is important--the probability of the hypothesis being true (or false), conditional on the observed data (that is, the probability that we actually observed a Higgs). We would call such a probability a posterior probability. Arguably this probability is what we really want to know most. Unfortunately, in general P(D|H) does not equal P(H|D). Arriving at this latter probability requires additional information, namely, a distribution of prior probabilities. Although closer, it is also not a type 1 error rate (that is, the probability that we have incorrectly concluded that we observed a Higgs). Such a probability is called an alpha level, and is in fact specified a priori by the data analyst--we know that the probability of a type 1 error will be equal to the chosen alpha level before we ever collect any data.
None of this is to denigrate the present findings. But let's be clear about what exactly is meant when we talk about things like 1/400 certainty.
Oh BBC:
BBC News - LHC: Higgs boson 'may have been glimpsed'
Fail. No wonder the general public is so ignorant about science when you have this kind of shitty reporting.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ignorant BBC Science Editors
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.
Heh, well it's been a couple of years since I took stats in university :)Quote:
Originally Posted by DuB
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
Perfect explanation mate. Thanks for that.Quote:
Originally Posted by DuB
From Marvo's link:
"The Higgs Boson is a particle that Peter "P-Higgy" Higgs came up with to solve a bit of a puzzle in our understanding of particle physics. He did this way back in the sixties, and we've been trying to hunt the fucker ever since. It sometimes gets called the God particle, which is retarded. Please don't."
:lol:
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
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.
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?Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
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.