Author Topic: New Higgs boson-like particle found  (Read 2318 times)

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Offline Undecided

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New Higgs boson-like particle found
« on: July 04, 2012, 04:56:58 am »
CERN press release
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Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.
This is pretty awesome, methinks.
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Offline The Right Honourable Mlle Antéchrist

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #1 on: July 04, 2012, 09:40:42 am »
Saw this in the paper this morning. Pretty badass.
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Offline m52nickerson

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #2 on: July 04, 2012, 10:05:04 am »
If it turns out the be the Higgs this is huge. 
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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #3 on: July 04, 2012, 11:36:45 am »
Someone needs to convince the republicans there's now a Boson gap and we need to dump massive funds into scientific research to close it.

Offline Undecided

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #4 on: July 04, 2012, 11:56:47 am »
Someone needs to convince the republicans there's now a Boson gap and we need to dump massive funds into scientific research to close it.
As it turns out, the problem in the US is that nearly everybody likes science and scientists, but not very many understand how central of a role government plays in supporting research of fundamental importance.
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Offline ThunderWulf

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #5 on: July 04, 2012, 11:58:50 am »
Very cool.  This nickerson said, this could wind up being huge.
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Offline Meshakhad

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #6 on: July 04, 2012, 09:12:18 pm »
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Offline largeham

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #7 on: July 04, 2012, 10:49:57 pm »
Whatever they've found (one scientist on the news stated that it might not be exactly what they were looking for), it's damned huge and interesting.

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Offline Auri-El

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #8 on: July 04, 2012, 11:05:06 pm »
So what is the significance of this for those of us who don't speak scientist? I did read the article, but all I got was something about the key to understanding the universe, which seems a little over-hopeful to me.

Offline m52nickerson

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #9 on: July 04, 2012, 11:19:15 pm »
Basically it would go a long way in proving the current model of the universe is correct.  The Higgs Boson is the particle that goes along with the theoretical Higgs field, which is thought to be the field that gives particles mass.
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Offline Undecided

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #10 on: July 05, 2012, 01:12:01 am »
In nature, there are four fundamental interactions/forces: electromagnetic, weak, strong, and gravitational. These forces are known to be carried by particles called gauge bosons. The rules of quantum theory say that gauge bosons are supposed to be massless, but in nature, only three of the four forces—EM, strong, and gravitational—have massless carriers. The weak force, by contrast, has carriers that are actually really heavy, as subatomic particles go. This made physicists frustrated for a while, because they couldn't figure out how to make the theory of the weak force get off the ground.

But theoretical physicists found a detour around this no-mass rule which is now called the Higgs mechanism. They postulated that the electromagnetic and weak forces, at high temperatures/energies such as was found in the early Universe, were unified together in a single massless force called the electroweak force, and something called the Higgs field existed. When the Universe was hot, this Higgs field/electroweak configuration was stable, but eventually the Universe got too cold for it to exist and it froze. When this happened, the electroweak force "gobbled up" most of the Higgs field, which gave some of its force carriers mass: these newly massive force carriers became the carriers for the weak force. The massless remainder of the electroweak force became the carrier for the electromagnetic force, and the "leftovers" of the Higgs field became the Higgs boson.

As it turns out, this creative fix to the theory only works if everything that interacted via the weak force was also massless during this early epoch of the Universe and given any mass it had through the Higgs field. But all matter (that we know about) interacts via the weak force, so all known matter was given mass via the Higgs mechanism. This little story is an essential part of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Until possibly now, the Higgs boson was the only Standard Model particle yet to be detected in collider. Its existence—or absence—defines particle physics as we know it.
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Offline solomongrundy

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2012, 06:46:05 am »
This from Tesseract at RR:

Quote
It's a great discovery if true, but scientists are already using this discovery to further cement the established theories, instead of using it to critique them.

So discovering something your hypothesis predicts should exist actually does exist is a reason for abandoning that hypothesis now? Only in fundieland...

Offline ThunderWulf

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Re: New Higgs boson-like particle found
« Reply #12 on: July 08, 2012, 11:07:07 pm »
This from Tesseract at RR:

Quote
It's a great discovery if true, but scientists are already using this discovery to further cement the established theories, instead of using it to critique them.

So discovering something your hypothesis predicts should exist actually does exist is a reason for abandoning that hypothesis now? Only in fundieland...

What more do you expect from the people who live in Bizzaro world?
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