CERN to announce Higgs boson observation at LHC

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/108599-cern-to-announce-higgs-boson-observation-at-lhc

by mrsebastian • 15 years ago

145 31 15 years ago

extremetech.com

cq• 15 years ago

Oh my god, this is amazing. Congratulations!

iwwr• 15 years ago

Is there a way to explain the Higgs mechanism to a lay computer scientist?

mhb• 15 years ago

What is the Higgs boson and why is it important to science?:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/91482-what-is-the-higgs-b...

mrsebastian• 15 years ago

Yeah -- I've seen it described like this before:

Basically, Higgs boson particles are like paparazzi (or fans) around a celebrity (the observable matter that we already know about).

The Higgs boson particles, by affixing onto the celebrity, make their movement slower/harder -- i.e. they give the celebrity mass/substance.

That's the theory, anyway :)

giardini3• 15 years ago

So there's a "Higgs field" that all objects move through and those objects which have inertial mass are affected by this field? And inertial mass is the result of interchanges of the force carriers (higgs particle) between objects with inertial mass?

Inertial mass is ubiquitous. Why does it take so much power to make the Higgs boson detectable? How _do_ you detect it?

Is the Higgs boson one of the hypotheses of Newton's famous phrase "Hypotheses non fingo."?

scott_s• 15 years ago

Higgs boson, one page explanations: http://www.phy.uct.ac.za/courses/phy400w/particle/higgs.htm

maeon3• 15 years ago

1. The Higgs Mechanism

Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

When a drunk smelly hobo enters the room the members engage a cloaking device, so the hobo is able to accelerate to max speed immediately. The hobo has no higgs boson to attract the members, the prime minister does. The higgs field is the members, the hobo is the photons, the minister is the neutron. The LHC is finds out why the members gather around the minister.

arethuza• 15 years ago

I believe that explanation was created to help William Waldegrave, the UK Science Minister at the time, understand the point of spending money on CERN:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Waldegrave,_Baron_Walde...

The Prime Minister in question was, of course, Thatcher.

aerique• 15 years ago

Ugh, the mobile version of that site is awful to use on an iPad.

espinchi• 15 years ago

Here's the link to the seminar. It is titled "Update on the Standard Model Higgs searches in ATLAS and CMS". There, you can find a link to the webcast, since it will be broadcasted live at 14h CET tomorrow, Dec 13: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890.

From CERN's general director: "ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson [...] based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs."

andrewheins• 15 years ago

I may be in the minority, but I'll be slightly disappointed (although extremely impressed) if CERN actually does announce they've sighted the Higgs.

I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.

On the other hand, that our great minds were able to see a problem, come up with a solution, test it and then say "Yes, we accurately predicted an unobservable, and yet fundamental principal of our universe" would be damn impressive.

cynest• 15 years ago

> I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.

iirc, the Standard Model is a few pages of equations. Not nicely at all.

gjm11• 15 years ago

"A few pages of equations" is pretty damn good for the software the universe runs on. Imagine saying "iirc, Portal's physics engine is a few pages of code. Not concise at all".

(In fairness, we can be fairly sure that the Standard Model isn't the whole deal; it doesn't do gravity properly, for instance. And you need more than just the bare equations to explain what's going on -- though I think a lot of that is just impedance matching for the benefit of our not-very-mathematics-tolerant brains. But, still. "A few pages" isn't so bad.)

astrodust2• 15 years ago

Or in other words if you think the Standard Model is neat and tidy, got another thing coming.

suprgeek2• 15 years ago

When the LHC was built - one of the biggest reasons used to justify its massive cost was that it would lead to new physics. Th Higgs sighting is sort of the Good News/Bad News scenario.

At the energies predicted, it falls in nicely with mostly established physics (Standard model). So yes that is the good news part.

The seriously bad news part is that it does not lead us in any new directions at all. Theoretical Physicists usually feed off of Observations from experiments like the LHC and new strange results to expand their frontiers.

For a while now unfortunately they have been going down the Warren of String theory without any falsifiable predictions emerging. Instead people have more or less stumbled in the Anthropic principle as the new be-all and end-all. I was really hoping that there was no Higgs to be found at all OR Super symmetry to be found OR Fine structure constant Variations OR some clue abut dark matter :(

VMG• 15 years ago

I'm not familiar with the topic, but isn't there still room for new discoveries?

suprgeek2• 15 years ago

Yes certainly there is much room to find new and exciting stuff - but "not" finding the Higgs was the lowest hanging fruit. If the LHC were not able to find the Higgs at any energy level, the Standard model wold be rendered incomplete and a lot of "new" new Physics would follow. They would have had to explian how Mass is introduced into the model without relying on the Higgs Field.

Now (if this is confirmed to the 5 sigma needed) the experimenters have to actually go looking for new stuff - a harder proposition, fraught with interpretations and Agendas.

sp332• 15 years ago

I'm not an expert, but knowing the actual value of the Higgs boson mass has implications for other parts of the model. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3343321

mattheww2• 15 years ago

There are several things to keep in mind when reading things like this piece:

1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger friends roughly what they saw.

2) The most familiar exclusion plots are showing the line at which the cross section is excluded at 95% along with the 2-sigma uncertainty on the expected location of this curve. Since the people spreading rumors are not very familiar with the analysis, they do not realize that n-sigma deviations between the observed and expected lines are not the same thing as n-sigma observations. The actual significance of observation will usually be lower.

3) Again because the people spreading rumors are not familiar with the analysis, they are not able to add appropriate caveats about systematic uncertainties, which can substantially reduce significance. Because these rumors started last week, I guarantee the plots on which they were based do not include all systematic effects. And because the bloggers are predominantly theorists, they don't have the experience to add that information themselves either.

So I hope you will take rumors for what they are: rumors.

demallien• 15 years ago

Are you saying that you do have actual knowledge, or are you just guessing this stuff just like the others? I'm not trtying to be snarky, I really want to know if you have good hard info or not.

mattheww2• 15 years ago

Let's just say that regardless of whether I have any actual knowledge about this specific situation, I know that what I outlined is what happens from other, similar situations where I definitely have actual knowledge. Let's also say that if I did have any actual knowledge, I would know better than to confirm it and I would definitely know better than to say what I know to a blogger.

I do know that knowledgeable people will probably be more open-mouthed around this time tomorrow.

Steuard• 15 years ago

CERN apparently said the following in a press release, which puts some substantial limits on what's actually going to be announced:

"A seminar will be held at CERN on 13 December at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs."

I got that from Matt Strassler's blog entry below (which is worth reading):

http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/12/07/about-those-rumors-t...

giardini3• 15 years ago

Is this important to string theory?

bitops• 15 years ago

Aside from the good explanations of what the Higgs is below, can someone explain why discovering the Higgs would be significant? I.e. what problems does it help illuminate.

CERN to announce Higgs boson observation at LHC

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