Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins

http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs.html

by Rickasaurus • 14 years ago

278 211 14 years ago

webcast.web.cern.ch

Create7• 14 years ago

The work at CERN is differentiated when it is performed by westerners or by people from the East:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

Western discrimination is firmly in place there.

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

What

That is referring to production costs for the calorimeter, which is part of the ATLAS detector, (it picks up neutral particles IIRC.)

It doesn't refer to differentiating between work done by white people and non white people actually at CERN, which is what you seem to be implying?

Create7• 14 years ago

Please take time to read it. But here is a summary:

"1the western equivalent value is 1'390 kCHF. 2the western equivalent value is 5'450 kCHF"

http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost...

It is not from the ATLAS experiment, but of another LHC experiment -- but still within the organisation of CERN.

The comment/quote is about evaluating people -- ie. by the simplest budgeting metric, labour cost (with obvious consequences for peer evaluation). It has nothing to do with colour but with peer evaluation of equivalent work, differentiated according eastern or western membership.

edit: unable to reply to the comment below. But I can cite concrete case(s) in which work was performed in Geneva by both eastern and western member within the same group. China isn't a memberstate anyway.

icarus_drowning2• 14 years ago

Really, I think this might take the cake as the worst comment I've ever read on Hacker News.

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

He cited a source, so I don't think it can take that particular cake.

Create7• 14 years ago

to quote somebody who claimed to have invented the Internet:

...inconvenient truth?

What makes it even worse, is that the worse comment is actually factual.

ErikHuisman• 14 years ago

Mr. Higgs just walked in.

nodesocket2• 14 years ago

Sorry, noob, who is this?

corin_• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

tip: in the future, google Higgs

tdicola2• 14 years ago

Anyone else getting no sound?

edit: Sound is working now!

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

It's just very quiet, you're just hearing the spillover from the room into the main mic. If you crank your speakers you'll hear people talking, but be careful when someone talks into the mic :)

nodesocket2• 14 years ago

They muting until it starts. ;)

brok3nmachine2• 14 years ago

you're right, I have sound now, thanks!=)

brok3nmachine2• 14 years ago

I only heard sound for a few seconds, while I let it run in the background for 5min or so.

10dpd2• 14 years ago

Why is potentially the worlds finest discovery of the 21st century being communicated using the worst software to be cobbled together in the 20th? (Aka Flash)

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

Because the universe is conspiring against us.

Brajeshwar• 14 years ago

It works. Flash Player is the only browser plugin yet that can do an actual streaming (not progressive download) using either Adobe's own Media Server or other similar Open Source at the back-end. If need be, that is the best form of protection against content theft so far.

It is not that difficult to setup the whole streaming with lots of free and open source solutions available today. It's just a good means to a useful end.

EDITS:

Just as I suspected, it's using a Media Server Streaming Server. "rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/"

It is also automatically streaming corresponding quality depending on the user's bandwidth.

  { bitrate: '1000', width: '640', file: 'cern1_900' },
  { bitrate: '700', width: '640', file: 'cern1_600' },
  { bitrate: '400', width: '640', file: 'cern1_300' },

So far, I haven't found a decent way to do that in HTML5 without having to encode multiple video-streams for multiple bitrates.

10dpd2• 14 years ago

It works

Unfortunately I was unable to listen in due to being on a mobile device....

JacobAldridge• 14 years ago

Latest application of the uncertainty principle - you can have 21st century discoveries or 21st century technology, but you can't have both simultaneously.

shriphani• 14 years ago

Inkjet printers were made in the 70s and everyone I know still uses one (labs, etc) (even for thesis prints)

To Flash or not is probably the least significant decision anyone at CERN makes.

dmvaldman• 14 years ago

That's Joe Incandela speaking, he taught me graduate quantum physics at UCSB. I feel awesome now :-P

syassami• 14 years ago

gaucho here too! :) Edit: Had David Stuart, (Cern -Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS))

modarts6• 14 years ago

UCSB Physics Alum checking in.

Sukotto• 14 years ago

I'm in a place with single-bar wifi signal and the livestream is really choppy.

Does anyone have something like a buffered stream on a delay so I can be sure I don't miss anything, even if I have to stop to buffer more of the stream?

I have a vanilla, chrome browser, and a fairly recent VLC.

Indyan• 14 years ago

I am in office, and am following a live blog of the webcast. http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/07/03/higgs-seminar-live-... [The Guardian one pointed out below is more informative]

gnyman• 14 years ago

The guardian has one but it is not very detailed, but I guess they will have the main points not all the details of the presentations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jul/04/higgs-bos...

humbert• 14 years ago

Try the RTMP stream: rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900

If that's choppy, save it to disk with rtmpdump: rtmpdump -v -o cern1_900.flv -r rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900

edit: alternate bitrates (thanks to Brajeshwar): cern1_900 cern1_600 cern1_300

korussian2• 14 years ago

Why is the speaker in such a rush? He seems to be under a constant time-crunch. He keeps saying he's going to go over time and that he'll speed up.

Didn't he practice this before? Can't he just tell us what he wants to tell us, and skip over the rest?

jmcqk6• 14 years ago

If you're going to make an announcement that is going to be held up to the highest rigorous standards, figuring out exactly what to say is going to be a difficult issue. This presentation isn't for you, this is for the physics community.

korussian2• 14 years ago

Right now, he's presenting general stuff that everyone in the room already knows, including him. It's just a summary of the status of the project up to now.

He could have practiced this 6 months ago.

Aaaand... at this very second he's starting on the new stuff, I think.

robryan• 14 years ago

Sounds like the kind of content that is just very hard to condense into a reasonable amount of time. This seems super dense to me, but you can imagine to a physicist this is a high level overview.

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

That was simply nerves. He knew how much media attention was on him.

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

Next time you do a major presentation on state-of-the-art high-energy physics experiments live to a world-wide community on what could be a Nobel Prize winning event, let us know and we'll watch you do it better. ;)

exolab• 14 years ago

I am having a lot of fun watching this, although I don't understand a single word of what he is saying :D

M4N14C• 14 years ago

This guy is excited to get to the conclusion of the talk.

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

The magic number for CMS is 4.1 sigma. That was combined across all channels I think?

mattheww3• 14 years ago

At the point you made the comment, the full number has not yet been shown. That's only the combined number for Higgs to gamma-gamma for 2011 and 2012 (so far).

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

Sorry about that. He just said 5 sigma for the combined signals (I think? maybe I misunderstood again.)

Nobel prizes all round!

lancefisher2• 14 years ago

The Monte Carlo method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

chadnickbok• 14 years ago

Just announced 5 sigma.

ehsanu12• 14 years ago

Really striking what a large percentage of the words are jargon. Sometimes I understand less than 10% of the words in a sentence. I think I might now better understand how a non-programmer feels when seeing a talk related to programming.

nsns• 14 years ago

That's true for almost every field of academic research and work; around 70-80% of the words are not in any dictionary (or, if they are, their standard definition has nothing to do with their professional meaning).

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

What always interested me is how the ratio of new words to repurposed words varies per field.

For example, in CS we use a whole bunch of words like "string", "thread", "class", "type", "object", "arrow", "map" and "macro" to denote CS-specific concepts related at best tangentially to the words' original meanings. On the other hand, biology seems to prefer to come up with new words for their technical terminology.

I wonder if this is a product of different cultures or something like that.

tdicola2• 14 years ago

I don't understand the particle physics they're talking about, but I do find it fascinating how a lot of the work is really how to sort through a massive amount of data to remove all the noise and find the signal. It sounds like they're using some machine learning algorithms to examine and classify various interactions in the data.

jessriedel2• 14 years ago

> It sounds like they're using some machine learning algorithms to examine and classify various interactions in the data.

They are.

obilgic• 14 years ago

This is basically lecturer giving lecture to lecturers. Pretty amazing.

bobsy2• 14 years ago

I've given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people. I am surprised he didn't start with:

"I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this."

I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.

If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.

Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.

antonioevans2• 14 years ago

This is for the scientific community. The scientific method is that all results should be scrutinized, tested and verified. If you want a 2-3 minute explanation. Wait for CNN.

waterlesscloud3• 14 years ago

I don't really buy that in this case. It's still high level and summarized and no one is verifying or scrutinizing anything based on that presentation alone.

NASA handles these kinds of announcements well, but then they also announce cyanide-based life. So.

bobsy2• 14 years ago

I understand that. I don't understand why announcements of this significance are done like this.

Its like NASA landing on the moon without video and presenting geology findings based on the rocks. Sod that. The people want to see VIDEO! They want to live the moment. I thought this could be one of those moments where something significant was discovered which I may be asked about in many years time. A "this changes everything moment." The way it is presented though may be just that for scientists. For everyone else though.. who cares when the announcement is this technical.

Surely I wasn't the only person wondering if we are not closer to the hover board? That would have been a nice way to start.

Screenshot of hoverboard "For the leymens tuning in. Our discovery means this is / is not closer to being made."

short_circut• 14 years ago

He specifically said that would come later.

drostie4• 14 years ago

Even the Guardian reporter has admitted that it goes over her head. Heck, I'm doing a Master's in condensed-matter physics and I don't understand much of the jargon.

What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits. CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they're talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.

The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say 'bb') and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let's say).

All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating "expected" curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, "expected" vs. "actual", so that you can compare them.

On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what's actually seen and what the statistical "counting" errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to "subtract out the noise" to see the signal more clearly.

irollboozers• 14 years ago

I feel like the statistics going on here is almost as fascinating as the physics. Well, they technically are the same, but so intriguing to see people hooping and hollering at 5.0 sigma.

"We are 99.999995% sure we found it!"

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

The ATLAS lady has what I think must be the worst set of powerpoint slides I've ever seen. Epically bad. Pretty amazing.

Even if you are working at CERN running the equipment, there's no way you could absorb all the info on each of those slides in the 10 to 15 seconds she shows them. They might as well have pictures of frolicking kittens on them.

fletchowns• 14 years ago

Seems like a lot of it is just comparing more recent data to last years data. I'm sure they have spent plenty of time looking at last years data, so they can probably understand quite a bit at this pace.

tincholio• 14 years ago

That, and Comic Sans!

mukaiji• 14 years ago

This, unfortunately, is not even that bad when compared to the litany of bad, overloaded, eye-scorching powerpoint presentation I usually sit through in research group meetings, conferences, and more. Maybe all intro courses in STEM should include a course on communicative design.

nilaykumar3• 14 years ago

Clearly you don't understand how much time pressure these people are under. If you were at CERN you would realize how intense the atmosphere has been in the past 2 weeks.

Also, focus on the content - if you're caring so much about the presentation, then you probably don't understand enough of the physics to comment on the content.

pessimist• 14 years ago

Bullshit. She has plenty of informative graphs and useful numbers.

The worst powerpoint presentations are ones that are content-free - this one could be accused of too much content.

noselasd• 14 years ago

That'll happen, someone will explain it in "layman" terms about why/how this is fundamentally important. That's probably not going to be done at this announcement though, but hopefully in the aftermath by the media reporting on the announcement.

nagrom3• 14 years ago

I am a particle physicist. The most interesting point of this announcement for me is that this is a confirmation of predictions of a very exotic particle.

The properties of subatomic particles include something called 'spin' - that's a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we've discovered; it's completely unlike anything that we've seen up until now.

That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we're in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.

That's why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It's an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.

(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been much more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)

kamaal• 14 years ago

We still couldn't understand this completely,

What is the significance of discovering a particle without a spin?

Does this answer some questions about black matter, anti matter, big bang etc.

Then it would be interesting thing for us, laymen.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

So basically all of this will not result in having that transporter I want so badly?

guscost• 14 years ago

I'm curious what you mean by "pretty much." Did the Standard Model predict 125 GeV?

I'm asking because I've seen a few casual descriptions of this Higgs as a "lightweight." I'm assuming that means it's not as heavy as expected?

EDIT: "If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV)."

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/H/Higgs_boson.html

rangibaby• 14 years ago

TL;DR: New boson discovered!

Maro5• 14 years ago

CMS is at 4.9 sigma. Soooooooo close.

ehsanu12• 14 years ago

5 sigma is kind of arbitrary, isn't it? Just a nice "round" number. Obviously better than 4.9, but the line is fuzzy, if it even exists.

Maro5• 14 years ago

Correct. What really counts is independent verification, all at high sigmas: Tevatron, CMS, Atlas.

tfm• 14 years ago

But then at the end he kept mis-speaking as to whether there were five Directors-General or six. Maybe they're at 5.9 sigma after all!

duiker101• 14 years ago

could you explain in easy terms what getting to 5 would mean? thanks

Achshar• 14 years ago

I am just a hobbyist, but as i understand it, 5.0 sigma is just the probability of the result being bogus. So 5 sigma is very high probability, something like one in 1.4 million. i.e. the chances of the result being wrong is one in 1.4 mil. 4.9 sigma will mean lesser probability, but i am not sure by exactly how much will that 1.4 mil number reduce.

guelo• 14 years ago

Final (CMS) summary: We have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 +/- 0.6 GeV at 4.9σ significance!

Atlas comes in at ~126.5 GeV with 5.0σ. That would be a confirmed discovery!

Interesting that Atlas' mass is outside CMS's confidence range, though Atlas didn't have a range on theirs.

Maro5• 14 years ago

There are 2 big experiments (detectors) at LHC. This is for the CMS detector. Next up is Atlas.

Clarification:

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.ht...

Devilboy• 14 years ago

Could we combine the ATLAS results to get over the 5 sigma mark?

diminish3• 14 years ago

Are there any other theorized boson candidates, which may fit the experiment results or is Higgs Boson the only candidate?

yk• 14 years ago

Short answer: They discovered a particle which looks like a Higgs Boson.

They are talking about the standard model Higgs, which is the result of a specific way to break electroweak symmetry. A consequence is, that there are quite well understood predictions from this how the cross sections and branching ratios should look like. And on the current level of statistical significance it looks like a standard model Higgs.

On the other hand, there are so called effective field theories, that is you can start from a complicated theory and derive a simpler theory from it, which behaves the same in some aspects (for example at low energies).

So the more exact answer is probably that now a theory has to contain a Higgs boson in the appropriate limit.

gorak2• 14 years ago

Hawking owes Kane $100!

modarts6• 14 years ago

I wouldn't think Hawking would be betting on such a result.

bingbing• 14 years ago

You are correct: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18708626

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Charge? Color charge?

Since this is apparently "only seen" through the Monte Carlo analysis I suppose they haven't seen one specific particle decay with it, I suppose?!

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

The error bars on the mass range are typically just 1 sigma, so there's considerable overlap between the two figures (the Atlas figure is within the 95% confidence interval for the CMS figure, for example).

dgquintas• 14 years ago

"We have observed a new boson at 125.3 +/- 0.6 GeV at 4.9 signa significance"

rabagaz• 14 years ago

Comic sans!

tomjakubowski• 14 years ago

The ATLAS presentation is set in Comic Sans. Monumental.

timcederman• 14 years ago

Is that comic sans?

trafficlight• 14 years ago

Nothing says High Energy Physics like Comic Sans.

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

Designers vs physicists:

Designer sits in coffee shop wearing his hipster outfit drinking his hipster coffee, writing incensed blog post about the outrages of Comic Sans.

Physicist makes presentation on what is clearly a state-of-the-art advancement in the progress of high-energy particle physics (and thus, physics) to a world-wide community, live, and NOT a fuck was given as to what font is used. :P

Much respect to the latter folks.

lancefisher2• 14 years ago

Looked more like Chalkboard to me.

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

I have a 5 sigma level of confidence it was either Chalkboard or Comic Sans. We'll need a real designer to chime in to present their own numerical analysis.

modarts6• 14 years ago

So I see a lot of people are frustrated about the impenetrable physics "jargon".

I'm not exactly sure how you'd expect some sort of tldr; of potentially one of the most important scientific announcements of the last 100 years.

unconed• 14 years ago

Probably because the guy's presentation style is terrible, rushed, and his slides are a graphical disaster. He jumps from overload to overload, connecting with "obviously" and "as you can see". There is no overview, nothing connecting the endless series of slides. Everyone in the room is just waiting for the Higgs announcement.

I gather that they wanted to include last minute data, but given that they're livestreaming this and tons of people are watching, it was a huge chance to get a decent presentation done that would at least highlight the important results clearly rather than having them be throwaway lines between jargon.

zethraeus2• 14 years ago

The world's most cutting edge scientific results presented with comic sans. :)

(edit: The current ATLAS talk, not the first one on the CMS data)

biot• 14 years ago

It's certainly an incredibly readable font, even with the webcast being somewhat blurry. A good choice.

zethraeus2• 14 years ago

Twitter is full of bashing. I don't think it matters. The presentation is already unfriendly to anyone not in the scientific community, so presentation isn't really that important.

However, as everyone else has said, it would have been lovely to have a layman's TL;DR. Perhaps that's the press conference at 11:00, and expecting it beforehand is arrogant.

NHQ• 14 years ago

There is a font called Dyslexie which looks like a much subtler Comic Sans and was designed to be more readable for dyslexics.

www.studiostudio.nl/project-dyslexie/

diminish3• 14 years ago

Soon the web will move to Lobster.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

Exactly! Take that, Valley's "Beautiful" startups ;)

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

Simon Peyton-Jones, of Haskell fame (however relative such a fame may be), is also well known for using Comic Sans in his presentations.

So it's not unknown in advanced CS either :).

ot• 14 years ago

This happened already in 2011:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vif4D-TJYQ

They must really like that font :)

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

Sean Carroll is liveblogging from the room and has some actual interpretation of what's being said: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/07/03/...

drostie4• 14 years ago

I love how we're using Hacker News here -- this is definitely not what it was designed for. What we're really doing is something like a live chat room while watching a common talk, but unlike chat rooms it can be threaded and points can be allocated. Also unlike a chat room, HN does not automatically update when we get new discussion messages, but that's a constraint of the technologies at the time it was built.

It might be very interesting to try to use comet-casting or websockets to revolutionize chat in precisely that way, realtime threaded discussions. So, in addition to all of the chat constraints you have the ability to dynamically mark certain chat messages as replying to other messages, and as the noise in the chat room gets higher you can filter yourself to just "I want to follow this discussion."

diminish3• 14 years ago

I love how HN users love to make live meta analysis; in most of the topics, some significant percentage of people are not focused much on the topic, but on observing other users' interactions and its techno-historical review. These show opportunities for future products.

dandelany3• 14 years ago

This is why Google Wave got me so excited - and why I was so disappointed when it was botched and silently killed. I think an app like Wave could be great for many things, including discussing a live event like this.

JohnLBevan2• 14 years ago

My thoughts precisely. The code is still out there though - just waiting for someone to pick up where Google left off. . . http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html My plan is to try to rewrite this as a sharepoint add in, so that all those companies who install sharepoint as their "solution to everything" get something good with it; that could help grow the user base / promote belief in the technology. Then it could be openned out into allowing people to connect to hosted public services, and eventually get back to Google's original vision. ps. In honour of the subject matter, perhaps we should be calling it Google Duality?

tikhonj3• 14 years ago

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one sad that Wave passed away. I really think it could have found some unique uses, but most people (and, transitively, Google) just didn't give it enough time.

Isn't it open source now? I might try the open source version one of these days... Maybe I can even convince my friends to use it :).

Hovertruck• 14 years ago

This happens a lot on sports-based subreddits as well, when there's a game on.

dandelany3• 14 years ago

So, the magic number here was 5σ, the generally accepted "gold standard" for discovery, which would mean a 1 in 1.74 million chance that the results occurred by chance rather than being a signal. As other commenters have pointed out, the presenter originally announced a 4.1σ observation, then continued to add data from other experiments until the combined result was 5.1σ. However, right at the end, he added in some additional data which actually brought the significance down to 4.9σ... That's science - you can't ignore data just because it ruins your big presentation.

IANAPhysicist, but I'd be interested to know how strict the 5-sigma discovery rule is considered - for example, could they still get a Nobel prize for a 4.9σ announcement? I suppose it's not that big a deal - the LHC is still running, and I'm sure they'll have enough data for a true 5σ announcement soon. Regardless, hats off to all involved, it must be exciting to be at the forefront of human knowledge :)

chime3• 14 years ago

Atlas is still presenting. So let's wait and see what they came up with. 4.9σ was just from CMS.

Edit: It is worth noting that 125GeV fits well within Fermilab's recent announcement: http://news.discovery.com/space/tevatron-data-detects-higgs-...

dandelany3• 14 years ago

I think these physicists have been watching too many Steve Jobs presentations. "4.9σ... Oh, but one more thing!" ;)

In all seriousness, does anyone know how common it is to do this kind of gradual reveal during scientific presentations vs. stating your basic final results in the introduction? It's kind of fun, but you could cut the tension in that room with a knife!

typpo• 14 years ago

She is working the crowd, so to speak. Here is the final CERN press release, which claims a 5 sigma result:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2012/PR...

lmm• 14 years ago

>IANAPhysicist, but I'd be interested to know how strict the 5-sigma discovery rule is considered - for example, could they still get a Nobel prize for a 4.9σ announcement?

It's very much a HEP thing, and done that way because HEP is pretty much all statistical analysis these days. Other fields wouldn't treat the sigmas as the most important thing, and I've heard mutterings that it's not really the most accurate approach - but it is objective and easy to apply.

haberman• 14 years ago

5σ seems like an unnecessarily high standard to this non-physicist; what's the rationale for that? At 5σ we could publish 1,000 major discoveries a year and have E[false discovery accepted] = 1,740 years.

JonnieCache9• 14 years ago

I think it's mainly so they can be as condescending and smug as possible at interdisciplinary conferences.

mattheww3• 14 years ago

The two main rationales are that systematic uncertainties are historically under-estimated and that we are looking in many channels (more than 1000), so it would not be too hard to find a 3 or 4 sigma anomaly. The second part is the so-called "Look Elsewhere Effect." If you hit 5 sigma, you are fairly safe from either of these effects ruining your "discovery."

raphinou2• 14 years ago

I searched but didn't find an explanation of this 5 sigma. Any reference to share?

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

5σ = 1 / 1,744,278 chance this was just luck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

SiVal• 14 years ago

The 5σ convention is more about announcement than about discovery. No one can really say when a discovery is made. As more information comes in, the image can remain fuzzy or can get clearer and clearer. In the latter case, 5σ is a convention as a threshold for when you are entitled to announce a discovery without being blamed for jumping the gun. They'll collect data for many more years before passing the threshold of Nobel-worthy discovery.

ekianjo3• 14 years ago

5σ is not a rule. It's just a measurement of the probability that the result you observe is an accident. It means that it's very unlikely that it was just pure luck.

By the way, σ measurements are also used in many engineering jobs, and quality systems measurements. The kind of industry "goal" is to get 6σ (let's say when you manufacture consumer goods in large quantities, like millions every month). But for some other industries, 9σ is the benchmark - and from what I know, air companies have quality systems up to 9σ to ensure the lowest risk of something wrong happening.

rflrob• 14 years ago

How can they possibly have up to 9 sigma? 6 sigma is a failure rate about 1 in 10 billion, whereas 9 sigma would be 1 in 10^19 or so! That's oddly similar to the number of grains of sand on the earth![1]

[1] http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

You should have waited to watch the ATLAS woman's presentation afterward. During hers, they concluded with a solid 5 sigma.

Almaviva3• 14 years ago

> which would mean a 1 in 1.74 million chance that the results occurred by chance rather than being a signal

No!! It's the chance that randomness could produce a result that large. This distinction sounds pedantic, but misunderstanding this is widespread and leads to fallacies committed frequently by very smart people who ought to know better in many fields.

raldi5• 14 years ago

Aren't those the same thing? How are they different?

jasonwatkinspdx• 14 years ago

To be explicit, since this comment is still top voted: This comment was made by someone who only watched the first of 2 presentations.

The second presentation showed a 5 sigma result.

I'm Incredibly disappointed by the trivial inaccuracy of comments on hacker news lately, and that corrections never get upvoted quickly enough to prevent the spread of misinformation.

detay• 14 years ago

CERN: Makes you feel stupid since 1954

kmil• 14 years ago

They desperately need a designer. The color scheme,use of comic sans and broken composition make my eyes bleed.

modarts6• 14 years ago

They could care less about the presentation; these guys are all about content.

Create7• 14 years ago

I am under the impression, that what you think is not entirely true:

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

Perhaps an answer to the naive question:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_(public_...

grumblepeet• 14 years ago

Nothing to do with the science, but it looks suspiciously like they are using Squeak to produce their slides. Maybe they are using it in some capacity to collate data?

urbanjunkie2• 14 years ago

Cool - they just showed a quick shot of Peter Higgs in the audience - he looked a bit emotional

chime3• 14 years ago

Peter Higgs just teared up. This is amazing.

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

I heard once that when Peter Higgs tears up, each teardrop is 126.5 GeV.

And now it has been confirmed to 5 sigma. :)

mkramlich8• 14 years ago

TL;DR: "I think we have it."

scotty79• 14 years ago

What they actually established except for mass and the fact that it's previously undetected particle?

Do they know that it's a boson not ferminon? Do they know that's elementary particle?

gouranga• 14 years ago

Pedant here.

Can people please stop posting intervals in headlines i.e. "20 minutes!"

It expired a long time ago and was probably too late by the time the first people read it.

Please use at 12:00 UTC or something (a time).

wqfeng• 14 years ago

The 404 page looks great.

zvrba• 14 years ago

OK, when can I order my bottle of Higgs bosons? ;-P

tvon• 14 years ago

Meta, but come on, "in 20 Mins"? The headline was wrong seconds after it was posted...

chris_wot6• 14 years ago

Sorry if this sounds ignorant, but were they doing some sort of regression analysis over large data sets?

Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins

Related Stories