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4th July 2012, 08:57 PM | #161 |
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4th July 2012, 10:29 PM | #162 |
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I joke I stole from Slashdot:
The Superconducting Super Collider in Texas probably would have found the Higgs Boson first, if only it was funded as the "God Particle Gun", instead. |
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5th July 2012, 02:16 AM | #163 |
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5th July 2012, 02:17 AM | #164 |
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The Higgs Boson lives - All hail the Higgs Boson
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5th July 2012, 02:46 AM | #165 |
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Ok, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the thing that makes the Higgs so important simply that it's the only particle predicted by the SM that hadn't yet been found? And this discovery basically elevates SM to the same status as GR--a theory that's withstood every test we could throw at it?
I mean, it's nice to know that it has something to do with some form of mass, but that's not really why this is such a big discovery, is it? It's not the HB itself; it's the fact that it's the last piece of the puzzle. (At least within the domain the SM covers.) |
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5th July 2012, 07:35 AM | #166 |
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Sort of. Ultimately, it's not actually about a specific particle at all, but about symmetries. The standard model in it's basic form has certain symmetries which result in predictions that don't actually agree with observations. In order to get the theory to match things like the mass of certain particles, you need to add some way that the symmetry is broken. The Higgs mechanism adds an extra field (the theory is actually made up of fields, see here) into the SM which allows breaking of the symmetry in the correct way to get the masses for the W and Z gauge bosons that we actually observe.
So it's not just a question of there being a missing particle, this is essentially a test of the fundamental basis of the whole theory. Without the Higgs mechanism the entire standard model just makes no sense at all, so if we don't see the extra particle it also predicts the whole thing pretty much falls apart.
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5th July 2012, 09:11 AM | #167 |
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5th July 2012, 09:50 AM | #168 |
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5th July 2012, 11:56 AM | #169 |
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But GR doesn't explain any of those things either (with the possible exception of dark energy). It seems to me that all of those (with the possible exception of the matter/antimatter imbalance) are outside the domain of the standard model. And yes, we'll need a new model at some point to explain all that, but then we'll most likely need a quantum gravity model to supercede GR at some point as well, and GR may need some adjustments to deal with dark energy.
There's a difference, in my mind at least, between being incomplete and being incorrect. GR and the standard model both seem incomplete to me (the degree isn't so much of an issue--incomplete is incomplete), but both seem to be basically confirmed now within their domains.
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But that's still a good point. |
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5th July 2012, 02:36 PM | #170 |
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Stephen Wolfram has an interesting article at The Reference Frame giving his thoughts on the progression of particle physics and where he thinks it might be going.
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5th July 2012, 03:25 PM | #171 |
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My personal favorite joke to come out of this....
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/05/its...Boing+Boing%29 |
5th July 2012, 04:02 PM | #172 |
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5th July 2012, 04:27 PM | #173 |
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Every time a journalist says "God Particle", Schrödinger maybe kills a kitten.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6...e6zto1_400.jpg |
5th July 2012, 07:22 PM | #174 |
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5th July 2012, 07:26 PM | #175 |
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5th July 2012, 08:35 PM | #176 |
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5th July 2012, 08:47 PM | #177 |
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Awww.
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6th July 2012, 02:55 AM | #178 |
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An 'explanation' of mass said that there are Higgs Bosons everywhere, creating the Higgs field that creates mass. However, the Higgs Boson has an incredibly short life span, before it 'transmutates' into other particles.
How does that work? |
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6th July 2012, 03:23 AM | #179 |
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6th July 2012, 05:17 AM | #180 |
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6th July 2012, 05:29 AM | #181 |
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It doesn't. The Higgs mechanism is said to do be responsible for mass, but take a look at A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC. It’s by Gian Francesco Giudice, a CERN physicist. There's a search-inside on Amazon. If you search on Higgs sector you can read pages 173 through 175. He starts by saying: “The most inappropriate name ever given to the Higgs boson is 'The God particle'. The name gives the impression that the Higgs boson is the central particle of the Standard Model, governing its structure. But this is very far from the truth.” He also says the Higgs mechanism is “the toilet” of the standard model, and is “frightfully ad-hoc”. On page 174 he says: “It is sometimes said that the discovery of the Higgs boson will explain the mystery of the origin of mass. This statement requires a good deal of qualification.” He ends up saying “In summary, the Higgs mechanism accounts for about 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter, and for only 0.2 per cent of the mass of the universe. This is not nearly enough to justify the claim of explaining the origin of mass.”
The CERN press office don't correct the garbage you read because it suits them if you think this is something more important than it is. E=mc² is responsible for mass. If you heat a container of gas, you increase its mass. If you trap a massless photon in a box, you increase the mass of the system. |
6th July 2012, 05:53 AM | #182 |
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It's hardly ad hoc if it's pretty well what they predicted it would be.
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6th July 2012, 06:21 AM | #183 |
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Farsight:
It's sad. First you make a very reasonable statement, while quoting Francesco Giudice's reasoned comments. Then conclude with the absurd comment that "E = mc2 is responsible for mass." An equation is responsible for mass? Energy is responsible for mass? Does that comment have any meaning? Is sinθ1/sinθ2= n responsible for refraction? |
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6th July 2012, 06:49 AM | #184 |
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There's a sense in which the background Higgs field is a collection of Higgs particles in a Bose condensate. But it's probably better to think of it as a sort of aether, except that it's an aether that has no rest frame (i.e. it looks the same to all observers, regardless of their state of motion).
The Higgs particles that LHC produced are like excitations (waves, or ripples) of that aether. They decay quickly to other particles. |
6th July 2012, 08:39 AM | #185 |
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The difference is that GR doesn't try to explain any of those things. GR is basically a theory of gravity and motion. It says nothing whatsoever about what things might exist to obey its rules, it just says what those rules are. The standard model, on the other hand, is basically a theory that tells us what particles should exist. Dark matter is presumed to be made of particles, but the SM tells us there shouldn't be any more particles left. Gravity is often presumed (or at least hoped) to behave similarly to the other forces and therefore be described as a field with associated particles, but the SM just can't do it. Matter/anti-matter imbalance is a big one, because that's exactly the sort of thing all the symmetries and symmetry breaking should predict, but we just can't get a prediction that matches the amounts we actually see.
The standard model simply doesn't predict, or gets badly wrong, many of the things that it absolutely should predict. It's not a question of not quite being complete or not giving answers to things it's not designed to answer, it's just very much a broken theory that can't deal with many of the big questions in particle physics. It's good enough to be fairly useful up to a point, but it goes way past the "might need a bit of refining in extreme cases" of something like GR. See here. The standard model is a field theory. The Higgs field is nothing special, it's just one of many fields that make up the theory. It's no more aether than electromagnetism or the strong force. |
6th July 2012, 09:32 PM | #186 |
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The big guy puts things in context:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-particle.html
Quote:
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6th July 2012, 09:43 PM | #187 |
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That makes me feel better. |
6th July 2012, 10:32 PM | #188 |
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Since it was mentioned...
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/sh...s-at-cern.html |
7th July 2012, 01:55 AM | #189 |
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If we don't know what dark matter is, maybe it is one of the existing particles? Could gravity be explained with the existing set of particles, but we just don't know it yet? Do we call Newtonian physics a failure because it doesn't include relativity, or was it just an iteration in our progress of advancing knowledge?
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7th July 2012, 02:15 AM | #190 |
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7th July 2012, 02:18 AM | #191 |
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7th July 2012, 09:50 AM | #192 |
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We can invent the name "graviton", we can say "to explain gravity it has to be massless, spin-2 and couple to mass", and ... well, things sort of peter out there. There's no single coherent theory of the graviton, not like there is for Higgs or photon or gluon interactions.
Insofar as we can guess what the graviton's properties are, no one is searching for it. It's utterly inaccessible to experiments as far as I know. Interestingly, there *are* sensible hypotheses which combine supersymmetry---an extension of the Standard Model---with gravity, generally in a string-theory context. In these theories, the graviton has a stable, heavy superpartner, called the gravitino, which might be amenable to searches at the LHC, and could be a component of the dark matter. |
7th July 2012, 12:54 PM | #193 |
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7th July 2012, 12:57 PM | #194 |
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Can anyone answer another lay person's question in lay language: I'm reading now that the "measurements seem to diverge slightly from what would be expected". Having only the vaguest clue why drag matters, I can't make sense of the Net explanations on just what differs and why it matters.
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8th July 2012, 02:26 AM | #195 | |||
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I'm sure that everyone here has been waiting with bated breath for Deepak Chopra to weigh in on the significance of the Higgs boson. So without further ado:
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8th July 2012, 05:13 AM | #196 |
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8th July 2012, 06:42 AM | #197 |
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8th July 2012, 06:49 AM | #198 |
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8th July 2012, 02:17 PM | #199 |
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8th July 2012, 03:07 PM | #200 |
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