Are we nearing 'God particle' finding?

[Frankie]

US physicists confirm Higgs finding is near

US-based physicists said Wednesday that their experiments confirm those from a major European atom-smasher's that have narrowed the range where the elusive Higgs boson particle could be hiding.

The results come from the now-defunct Tevatron collider, which closed down in September after nearly a quarter century, though physicists continue to analyze its data in the hunt for the so-called "God particle."

The Higgs boson is the missing link in the standard model of physics and is believed to be what gives objects mass, though scientists have never been able to pin it down and it exists only in theory.

"The end game is approaching in the hunt for the Higgs boson," said Jim Siegrist, Department of Energy associate director of science for high energy physics.

"This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements in the quest to understand the building blocks of nature."

Physicists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermi National Acceleratory Laboratory in Illinois said in a statement that their data "might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV (gigaelectronvolts)."

That result includes the slightly more narrow constraints announced in December 2011 by scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- the world's largest atom-smasher, located along the French-Swiss border.

The CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) experiments, carried out by a consortium of 20 member nations, have shown a likely range for the Higgs boson between 115 to 127 GeV.

GeV is the standard measure for the mass of sub-atomic particles. One GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton.
However, none of the hints so far have been enough for physicists to announce that the particle has been "discovered," or to claim there is enough evidence to say for certain that it exists.

Fermilab director Pier Oddone said he was "thrilled with the pace of progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson," noting that scientists from around the world have combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions.

"There is still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists," added Dmitri Denisov, DZero co-spokesman and physicist at Fermilab.

"Based on these exciting hints, we are working as quickly as possible to further improve our analysis methods and squeeze the last ounce out of Tevatron data."

http://news.yahoo.com/us-physicists-confirm-higgs-finding-near-095411592.html

[blaise]

Obligatory mid air joke.

[Donger]

Only if the atoms break apart in mid-air.

[loochy]

Obligatory mid air joke.

Obligatory IQ reference joke.

[stonedstooge]

Physicists smoke good weed

[Donger]

Obligatory mid air joke.

****er.

[loochy]

Only if the atoms break apart in mid-air.

They do, don't they?

Or do they break apart in mid-vacuum?

[Donger]

They do, don't they?

Or do they break apart in mid-vacuum?

There is no vacuum. Only spoon.

[Imon Yourside]

All particles are God Particles, They come from the creator. Hopefully they don't spend too much time looking for "it".

[loochy]

All particles are God Particles, They come from the creator. Hopefully they don't spend too much time looking for "it".

So that means all particles are made up and exist solely to create hate and intolerance?

/DC Trolls

/off to dc

[DaKCMan AP]

I recommend the documentary "Atom Smashers"

[Imon Yourside]

So that means all particles are made up and exist solely to create hate and intolerance?

/DC Trolls

/off to dc

Exactly, it's all about the hate.

[loochy]

Exactly, it's all about the hate.

Maybe Anonymous can hack and shut down all physics related websites.

[seclark]

.

[Imon Yourside]

Maybe Anonymous can hack and shut down all physics related websites.

LMAO

[Dave Lane]

There is no "god" particle. Its the smallest unit in the construction of mass in any object. It's just a stupid term someone threw in there.

[Imon Yourside]

There is no "god" particle. Its the smallest unit in the construction of mass in any object. It's just a stupid term someone threw in there.

It's in the air, it's in the trees, it's even in aids ya know.

[Donger]

There is no "god" particle. Its the smallest unit in the construction of mass in any object. It's just a stupid term someone threw in there.

I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but one geek apparently named it "The Goddamned Particle" since it's been elusive but for decency's sake, it was changed to the above.

[Pitt Gorilla]

There is no "god" particle. Its the smallest unit in the construction of mass in any object. It's just a stupid term someone threw in there.Most folks simply refer to it as the Higgs boson.

[Imon Yourside]

Most folks simply refer to it as the Higgs boson.

Don't they make tractors?

[Frankie]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/28/us-science-higgs-cern-idUSBRE85R0JS20120628

World awaits latest in hunt for Higgs particle

By Chris Wickham and Robert Evans
LONDON/GENEVA | Thu Jun 28, 2012 6:54am EDT

(Reuters) - Scientists hunting the Higgs subatomic particle will unveil results next week that could confirm, confound or complicate our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

Seldom has something so small and ephemeral excited such interest. The theoretical particle explains how suns and planets formed after the Big Bang - but so far it has not been proven to exist.

The CERN research centre near Geneva will on July 4 unveil its latest findings in the search for the Higgs after reporting "tantalizing glimpses" in December.

Scientific bloggers and even some of the thousands of physicists working on the project are speculating that CERN will finally announce proof of the existence of the Higgs.

"It's still premature to say anything so definitive," says CERN spokesman James Gillies, adding the two teams involved are still analyzing data and even CERN insiders won't know the answer until the results from both are brought together.

But with plans for a news conference that will be beamed live around the world and coincide with a major particle physics conference in Melbourne, Australia, anticipation of a significant announcement is hard to avoid.

For Jordan Nash, a professor at London's Imperial College and a member of one of the teams looking for the Higgs, the excitement around the experiment is justified.

"We're trying to understand the fabric of the universe itself," he told Reuters. "It's a hugely fundamental piece of the mystery of how the universe is put together."

SMASHING WATERMELONS

A definitive 'we've found it' would be a surprise and a major scientific milestone.

"We too are holding our breath," says Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian physicist on one of the teams, in her latest blog.

The action takes place in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, a 27-km (17-mile) looped pipe that sits in a tunnel 100 meters underground on the Swiss/French border.

Two beams of energy are fired in opposite directions around it before smashing into each other to create many millions of particle collisions every second in a recreation of the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The vast amount of data produced is examined by banks of computers. But it's a messy process. For all the billions of collisions, very few of them are just right for revealing the Higgs particle.

"It's like smashing watermelons together and trying to achieve a perfect collision for two of the pips inside," says Nash.

Last year's "glimpses" of the Higgs were from just a handful of collisions out of the many millions that were analyzed. Since then, the power inside the collider has been ramped up to increase the intensity of the particle smashing. This threw off more data between April and June than in the whole of last year.

"We're looking for something so rare, it's a sifting experiment," Nash said. "We just made a gigantic haystack and now we are looking for the needle".

IT'S A BIG UNIVERSE

The Higgs particle is a crucial plank of the Standard Model, which is the best explanation physicists have of how the universe works at the most fundamental level.

But the particle is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by British scientist Peter Higgs as the way matter obtained mass after the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago.

Without it, according to the theory, the universe would have remained a giant soup of particles. It would not have coalesced into stars, planets and life.

Even if its existence is finally proven, it will only apply to the relatively small part of the universe explained by the Standard Model. It won't tell us about so-called dark matter or dark energy, which scientists believe make up about 96 percent of the cosmos.

It could, however, be a step towards a theory of everything that encompasses dark matter and energy, as well as the force of gravity, which the Standard Model also does not explain.

Those early glimpses may of course not be borne out in the latest data, which would provoke serious head-scratching and debate about where to look next. They may discover the Higgs exactly as postulated.

But scientists say the most exciting news from CERN, whether it comes next week or later this year, would be the discovery of a type of Higgs particle but not quite as described in the Standard Model.

This, they say, could provide a road sign on where to look for answers on dark matter, dark energy and even esoteric concepts like parallel universes.

"Something more exotic could take us beyond the Standard Model and into the rest of the universe that we currently know nothing about," said James Gillies.

He said just as Albert Einstein's theories enveloped and built on the work of Isaac Newton, the work being done by the thousands of physicists at CERN has the potential to do the same. "It's where we'd like it to take us," he said.

WHO CARES?

In a hard-up world paying the bill for multiple financial crises, some question the value of big science projects like the Large Hadron Collider and scientists feel an ever increasing pressure to justify the expense to policymakers. The LHC cost about 3 billion euros to build.

CERN's highest profile gift to the real economy was the source code for the World Wide Web, written by scientist Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at the research centre in the 1990s.

Asked what the Higgs hunt could bestow on the world, Nash says the research is too leading edge and too nascent to say. At this point it's about the thirst for knowledge, something he argues the public well understands.

"We do bring a lot of things back," he says. "But when I talk to taxi drivers or builders they never ask that."

[tooge]

Which god are we talking about here?

[Chiefless]

Discoveries like these always make me wonder when a "sub-higgs-boson particle" will be found and of what greater thing the universe as we know it is a part. If history is an indicator, proof of Higgs's existence will raise even more questions than it answers.

[vailpass]

You wanted to say allah particle didn't you?

[Frankie]

You wanted to say allah particle didn't you?

Now see? I thought you disapproved of trolling. So did the mods apparently. :shake:

[vailpass]

Now see? I thought you disapproved of trolling. So did the mods. :shake:


What the hell are you talking about?
Never mind, I just realized I don't give a shit.

[Valiant]

The god material is stem cells.

[CrazyPhuD]

There is no "god" particle. Its the smallest unit in the construction of mass in any object. It's just a stupid term someone threw in there.

Bah I release several million god particles a day.

[Two-Twenty]

So that means all particles are made up and exist solely to create hate and intolerance?

/DC Trolls

/off to dc

God and religion are not the same

[Frankie]

God and religion are not the same

This.

[Frankie]

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-proof-god-particle-found-131226045.html


APNewsBreak: Proof of 'God particle' found
By JOHN HEILPRIN and SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press – 3 hrs ago

GENEVA (AP) — Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist.

But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.

Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson — all but proving it exists — but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.

It appears to be a fine distinction.

Senior CERN scientists say that the two independent teams of physicists who plan to present their work at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border on July 4 are about as close as you can get to a discovery without actually calling it one.

"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s, told The Associated Press. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."

CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

For particle physicists, finding the Higgs boson is a key to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed. Each of the two teams known as ATLAS and CMS involve thousands of people working independently from one another, to ensure accuracy.

Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, said: "Particle physicists have a very high standard for what it takes to be a discovery," and he thinks it is a hair's breadth away.

Rosen compared the results that scientists are preparing to announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: "You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don't actually see it."

Though an impenetrable concept to many, the Higgs boson has until now been just that — a concept intended to explain a riddle: How were the subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, themselves formed? What gives them their mass?

The answer came in a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. It envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.

The idea is that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. Some liken the effect to a ubiquitous Higgs snowfield that affects other particles traveling through it depending on whether they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, skis, snowshoes or just shoes.

Officially, CERN is presenting its evidence at a physics conference in Australia this week, but plans to accompany the announcement with meetings in Geneva. The two teams, ATLAS and CMS, then plan to publicly unveil more data on the Higgs boson at physics meetings in October and December.

Scientists with access to the new CERN data say it shows with a high degree of certainty that the Higgs boson may already have been glimpsed, and that by unofficially combining the separate results from ATLAS and CMS it can be argued that a discovery is near at hand. Ellis says at least one physicist-blogger has done just that in a credible way.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said Monday, however, that he would be "very cautious" about unofficial combinations of ATLAS and CMS data. "Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday," he told AP.

But if the calculations are indeed correct, said John Guinon, a longtime physics professor at the University of California at Davis and author of the book "The Higgs Hunter's Guide," then it is fair to say that "in some sense we have reached the mountaintop."

Sean M. Carroll, a California Institute of Technology physicist flying to Geneva for the July 4th announcement, said that if both ATLAS and CMS have independently reached these high thresholds on the Higgs boson, then "only the most curmudgeonly will not believe that they have found it."

[Frankie]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/scientists-unveil-proof-god-particle-165431909.html

Scientists to unveil proof of ‘God particle’
By Jeff Stacklin | The Lookout – 41 mins ago

This is as big as the, well, big bang theory: Scientists working at the world's largest atom smasher say they have enough evidence of the long-sought-after Higgs boson.

To the layman, the Higgs boson is the "God particle" and a key puzzle piece in the scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. Physicists around the globe—and perhaps elsewhere, given the size of the universe—have invested billions of dollars in research and have been hunting for the Higgs boson for decades.

Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN) on Wednesday are expected to announce they have proof of its existence, reports The Associated Press.

The Higgs boson appeared 13.7 billion years ago in the chaos of the Big Bang and turned the flying debris into galaxies, stars and planets.

Its formal discovery, according to a broad scientific consensus, would be the greatest advance in knowledge of the universe in decades and a key to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed, according to the AP.

Rutgers University physicist Matt Strassler told Reuters that without the particle, "nothing like human beings, or the earth we live on, could exist."

Physicist Joseph Lykken of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago explained in an interview with National Public Radio the difficulty for physicists in tracking down Higgs boson.

"We think the Higgs boson is a manifestation of the fact that the universe is filled with a force that we haven't been able to detect yet that gives other particles mass," Lykken told NPR. "It exists for a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, or something like that, and then falls apart into other particles."

Thus, scientists are in a bit of a quagmire, according to the AP. While they appear to have enough evidence to report the existence of the "God particle," they still hedge on whether to report "a discovery." It's a fine line, indeed, but one that scientists will likely continue to debate.

"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s, told The Associated Press. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."

Oh, those wacky scientists.

[tooge]

Now that the European Organization for Nuclear Research has found the particle, perhaps they can find a more fitting acronym than CERN. WTF?

[Frankie]

Hawking says he lost $100 bet over Higgs discovery

Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking said Wednesday the Nobel Prize should be given to Peter Higgs, the man who gave his name to the Higgs boson particle.

Former Cambridge University professor Hawking also joked that the discovery had actually cost him $100 in a bet.

In an interview with the BBC Wednesday, Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, said: "This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize.

"But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect.

"For this reason I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found. It seems I have just lost $100."

After half a century of research, physicists announced at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Wednesday they had found a new sub-atomic particle consistent with the elusive Higgs boson which is believed to confer mass.

Hawking said the discovery was of major importance.

"If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, it will be strong evidence for the so-called standard model of particle physics, the theory that expains all our experiments so far," Hawking said.

http://news.yahoo.com/hawking-says-lost-100-bet-over-higgs-discovery-151710271.html

[Donger]

BRC's thread is much better.