Higgs Signal Gains Strength 189
ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."
Damn... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Who's the joker who +1'd the paranoid schizophrenic?
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Don't worry. The higgs exists. If it doesn't they will fabricate it. They have to because if they don't then they might have to finally reveal the truth.
That we've actually been secretly using the Black Mesa Lambda Complex dark fusion reactor to slingshot our teleport signals via a Xen relay in order to hide our illicit entanglement research from both the Nihilanth and the Combine? Pfft, everybody knows that. What you should be asking is, how come the Portal Storms and the Seven Hour War happened after Gordon and the G-Man gained control of the border world. Hmm?
Eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigmas in a way tells how probable is to get these results
To be pedantic, it's a measure of the probability that random chance caused these results. A 4.3 sigma result means that if you just fed white noise into the sensors, you would get a result this strong 0.001% of the time - or to put it another way, if you run the test 100,000 times with absolutely no real signal, one of them will probably have a result this good.
The important distinction is that this is not a measure of "how likely we are right". There is a 1 in 100,000 chance that random luck caused this result, but there is also an unknown and hard to quantify possibility that our theory is wrong and some other mechanism caused this result.
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
All this is under pure mathematician's "null-hypothesis" assumptions. That is, we have a 99.999999999% confidence level of being right, unless we are making any mistake in our set of thousands of assumptions, there is any miscalibration, any fundamental error, systematic errors, ...
But this is not a mathematical exercise. It is a physics experiment. Knowing how the CMS/ATLAS collaboration works and how politized it is, If there is a (subtle but likely) mistake, then this number means nothing.
The correct reading would be: "we are 99.99999999% (or whatever) sure that if we are wrong it is not due to a purely random statistic fluctuation"
Other than that 5-sigma is a mere convention on when to trigger a press conference to declare "discovery"
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
This is about as certain as ... taxes ...
Doesn't that make it 99%?
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Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Stupidly assuming you're talking American "football", 119.99993120364 yards, or 0.00247666896 inches from the line.
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Well, of course he meant American football. If he'd meant un-American football he wouldn't have referred to a "field", he'd have referred to a "pitch", or a "winkie", or whatever term y'all use for that sort of thing.
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The term football actually comes from the fact that the players were standing and running around on their feet, rather than riding a horse (as the nobility played polo.) Sometimes I like to call cricket football, but no-one seems to get the reference.
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Rugby - just like a gang war, but occasionally involving a funny shaped ball.
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You know that the last nation to win gold at the Olympics for Rugby was the USA?
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Is why I recommend we officially call "American Football" for "Wussie-ball" - once you've seen Aussie Rules, you understand why :)
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia has a good explanation at The 68-95-99.7 [wikipedia.org]
How many sigmas you have is a way of summarizing how much area of the bell curve is covered or how far along to one end point the bell curve you are. Being further along means less chance of error
From the page:
+/- 1 sigma = 1 in 3 chances of being wrong
+/- 2 sigma = 1 in 22
+/- 3 sigma = 1 in 81
+/- 4 sigma = 1 in 15,787
+/- 5 sigma = 1 in 7,444,278
+/- 6 sigma = 1 in 506,797,346
+/- 7 sigma = 1 in 390,682,215,445
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)
You managed to get the values for both 3 sigma, and 5 sigma wrong
+/- 3 sigma = 1 in 370 (which is what clued me into them being wrong, 1/81 + 0.997 isn't close to 1)
+/- 5 sigma = 1 in 1,744,278
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
So what you are saying is his transcription is accurate, to +/- 1 sigma?
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Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
This dialog is a bit of a mess, but makes some good points: Taleb on Antifragility [econtalk.org]
These talks come with very loose transcripts. Here's the key passage at length as I shamelessly promote Taleb's upcoming book Antifragility [fooledbyrandomness.com], through I'm already certain I only agree with two-thirds of what he is putting forth (emphasis mine):
Some of those sigmas are model guards, not actual certainty.
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He sounds like the kind of person who is well on he way to making a functioning "improbabilty drive" (HHTTG) - He just needs to cut back a little on the caffeine and find a way of using the Brownian motion in a spare cup of coffee as a source of true randomness.
"Just because something has an exceedingly small probability of not happening, is no guarantee that it won't happen."
Some time ago, there a was a small-town church that held an annual throw-six-dice competition for charity. Pay for some throws, throw
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
It's not good enough. They've got a good way to go before they achieve Six Sigma.
To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
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To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
Fuck everything, we're doing Seven Sigmas [theonion.com]
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To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
A customer-facing giant accelerated relativistic particle ray, eh? I like the cut of your jib!
12/21/2012 (Score:5, Funny)
Full blown Higgs signal. And the world will turn inside out and we will become Mole People and mocked by a future human and his 2 robot friends.
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I'm disturbed I understand this, lol.
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Interestingly enough, finding the Higgs Boson also solves the Fermi Paradox:
"If found, return to primordial soup."
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All your bosons are belong to us?
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Full blown Higgs signal.
Is that what you get right after you get a full frontal Higgs signal?
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And the world will turn inside out and we will become Mole People and mocked by a future human and his 2 robot friends.
Um, are you talking about these [slashdot.org] guys? [slashdot.org]
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The 2nd part-
The Mole People
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049516/ [imdb.com]
Mocked on MST3K
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0655468/ [imdb.com]
Thought we were nerds around here..
Let's not get too excited about 4.3sigma (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently, the superbowl coin toss "experiment" has generated nearly as large a statistical anomaly... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/02/04/a-3-8-sigma-anomaly/ [discovermagazine.com]
Right now they are sorting through the math on old experimental data.
I'm sure they are waiting for at least 6 sigma to acutally claim anything...
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Motorola and GE had six sigma a long time ago. They should have just asked.
sure but... (Score:2)
Re:Let's not get too excited about 4.3sigma (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, because that was only "predicted" after it occurred. That's cheating. In other words, if you sift through millions of events discarding all the "likely" ones (such as coin tosses in other sports, or regular season NFL games, that didn't show any consistency), it is extremely likely you'll eventually find an "unlikely" one.
In contrast, the criteria for detecting the Higgs Boson were set ahead of time.
By the way, the NFC lost the coin toss last Sunday.
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Not really, because that was only "predicted" after it occurred. That's cheating. In other words, if you sift through millions of events discarding all the "likely" ones (such as coin tosses in other sports, or regular season NFL games, that didn't show any consistency), it is extremely likely you'll eventually find an "unlikely" one.
In contrast, the criteria for detecting the Higgs Boson were set ahead of time.
Not entirely, because there was no specific prediction for the mass. There were upper and lower mass limits on the Higgs set by theory, but not an actual prediction. So, if you scan a mass histogram looking for a bump and then find one, you can't simply ask how many sigma it is above the background and translate that to a 99.99... whatever percent probability. That's why they're hoping for a five or six sigma signal before they say anything conclusive, despite the fact that four sigma is well above 99% p
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Hmm, in an ideal world, a reported sigma value should include those types of considerations. (Basically, factoring in how many different hypothesis were tested.) It can be tricky, but you would expect such high-profile science to be top notch.
It is high profile science, but these "sigma" numbers are in informal way of reporting the size of the signal. In the final paper, they'll report masses and production rates with proper error bars, taking into account all statistical factors. The final published paper won't say "Hey, we have a six sigma signal!", it will say the mass of the Higgs is xxx ± yyy GeV/c^2, etc., and a mass histogram will also be shown, as well as information on the mass window searched, etc.
NFC? (Score:2)
Wrong (Score:2)
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They say it is impossible on how to bias a coin to one side or another (the centre of gravity would only move closer to one side or another). One commenter posts a way of tossing a coin even if such a bias were possible (using HT vs TH).
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I'll try that and see what happens, the next time I buy croutons.
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Dear God. I'll make Sean Carrol a deal: I will never again talk in public about physics, as long as he agrees never again to talk in public about statistics. The sheer badness of that post makes my head want to go all splodey.
Only the first step (Score:3, Interesting)
This is only the first step. What the data suggests is that there's probably a particle there -- however, the higgs has several important properties that are impossible to measure with this dataset yet -- like its spin0 property. Chances are though, that because of how this data fits in with the higgs predicted mass, it really is the higgs.
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Cool. But can it be used as a grammar checker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cool. But can it be used as a grammar checker? (Score:4, Funny)
So, we can detect Higgs but we can't detect multiple typos in the damn summary? Really?
I've just checked... There is no TYPO detector at CERN [web.cern.ch] so that'll explain that problem!
At Least Plagiarise Correctly (Score:3)
Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
Clearly, this was originally
In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, physicists have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
and someone sloppily tried to change it to
Physicists working on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay,
but failed.
Just fucking CTRL+C, CTRL+V - no one believes you're writing up your own summary anyway. Just plagiarise in full.
So, when the run the final test on Dec 21st... (Score:3)
I'll be standing at the gates of the Playboy Mansion waiting for an avalanche of apocalypse sex
Units! (Score:3)
Forget all that sigma stuff. We want Las Vegas bookmaker's odds.
oops (Score:2)
posting to undo accidental bad moderation
Don't tell the BBC (Score:2)
They will probably attribute the increase in Higg's signal strength due to global warming.
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's true, but we didn't know that going in.
The real prize is learning what are, and how to manipulate the carriers of dark matter and dark energy.
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
Synchrotron light source
Super conducting wire
Positron emission tomography
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Let's see, do any of these require exotic particle theory?
Synchrotron light source? Uses good old maxwell equations to steer electron beams with magnetic fields to make x-ray radiation...
Super conducting wire? The most viable theory behind cooper pairing is QM electron-phonon interaction which doesn't need any exotic particle theory...
PET? That uses simple radioactive sugar (where glucose is fluoridated with radioactive fluorine-18) and the resulting gamma ray decays are imaged...
Not to say that standard
circumlocutionary; didn't read (Score:5, Insightful)
High-energy physics research has created extremely beneficial spin-off of technology, without being the primary purpose of that research.
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I think we can say we have discovered the "God Particle" or there's about a 1 in 16400 chance that they are right. I think It's a great chance that the standard model is "IT". Lets work from that and go forward for now unless I loose that bet.
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those 3 things are technologies developed by Experimental Particle Physicists who wanted to test Particle Physics Theory.
Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
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Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.
Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?
No, I really don't think they do. At least they shouldn't where science is concerned.
If you set out to do X, and pour millions of dollars into doing X, but in the end you fail at doing X, even if in the process you end up doing Y, it is still the case that doing X in itself was not a sensible goal. You would have been better and cheaper to just sit down and do Y from the beginning.
We might as well say that gathering giant multi-story piles of $10 banknotes into heaps and burning them is a worthwhile economi
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Getting lots of smart people together yields cool technology. Doesn't mean that original goal that got them together has economic value, though.
Yes... It really does...
Everything we have today, when converted to your "economic value" was derived by some people doing something they didn't originally thought was going to give them "economic value".
Everything...
The human race literally benefits from any new and seemingly useless activity that it attempts to undertake. Someone much later eventually finds out how to make money out of that idea.
Let me give you a small example... The magazine "New Scientist" is only economically viable because people like
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you didn't understand. these are things that were developed while studying exotic particles, for the study of exotic particles. anyway, if you have a lot of money, feel free to give it to the research you think matters, and let people decide in a hundred years if you were right or not.
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And yet, without the un-economical research that lead to those things, we wouldn't have them. The danger of letting the bean counters run the world is that we confine ourselves to mostly producing yet another X At that, X is most often an entirely un-necessary consumer product of minimal quality.
The synchrotron came into existence as an 'atom smasher' to probe particle physics. The synchrotron radiation we find so useful these days was actually an undesirable but unavoidable loss of energy. One day, we rea
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Funny)
That was almost a haiku if you drag "wire" out into two syllables, but the last line completely strays. What about this?
Synchrotron light source
Positron tomography
Superconductors
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So you know, other then the discoveries which led to the entirety of the modern age - oh, and you know, also the internet - this is all a real waste huh?
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Interesting)
strangely enough, application using one particle, the anti-neutrino, is in the works for reactor monitoring.
muons might be used to catalyze fusion or reduce lifespan of nuclear waste (with fusion products of catalyzed reaction
you are foolish, how can we engineer with the universe's components if we don't learn all we can about them?
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The argument against direct economic benefits from modern high energy physics is stronger than you think. All the examples you give are for particles that had clearly measurable signatures in the 1930s. The Higgs and other particles that might be detected for the first time in the 21st century have such incredibly tiny effects on our world that we haven't been able to measure them despite looking diligently for a long time (40 years since the publication of the standard model). We can indeed engineer w
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What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?
About 50 years, depending on how you calculate it. Radium isolated by the Curies in 1906. First commercial power plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Origins) in Russia in 1954.
But note that the key theoretical idea, the fission chain reaction, surfaced via Szilard as early as 1933, and Fermi's reactor was 1941. So from the first glimmerings of a practical nuclear fission theory to a practical demonstration was less than a decade!
What's missing in the rest of theoretical physics is anything app
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Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many millions of euro of taxpayer money have gone into this project, which will interest only a handful of scientists?
Approximately $9B, over 15 years, split between 20 nations. So on average, about $30M/year per country. Compared to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's a rounding error. Whatever may or may not come out of the Large Hadron Collider, I rather doubt either of those wars is going to show any ROI.
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Unless you cut taxes while going to war.
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Only navel-gazing morons mock basic research.
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet they said the same thing about electrons, protons, and neutrons several decades ago. The positron is also an important particle in positron emission tomography, which has certainly saved lives. The research that went into the production of these facilities has also yielded very useful things, such as particle counting and cryogenics (neither of which was invented by particle physicists but certainly vastly improved upon by them).
Oh yeah, and the world wide web [wikipedia.org] was invented at CERN, so I guess that was kind of important too...
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
One could have said the same thing about what Farrady found about electromagnetism, that the economic benefit wasn't much. The practical application of the higgs field we can only guess at now, but being able to dick about with the mass/inertia of matter for instance would have truly epic applications. This is about as insightful as saying in 1825 that electricity might be able to be used to make stuff move. Look how that technological revolution turned out.
It may not be very useful but it could equally well be the opposite. However from any particular point in history you can pretty much trace the current state of technological civilization back to some discovery at some point. I seem to notice a correlation between the effort in the discovery and how it transformed everything.
The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.
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... No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology....
Neutron discovered in 1932. 2012-1932 = 80 years. Not a century yet. Positrons and pions are both important for medical use, muons and neutrinos are powerful tools for imaging the Earth. So you fail on a number of counts.
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”
Richard P. Feynman
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“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out of it, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”
Richard P. Feynman
CERN is then a damn expensive bitch but so far we are far from a happy ending.
Perhaps a Waste of Time (Score:4, Insightful)
To respond to this so late, but...
Normally, when dotters take to correcting a post en mass, there isn't a reason to cover anything; however, the logic of, "We got these things 25-50 years later from a theory, but anything that doesn't contribute this quarter is a waste of money," would be sufficient to kill the theory of economic value versus investment. We got lots of things from the money dumped on the Space Race and the succeeding era, but from a dollar in to dollar out that month, year or even decade perspective, it wouldn't have appeared to be that affordable, even though those technologies, from fuel cells (more than just one type), to photovoltaics, to advanced ceramics and plastics, account for more economic profit today than the most expensive year of the US Independent Space Exploration Era.
I, however, wanted to plug, in a non-spammy way, a couple of places on YouTube that shows current payoff. While it doesn't focus on the LHC, it's a follow up on technologies that are otherwise related to what is being done at the LHC.
http://www.youtube.com/user/BackstageScience?feature=g-all-s#p/u/43/12KaFItjgl0 [youtube.com]
This is YT Channel BackstageScience, with a feature call for the video titled, "Lap of a Synchotron". In this video (as well as the many in that list), you will find discussion about many of the assists to, primarily, materials science that comes from the many research activities in the beamline branches.
http://www.youtube.com/user/DiamondLightSource [youtube.com]
This is the same facility, but these videos are more on the individual research projects going on at that facility.
Synchotrons are relatively expensive, and when they were the new thing, they were more expensive to construct, maintain and run than many infrastructure projects; they were the LHC of their time. Now, we have safer planes, improved medicine and more advanced super- and semi-conductors. Intentionally producing nanoparticles has been a relatively new thing for commercial industries, but that new economy is entirely dependent on technology like the synchotron.
BackstageScience has a video titled, :"Muon Man", which is an interview with one of the scientists in general. If you asked someone 25 years ago what practical applications existed for muons, you would have been told they can be used to detect time dilation in accordance to Special relativity or changes in a protons charge field. Today, we use the to detect restricted radio-active materials and peer into the inner workings of large-scale geological activities, which will eventually allows us to detect volcanic eruptions and, quite possibly, earth quakes.
With regard to this specific project, the LHC's job is to understand the fundamental structures of energy at very small scales. The idea it's stuck on the Higgs boson research shows a lot of ignorance, but the kind one might expect from the limited understanding that comes from someone who would say, "[A]nything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon," is exotic or has never produced any useful technology. E^2=M^2C^4+P^2C^2 has brought us anti-matter, which eventually led to improved medical technologies. The fact is, large projects, like the LHC, are necessary for such advancements, but too expensive for even a single portion of the economic spectrum to manage for the initial time between theory and application. To say it was too expensive because you can't see any advantage in it shows a failure of understanding how doctorates lead to economic and social advantages. Perhaps you should join slashdot with the moniker Lysenko, so, we will all know how ignorant you are about the importance of advancing science through large scale. publicly funded projects.
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That's because you're a fucktard. I suspect concepts like zero and water being yet cause you the same degree of consternation. Here's my advice to you. Just start jamming pencils into your eyes until the feelings go away.
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Wait till you hear about derivatives and integrals.
rj
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So I wonder if they have factored into their Higgs Boson experiments the possibility that they don't exist and neither does the CERN collider. I'll bet they haven't! Junk scientists!
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The list is too long to fit here, I think.
To be fair, you didn't really try did you? You only got up to 3!
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Reading some of the papers, it is clear that the data is being selectively interpreted to yield a desired conclusion. This is yet another case of continued government funding depending on making progress in proving a particular result, in this case, the existence of the Higgs particle.
Reading your post, it is clear that the article is being selectively interpreted to yield a contentious opinion. This is yet another case of trolling.
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You mean they are alike because in both cases, if you are wrong there is no way to prove it, so we just have to take your word for it that that is how it happene
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You mean they are alike because in both cases, if you are wrong there is no way to prove it, so we just have to take your word for it that that is how it happened? (I mean, your "wife's" word, of course.)
So... because you're not smart enough/too lazy to take the time to understand any of the field (100 to 1 says you don't even have a BSC in physics) it must be bad science?
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