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."
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool. But can it be used as a grammar checker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Net economic loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
Synchrotron light source
Super conducting wire
Positron emission tomography
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.
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: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.
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.
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?
Re:Stinks of Confirmation Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.