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"God Particle" Possibly Discovered 19

Posted by michael from the next-on-the-list:-"devil"-particle dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "from http://ajanta.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~jupiter/pub/sciinfo/higgs.html: "One of the most important discoveries in particle physics of the last 25 years has possibly just been made by experimentalists at CERN, the giant laboratory just outside of Geneva on the border of Switzerland and France. Scientists there think that they have discovered the Higgs field, also nicknamed the "God particle" by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman who wrote a book with that title. If the result is verified, the Higgs will have a mass about 125 times the mass of the proton, making it as heavy as a medium-sized nucleus, and it will "fill in" the last missing piece of a puzzle involving the solution of one of the great outstanding problems in physics of the 20th century: the origin of all mass."" Very preliminary stuff, but interesting...
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"God Particle" Possibly Discovered More

"God Particle" Possibly Discovered

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  • This was posted here, [slashdot.org] at the beginning of Sept., and they've still only had 4 events.
  • It burst forth from a virgin fission.
  • I realize that this is only a "Possible" discovery of the Higgs Particle, but any developments in work towards this discovery is highly interesting. I have heard some physicists say that the discovery of this particle will allow all of physics to be reduced to a t-shirt. One particle. One force. One equation.
    This would be a fundamental discovery in physics.
  • Yes. But that's everything. If the Higgs Particle is as fundamental as some people believe, it's equation would fit on the t-shirt, and then everything else could be derived from it. Just like Newton's physics basically come from F=ma.
    There's a lot of theory and derivation to get everything else, but that is the basic foundation of Newtonian physics.
  • I understand that. Perhaps all of these things will follow naturally from the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I have a feeling that at least gravity might. Gravity is the attraction of mass to other mass. The Higgs boson is supposed to be mass. If we can figure out how the Higgs boson exists, and interacts with other particles, then we may just discover gravity.

    The strong force, however, that's another matter entirely, and I'm not qualified to address it :-).

  • Got a feeling that the Unitarians will be just fine with this one.
  • "This would be a fundamental discovery in physics."

    So... you're saying that this could be some sort of holy grail?

    *rimshot*

  • This is a bit political... (Score:4)

    by tesserae ( 156984 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @09:59PM (#719562)
    There's not much chance that an extra month of operation of the LEP collider will really cement the "discovery" of the Higgs boson: they've been running the machine at "overclocked" levels for months now, and one more month won't add many new events to the four they've already found -- maybe they'll double the count. Right now it's at best a three-sigma event -- three standard deviations, or about 99% certain -- and a few more candidate observations isn't going to bring that to five-sigma levels, which is the gold standard for discovery.

    A recent article [sciencemag.org] in Science discusses the fragility of even five-sigma results: rather than being wrong only once in a hundred times, three-sigma results are historically wrong about half the time, and five-sigma results are wrong much oftener than they "should" statistically be. As the article points out, the errors are often systematic: the experiment is designed to find a particular result, and if it doesn't give evidence quickly, it is often modified slightly and re-run; this can introduce large biases in the statistics.

    So in the end, CERN isn't going to have "proof" of the Higgs discovery; basically, they're trying hard to get their names on the same page as those of the eventual credited discoverers, as precursors... not necessarily a bad thing, but also not worth the large penalties CERN will pay if they delay the start of LEP's replacement (the Large Hadron Collider) beyond another month.

    ---

  • Re:"possibly discovered" (Score:4)

    by tesserae ( 156984 ) on Monday October 09, 2000 @10:00PM (#719563)
    Does anyone else find it odd how all the "detectors" are refered to? Are they automated somehow? they each have names, but they refer to 'it thinks it has discovered' etc.. is there some algorithm for it to determine whether it (the detector) discover's something?

    Yes, yes and yes...

    The CERN LEP (Large Electron-Positron collider) works by creating two rings of particles -- electrons and their antiparticles, positrons -- which circle in opposite directions within an evacuated tunnel. They create huge numbers of each, then direct the particles into a collision. Naturally, there are large numbers of collisions each time they do this -- and only a tiny fraction of them have the interesting results they are looking for.

    Rather than personally analyze and interpret all the collisions (most of which are "trivial" in the sense of being well-understood interactions), the researchers use computer algorithms to monitor the results and filter the huge amount of raw data down to a manageable few candidates for the sought interaction. Each of the detectors is looking for slightly different kinds of results (which is part of what makes this discovery questionable -- only two of four detectors see anything at all, and one sees only one event... but all four should be detecting Higgs particles, each with its own particular collisional outcome).

    It's interesting to consider that the search for particles is "directed" in this fashion: what discoveries might there be if all the data were to be closely examined? The answer is that the algorithms are chosen to screen the predictable and common results out, and isolate the unpredicted results as well as the specifically sought-after ones. Still, it's interesting to speculate on what might be missed...

    The anthropomorphization of the detectors -- "it thinks it has discovered..." -- is a very common phenomenon in science. If you reflect for a minute, you'll probably realize it's common with computers, too... your Linux box, running WINE, "thinks" it's a Windoze machine!

    ---

  • All black holes radiate energy. The rate at which they do so is inversely proportional to their mass. Black holes of the size we expect to exist naturally radiate as if they had a temperature of something like a billionth of a Kelvin. Smaller ones could theoretically radiate much more energy. As the singularity radiates more and more of its mass away, its radiative power increases exponentially until it disappears entirely.

    This is all recalled (quite inaccurately, in all probability) from Hawking's Brief History of Time. If you want specifics and/or reliable facts, read the original.

  • It's kind of interesting when you think about it.

    If you view mankind as a portion of the matter in the universe that has evolved to a certain complex state (I know that is an extremely simplified view, I'm not trying to flamebait) maybe in the end a humankind-created black hole will be one of the final steps of our evolution as we like to think of it!

    Seeing as there might be trillions (who knows, just shooting in the dark) of civilizations in the universe, how many of them might end up with the same fate (assuming that most civilizations eventually persue scientific research of this nature)? If it is part of the learning process in particle physics maybe it is happening everywhere! Then again maybe there are some civilizations that have come to realize the impending 'black hole research doom' and have sent out signals warning against self annhilation by means of black holes. Fire up your Seti@home!

  • When they say "Aleph" or "Delphi" they really mean a collaboration of several hundred scientists from many different universities each (e.g. Delphi = 550 physicists from 56 universities). They operate the "Aleph" or "Delphi" Detectors (which have approx. the size of a gym).

    You can easily spot HEP papers by looking for those that have author lists of two pages.
    No wonder they had to invent WWW to communicate!

    A list of all CERN groups/experiments [web.cern.ch]. Visit their homepages; they have some nice pictures and explanations.

  • Scientific American has a blurb on what the Higgs Boson [sciam.com] is all about.

    The July 2000 issue also has an interesting article on the Large Hadron Collider that CERN is building. This article does not appear to be on www.sciam.com [sciam.com].

  • From the source:
    "So if one of the most important scientific discoveries has been made, why has there been so little news about it? The answer is that because of its great importance, experimentalists must be sure of the result before announcing it. There are four experimental detectors at CERN. Of these four, only Aleph is seeing convincing evidence of Higgs production. That detector sees three Higgs-candidate events. Another detector, Delphi, also thinks that it has produced one Higgs in a single positron-electron collision. Although Aleph states that the Higgs has been seen with better than 99% confidence, no strong claims can be made with so few events. CERN has decided to run its LEP experiment an extra month or so to try to produce more Higgs particles. If successful, an important announcement on the Higgs discovery will be made near the end of this year. "

    Does anyone else find it odd how all the "detectors" are refered to? Are they automated somehow? they each have names, but they refer to 'it thinks it has discovered' etc.. is there some algorithm for it to determine whether it (the detector) discover's something?

    It's pretty cool that presence of this particle IS mass. I wonder if too many of these in one place would cause a black hole? I'm always amused by the thought that someday science will advance to the point where they discover how to create black holes, and the black hole of the lab consumes all mankind...
  • It was 1989 Nobel prizewinner Leon Lederman who said all of science is too complicated to be put "on the front of a T-shirt."
  • There is something about this article which keeps confusing people, so I would like to take this chance to clear things up. The Standard Model states that all matter comes from twelve particles, six leptons, and six quarks. These particles mirror eachother, if you will. They are divided into three families, the first, whose particles comprise everyday matter, are the up quark, it's "partner" the down quark, and their "relatives", the electron, and the electron-neutrino. The second two groups are only observed in cosmic rays and high energy experiments. They consist of the strange quark and the charm quark, with the muon and muon-neutrino in one group, and the bottom and top quark, with the tau and tau-neutrino in the other group. This is the Standard Model, but it is not perfect, because it does not include the force which utterly dominates the large-scale universe: gravity. Additionally, it has 20 free parameters, i.e. properties or values only able to be determined through measurement. As imperfect as it is, that is the Standard Model. Now that that's out of the way, on to the Higgs particle. For simplicity, we shall only concern ourselves with everyday particles, i.e. the up and down quarks, and the electron. The electron is about 1800 times lighter than the proton, which is comprised of two up quarks, with a charge of +2/3, and a down quark, with charge of -1/3 (thus a net charge of +1). This is derived from the fact that protons and neutrons are affected by the electroweak force (the weak nuclear force, magnetism, and electricity, which are in essense one and the same) carriers, W's and Z's, while the electron is not. This is because in quantum phsyics, even a vacuum is not empty; it is filled with transient particles popping in and out of existence. The Higgs field can be compared somewhat to the corrugations in a sheet of cardboard. The massless carriers of the electromagnetic force (photons) travel effortlessly between the ridges, while the carriers of the weak force must travel over the corrugations. They absorb the needed energy from the Higgs field, and in the process become heavy. Without Higgs particles, W's and Z's would have no mass, and thus as they were absorbed by up and down quarks in protons and neutrons, they would not gain any mass (mass from other sources would also be zero, reducing its mass, in effect, to zero). So the Higgs particle is, in essense, where mass comes from. However, you can't simply jam a bunch of them into a ball and create a black hole. If that were so, there would be nothing stopping a trash compactor from pressing a soda can to infinite density and sucking your house into a black hole. There are other forces which prevent the particles from being pushed so closely together. The force required to do so is so incredibly immense that ordinary (and even extraordinary) means are required. Particle accelerators use as much power as small cities to break apart a few subatomic particles from eacother. To smash apart quarks, even a particle accelerator the circumference of the Earth would not be strong enough. I do not know exactly the density of a proton, but it is something on the order of fifteen trillion tons per cubic centimeter. Clearly protons like to keep a safe distance from one another. Furthermore, since the quarks that make up protons only constitute an infitessimally small portion of the volume of a proton, but nearly all its mass, their density much be even more astronomical in magnitude. So, in conclusion, unfortunately (fortunately?) labratories cannot simply cram Higgs particles in a bunch and suck the Earth into a black hole (one less thing to worry about.)
  • Even if this "God particle" was the prophesized Higgs particle, science would still need to account for the strong nuclear force (a Grand Unified Theory, or GUT), and gravity (a Theory of Everything). Not only must the Higgs particle be found, but the particle origins of the strong force and gravity as well.
  • We already know how the Higgs particle interacts with other particles, as I stated in another post on this article. Additionally, it would not explain the mass contained by leptons, such as the electron, since they are not affected by the weak nuclear force. Not to be anal or anything, I'm just saying that this is not the end of particle physics or the Standard Model.
  • xjesus says: "It's pretty cool that presence of this particle IS mass. I wonder if too many of these in one place would cause a black hole? I'm always amused by the thought that someday science will advance to the point where they discover how to create black holes, and the black hole of the lab consumes all mankind..."

    For concerns about *exactly* this sort of problem (only not with black holes) see here:
    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news_225924.html

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