Growing Consensus: The Higgs Boson Exists 254
It's a long, slow road from tentative discovery, to various forms of peer review, to wide acceptance, never mind theory and experimental design, but recent years' work to pin down the Higgs Boson seem to be bearing fruit in the form of cautious announcements. FBeans writes with excerpts from both the New York Times ("Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.") and from The Independent ("Cern says that confirming what type of boson the particle is could take years and that the scientists would need to return to the Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest 'atom smasher' — to carry out further tests. This will measure at what rate the particle decays and compare it with the results of predictions, as theorised by Edinburgh professor Peter Higgs 50 years ago.")
Cheap Chinese knock off? (Score:5, Funny)
What is this Higgs Bosun?
Re:Cheap Chinese knock off? (Score:5, Informative)
Also a Navy position (Score:2)
A bo's'n is a warrant officer in the deck department of Navy ships as well, supervising all sorts of deck activities such as mooring, anchoring, taking on fuel, and standing various watches.
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A cheap Chinese knock-off that you can buy at any Walmart - the "Hick's Bosun".
Proofreading, anyone? (Score:2)
The name of the particle is the Higgs Boson. The article title is incorrectly using the possessive form.
That damn apostrophe (Score:4, Funny)
Thank's for all your hard work, editor's.
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Re:That damn apostrophe (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait for the news media to pick this up. (Score:4, Interesting)
You know we're going to see this headline:
"Scientists prove that God exists."
Scary.
Re:Just wait for the news media to pick this up. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd prefer to hear about a truce between ardent atheists and fundamentalists where the former stops trying to disprove the existence of a divine creator and the latter stops trying to ban the teaching of evolution.
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I have never heard of an ardent atheist who puts any effort whatsoever into disproving the existence of a divine creator. The notion is nonsense in itself, as there is noting to prove or disprove and no way to go about doing either.
Clearly you've been drinking the fabricated controversy cool-aid.
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They exist, but they're rare, owing in large part to the fact that it's the burden for the believers to prove, not the non-believers.
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I don't know. Even what appears to be logically self-contradictory may not cover the entity that is supposed to have created causality itself. That's why it is generally pointless to get torqued up about science and religion. The two don't tend to meet in any way that will generate a conclusive result, and if God exists, he appears to like it that way.
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She.
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There is more to beliefs than what makes rational sense. In the same way that an average tennis player will perform better (plenty of studies) if he truly "believes" he can beat Federer, a society performs better if it believes in certain things rather than others. Beliefs are about what works best, not what is true (may coincide, may not). We have evolved to survive, not to discover truth. This is why I consider aggressive atheists to be rather naive and annoying even if they are not strictly speaking wro
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Mycroft
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irrational beliefs can effect people.
Er, I'd think they'd need to act on those beliefs first...
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Huh? So you maintain that it is irrational to hold a belief that provides a tangible benefit?
Heck, I'd try to convince myself to believe in God, Cthulhu, or the FSM if I thought it would provide any benefit. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any evidence that it does...
Grammar nazi time:
affect, not effect
Re:Just wait for the news media to pick this up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but what's the point of that? They're already believing in something that doesn't make any sort of rational sense, presenting them with further evidence isn't likely to do anything than cause your blood pressure to spike.
But believing in the Big Bang is logical? 13+ billion years ago everything sprang forth from a singularity of infinite density (lots of rational sense to be found there). Where did it come from? What caused it to explode? If it was infinite, where's the rest of it? Because we live in what appears to be an expanding universe, we take a leap of faith and assume that it all spring forth from a single point. I'm fine with this as we really don't have a better explanation, and it seems to be a workable theory to for now. But it takes some faith to believe it, even if many people don't like to admit it.
Personally, I believe in god. I know, that's a sure way to get modded as a troll on /. However I don't know if he/she exits for sure. I can accept that god may have been an alien, was even created by the mass consciousnesses from the belief of enough people, or even some sort of reality dysfunction that is left over from the big bang itself. Regardless, most religions tend to worship a god that tells us to be good to each other, so I don't really find this to be a bad thing. Generally it's power crazed nutjobs that pervert religions to commit acts of violence, which is a shame.
I really don't see how it's so hard to find a way to reconcile ones religious beliefs with their scientific ones. Anyhow, my point is, is that there is nothing wrong with what anyone believes, so long as they aren't hurting anyone else. If you want to believe that the universe just popped into existence for no apparent reason, I'm not here to argue with you. But I would also appreciate the same respect for my impossible to prove beliefs too.
Re: Just wait for the news media to pick this up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Two points:
Firstly, a lot of people do use their belief in God to harm others, from opposing gay marriage to the twin tower attack, belief has caused a lot of harm.
Secondly, 'belief' in the Big Bang is different from belief in God, in that if a scientist discovered something which would make the Big Bang an unlikely explanation we'd all say 'oh, ok' and start believing the new hypothesis. There are still people trying to argue that the Earth is only 6,000 years old...
Interesting side note, my iPhone capitalized Big Bang for me, but not God...
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Two points:
Firstly, a lot of people do use their belief in God to harm others, from opposing gay marriage to the twin tower attack, belief has caused a lot of harm.
And a lot of people use their scientific knowledge to build weapons. Lots of weapons. And those weapons give people the ability to do many orders of magnitude more harm than they ever could have with out them.
Secondly, 'belief' in the Big Bang is different from belief in God, in that if a scientist discovered something which would make the Big Bang an unlikely explanation we'd all say 'oh, ok' and start believing the new hypothesis.
Not really. It would take decades to change our minds on the matter. The scientific community does not "turn on a dime". And rightly so. The theory of the Big Bang is like seeing the ripples in a still lake hours later and arguing if a fish or a duck made the initial splash. Both are possible, but it c
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Secondly, 'belief' in the Big Bang is different from belief in God...
Anyone who believes in the Big Bang is an idiot. I know that the Big Bang is the most likely explanation for what we see from what we know. That is all. No belief required. No sacred cows need to be slaughtered when new information and theories come to light.
Re:Just wait for the news media to pick this up. (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless, most religions tend to worship a god that tells us to be good to each other,
Can I join you on whatever planet you're posting from? Seems a lot better than mine in this respect. On THIS planet we have bad tempered narcissistic sky gods with a serious inferiority complex who are either diddling with family members or structuring wholesale genocide.
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Where did it come from? What caused it to explode?
While that would be nice to know, not knowing doesn't preclude it from existing, unless there is some unresolved contradiction.
If it was infinite, where's the rest of it?
Infinity does not work that way. Just because it may have been infinitely dense, does not mean it had infinite mass, e.g. something analogous to a Dirac delta function.
Because we live in what appears to be an expanding universe, we take a leap of faith and assume that it all spring forth from a single point.
That isn't a leap a faith, unless some one asserts they are 100% true of it. It is an inference. There is a rather big difference.
There is really only one big assumption that requires faith behind science: that t
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Everything in the universe is expanding from a single point and at a rate which would put everything in the same spot about 13 billion years ago.
Seems logical enough to me that something exploded at that location 13ish billion years ago. Just because you choose to believe in such nonsense without any evidence to support the hypothesis does not put it on any sort of equal footing with observable reality. It just means that you were raised to believe in things without any good reason to believe in it.
And yes,
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I have never heard of an ardent atheist who puts any effort whatsoever into disproving the existence of a divine creator.
True. Most ardent atheists want people to believe there no divine creator on faith.
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I know, where's the side boob pix?
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If there is proof, there is proof right?
I dont care whether it is definitive proof that a god or multiple gods exist, or it is definitive proof that a god or multiple dont exist. As long as it is proper proof, and not the 'proof' that is used these days in religious matters.
Maybe commercial flights to heaven as a holiday destination are possible. Ask God why he forbade us to "have no other gods before me" and where
If by "news media" you mean mainstream media... (Score:5, Interesting)
...no, no -- that's not how it's going to be "picked up".
Let's take a look:
NBC News: Particle confirmed as Higgs boson [nbcnews.com]
Associated Press: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson [myway.com]
Reuters: Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN [reuters.com]
Wall Street Journal: New Data Boosts Case for Higgs Boson Find [youtube.com]
FOX News: Physicists say they have found long-sought Higgs boson [foxnews.com]
Washington Post: A closer look at the Higgs boson particle that helps explain what gives matter size and shape [washingtonpost.com]
Chicago Tribune: Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN [chicagotribune.com]
Sky News: Higgs Boson: Experts Sure Of 'God Particle' [sky.com]
New York Daily News: Physicists say they have discovered crucial subatomic particle known as Higgs boson [nydailynews.com]
Boston Globe: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson [bostonglobe.com]
BBC (UK): LHC cements Higgs boson identification [bbc.co.uk]
BusinessWeek: Case for Higgs Boson Strengthened by New CERN Analysis [businessweek.com]
The Daily Mail (UK): Scientists say they HAVE found the 'God particle' - but admit they still aren't sure what type of Higgs boson it is [dailymail.co.uk]
The Independent (UK): Have they found the Higgs boson at last? Cern physicists say they're confident of 'God particle' breakthrough [independent.co.uk]
Telegraph (UK): Higgs boson: scientists confident they have discovered the 'God particle' [telegraph.co.uk]
News Limited (AU): Higgs boson, the God particle, discovered by CERN [news.com.au]
US News and World Report: Physicists Observe Higgs Boson, the Elusive 'God Particle' [usnews.com]
None of these articles make any links to "God" other than a few -- mostly UK, not US -- sources referring to it as the so-called "God particle", but even those explain exactly what this particle is theorized to be, not anything supernatural, "proving God exists", or having anything whatever to do with God.
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Meanwhile, the Slashdot headline adds an apostrophe to "Higgs". :-(
Re:If by "news media" you mean mainstream media... (Score:4, Insightful)
And? (Score:3)
It links to an AP story with the headline "Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson" [msn.com], which says...
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You must get invited to all of the parties.
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Considering the media operates with not only with an expectation for godlessness but an appreciation thereof, I suspect such an admittance might actually be conceptually difficult for them. We'd never see it even in fact a universal supreme being (God) were discovered to exist.
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scientists confirm the existence of (Score:2, Funny)
Bigg Bosoms
Adjusting mass (Score:2)
If I understand this correctly, the Higgs is what gives particles their mass. Is there anyway we could influence them somehow to reduce the mass of a particle?
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The Higgs field gives particles their mass. the particles make up the field.
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So we couldn't lower the mass of a spaceship and accelerate it past light speed?
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We can lower the mass of a spaceship already by using lighter construction materials and jettisoning any bits we don't need --- however, that helps nothing to boost the speed past c. Within the framework of our present best scientific understanding (the "Standard Model" that predicted the Higgs Boson), you still can't go faster than light no matter what chicanery you attempt. Perhaps some future discovery (requiring a serious re-write of physics fundamentals) will change this, or perhaps not (the more likel
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If you've going to posit a "system aboard the ship that increases the energy density of the higgs field in your local vicinity," you might as well posit that you have a magic box that locally increases the value of c. Within our current scientific understanding, the properties of fundamental fields, like the value of c and the gravitational/inertial mass equivalence, are simply facts of the universe that can't be manipulated with some snazzy device. By starting your though experiment with a device that alre
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uhm, reading comprehension is hard for you? I am pretty sure I said you couldn't violate c this way, at the very beginning. Only that you could go very fast without normal reaction mass as the source of forward momentum.
As for the mechanism, I was leaning more toward artificially increasing the higgs particle density, rather than increasing particle interaction affinities. Much light bombarding the living fuck out of a uranium atom with neutrinos and electrons will cause it to decay faster, due to increas
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Sorry, I was reading a bit too quickly, and assuming you were continuing the discussion of the grandparent poster asking "couldn't you lower the mass of a spaceship and accelerate it past light speed?".
Anyway, you're still trying to pull some not-in-known-physics sleight of hand with your higgs-o-matic mass fiddling device. If I'm reading you right, you're saying that particles still have the same rest mass contribution from the existing (unchanged) Higgs field, plus extra interactions with the extra Higgs
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That is correct. The higgs manipulation device would be a monsterous energy hog, and would release a shitton of useless energy as the excited higgs particles decay.
That is not where the ship gets the energy to move forward.
All gravitational attractions are mutual. When you jump off the ground, the earth is ever so slightly attracted to you and moves up, as you fall back down. (This is balanced by the energy you supplied when you kicked off the ground, for a net of 0.)
In this case, the "mollasses" effect ma
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What you seem to be missing is why your plan *doesn't* work if you actually used molasses instead of Higgs --- and that the Higgs aren't particularly different in this respect. So, your ship is embedded in a blob of Higgs molasses. If the free Higgs were somehow pinned stationary to the fabric of spacetime, then it would indeed slow down the ship being pulled by the star's gravity. However, just as with embedding the ship in a molasses ball, the ship and free Higgs cloud are falling *together* under the sam
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If that is true, then explain frame dragging.
The degree to which a reference frame drags in comparison to another reference frame is dependent upon the mass energies of both frames. This mechanism directly futzes with that rest mass energy. It should therefor alter the behavior of the two frames involved.
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relativity and the speed of light limit applies to any object with mass, no matter how small.
Don't they apply to massless objects too?
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> What you might be able to do is reduce the mass to get closer to the speed of light, but you still can't break it.
That's an assumption. People used to assume breaking the sound barrier was impossible at one point too.
No one has proved one way or the other that FTL is (or isn't) possible. The jury is still out. Lowering mass is only one potential way to do it -- there are other theorized ways.
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You're trolling right? That's *not* an assumption. It's Relativity, which is the thing Einstein figured out. You'd need some pretty exotic discoveries indeed to overcome that.
You are not going to be able to accelerate any mass, no matter how small, to the speed of light in a vacuum, full stop. The amount of energy needed to accelerate any mass whatsoever to light speed becomes infinite as you approach it.
What you *may* be able to do is functionally overcome the speed of light by altering spacetime or cu
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Nothing with mass can go the speed of light.
So, you can "lower" it as much as you want and it will just approach light speed more closely. That is, assuming you could use the Higgs to do that, which there is no evidence you could even do that.
Still, if you could somehow lower mass, or perhaps more accurately, the effects of mass, you would still have quite the advance there, but it still wouldn't be FTL.
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Specifically, most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from the nuclei of atoms. Those are composed of protons and neutrons, which are in turn composed of a mix of quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons, with 3 "extra" quarks. The Higgs field gives mass to the quarks and anti-quarks (including the extras) but most of the mass of the particle is due to the binding energy of the strong force interaction between the constituent parts. So reducing the str
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The Higgs (named after Peter Higgs, not Higg, as your use of the possessive apostrophe would suggest) boson gives fermions and several bosons (including itself) their intrinsic mass. Even when discussing relativity, "mass" usually refers to the intrinsic Newtonian-style mass that you mean when you say "rest mass." "Relativistic mass" means the total energy of a system divided by c^2, which includes the intrinsic mass.
I also doubt the OP is referring to relativistic mass because he's talking about reducing
New Sci-Fi Macguffin (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Lord... the creature's power comes from electricity | radiation | tachyons | nanobots | god particles!
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Peter Higgs did the math to show how the particle would behave and what it would ‘act like.’ But that was all on paper; in the meantime, the little bugger has eluded empirical discovery. It was so elusive, that a physicist (Leon Lederman) originally coined it the “Goddamn particle,” in a proposed title to his book on the subject. His publisher persuaded him to re-name it “The God Particle,” and the name has taken off in the public sphere (much to the chagrin of many physicists).
God Damned Editors!
So you're saying its a good thing that Slashdot's editors never do a damn thing?
Does this mean the Higgs Boson 'Thinks'? (Score:3, Funny)
Or would that be putting Descartes before the force?
Next: how does it give mass to other particles? (Score:2)
How does the Higgs Boson giver mass to other particles?
And some other interesting questions:
How is a Higgs Boson produced?
Can we produce these particles at will?
Can we affect gravity with them?
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Re:Next: how does it give mass to other particles? (Score:4, Informative)
The theory behind the Higgs mechanism motivated the search for the Higgs particle in the first place. It's well worked out. Check Wikipedia.
Practical answer: if you put enough energy in a small enough space you'll get all kinds of particles. Some of those will be Higgs'.
Sciency answer: the Higgs particle is just a manifestation of a perturbation in the Higgs field, just like every other fundamental particle is a perturbation in it's own quantum field in modern quantum field theory. To produce a Higgs you pump enough energy into the Higgs field in a particular location.
If at will you mean by smashing other particles together at high speed and occasionally getting a Higgs out, yes. If you mean specifically producing a Higgs on command, no.
No. The Higgs field doesn't have anything to do with gravity: http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/10/15/why-the-higgs-and-gravity-are-unrelated/ [profmattstrassler.com]
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IANAP, but here's my take...
How does the Higgs Boson giver mass to other particles?
Nobody knows for sure, but people suspect that Higgs field (a complicated directionless/scalar field) interacts with other particles which creates the effect of expected non-zero rest mass. Other fields can yield non-rest mass effect so it's only the rest-mass that was problematic.
How is a Higgs Boson produced?
You don't really make them, they are more like a momentary "quiver" in the higgs field which immedietly decays into something else. Right now we are making this momentary quiver by colliding protons.
Can we produce these particles at will?
N
Wonderful! Now what? (Score:2)
Flying cars, invisibility, peace in the Middle East, FTL travel, consensus on the original lyrics to "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"?
What?
Also, can the Large Hadron Collider be used to find small and medium Hadrons?
[ Seriously CERN, think about multipurpose usefulness once in a while. ]
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Flying cars, invisibility, peace in the Middle East, FTL travel, consensus on the original lyrics to "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"?
At first I thought you couldn't be serious, then I dove into the information river for a swim. [wikipedia.org]. Amazing, things you learn and beliefs shattered. "In the Garden of Eden"? Really? So I took it one step further and wanted to see a video to help remember the song. I found this one [youtube.com] and had a disconnected moment thinking "My God those guys were old even back then". I quickly understood it was just a bunch of old guys reliving their glory. Please, old rockers, don't go on tour any more, you don't live up t
This is how... (Score:5, Funny)
... physicists celebrate mass.
how many events is considered significant? (Score:3)
The other thing I read in Physics Today is there are six classes and over thirty ways the Higgs can decay. Some ways are easier to see with current detectors than others. The July 4 announccment was based on at least two decay modes. The more modes the more confidence.
Come on y'all (Score:2)
Bitching about spelling and grammar like Bosun and Higg's with the apostrophe.
This post is still far better written then anything from the Huffington Post, a company of barely literate Gen Y'rs trying to write the "news" on their iPhones in between Tweets and popping Ritalin and Red Bull.
Global Higgsing (Score:5, Funny)
The Higgs is merely a liberal myth to get funding from big government by Photoshoping particle path photos using smelly hippie open-source software to claim they almost detected it.
Next those commie atheist Sharia liberal hippies will tell you that subatomic particles work the same way inside poor people that they do inside wealthy job creators!
Equality of physics? What's next, free sunshine?
And those damned neutrinos CANNOT go through us Republicans. We have guns! Neutrinos only pass through surrendering cowards!
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The US is quite involved in LHC:
http://www.uslhc.us/The_US_and_the_LHC [uslhc.us]
And the collider that did most of this work before LHC was the Tevatron, just outside of Chicago.
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It's correct that CERN is European. It's also correct that a significant portion of its budget comes from the US. It's further true that basically all the teams working the various experiments at the LHC are multi-national, consisting of European, Asian, and North American researchers (at least, there may be African and/or Australians as well). So it's kind of pointless and dumb for any particular nationality to beat their chest and proclaim that the Higgs boson is their discovery. This was a world-wide eff
Re:Faith (Score:4, Insightful)
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Belief and knowledge are different.
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The fundamental difference between belief in science and belief in religion:
Lets say somehow the world's scientific knowledge was lost; completely wiped off the face of the world. After the inevitable chaos, death, and destruction from the lack of food, water, medical care, power generation, etc, etc, the world would get going on science again eventually. And after a few thousand years, the body of knowledge would be fundamentally the same as what it is now. There will, doubtless, be areas that are well
Re:Faith (Score:5, Insightful)
Every predomently atheist society has the same rules, even those rare cultures that have no concept of religion. You're trying to argue that religion and morality are the same thing, which they need not be. It's true to a certain extent, most religions codify those morals, but then again, so do most governments.
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What? Those aren't common to even just the major world religions.
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A testable hypothesis, ?
Re:Consensus is not needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Consensus is very much part of the scientific method as it is actually practiced, even if not in an over-simplified theory of it. In practice, the people forming the consensus are smart, rational folks who rely on the "mathematical property of repeated observations" as much as possible. However, even with a few experiments reporting the same number --- how well do folks trust that there were not common systematic errors impacting all of them (it has certainly happened before)? That the results are not misinterpreted due to mistakes in the calculations, or missed effects? Forming a consensus within the scientific community that the reported numbers are *trustworthy* is a critical part of the actual existing scientific process: it's called peer review, and catches a lot of honest mistakes that a "just trust the numbers; don't bring your human experience/intuition/skepticism into it" approach would not.
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Sort of, if you're research data doesn't mesh with everybody elses data, you'll find it be subjected to closer scrutiny until they find the reasons for that.
In practice though, consensus tends to form around sound conclusions rather than the other way around.
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Yes, I wasn't arguing against that. Consensus forms a critical filter that separates "sound conclusions" from iffier (but just as good "on paper" based on reported error bars) propositions that require further scrutinizing efforts.
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What is interesting is that they won't just come out and say it is a standard model Higgs eventhough they know it has 0 spin. Seems like nobody wants to hurt the feelings of the SUSY people
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Re:Consensus is not needed (Score:4, Informative)
That is one of the reasons that the LHC has multiple detectors built by competing teams.
Re:What is in the name? (Score:5, Funny)
It's just short for Goddamn particle, because it was so hard to find..
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OMG, religious zealots might start believing in god! Uh, wait....
I really don't understand people who get excited over that nickname. Leon Lederman nicknamed the Higgs boson the goddamn particle for his book, and his publisher made him change it. People who aren't zealots know the particle has nothing to do with god and don't care. People who are zealots... will likely remain zealots. The only ones affected are weird edge cases like you who get excited about what you think other people might get excite
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Only morons or illiterates believe that this represents "discovering God", and being religious doesn't make you either.
Hell, the new Pope has an M.S. in Chemistry, so that's at least major one religion that isn't going to do something that retarded.
And the "God" particle is being used by the Media, not scientists. They had to shorten, "the Goddamn particle" to something that could be printed, and they realized that calling it the God particle would make a great headline. If you want to blame someone for i
Re:Proof (Score:5, Insightful)
"generally accepted scientific fact" = consensus --- otherwise, what's the "generally accepted" part? There is no stronger scientific definition of "fact" that transcends a general consensus based on a multitude of apparently properly done confirming experiments.
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Its not perfect replication, but the LHC has 2 multipurpose exeriments ATLAS and CMS. They a 2 separate teams of people, using different detectors of different designs, different software and different analysis techniques. The do share some systems, ie the same proton beam (so a miss calculation in the beam energy will effect them both (not that it matters a huge amount for proton collisions)), they sometimes work in the same buildings, and they go to the same canteens.
They both see the same bump in their d
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The Higgs field is part of the a particular formulation of quantum field theory that is often called the Standard Model. There are lots of other quantum field theories, and other theories that are not field theories, not quantum theories, or both, that may or may not have any relation to reality.
The existence of a Higgs particle in a particular energy range, detectable by such and such means, is a hypothesis, motivated by theory called the Standard Model, other more speculative theories which may one day b
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Uses improper "graviton", but yes.
Wing commander: the secret missions [youtube.com]
McGuffin plot device: Kilrathi invent super gravity intensifying device that increases object rest mass 137fold. Used it on Goddard Colony.
Interestingly enough, it increases gravity, but doesn't alter inertial activity, so planets this happens to don't fly out of orbit or fall into their star.
Also, for some mysterious reason, has no effect on spaceships.
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theories can be useful. the standard model is useful for predicting the outcome of experiments. these Higgs boson results are a part of that. there are actually several theories about the Higg boson's properties (such as spin and decay rate & products), and more research will tell which of those models are useful. science is about useful models, you want Truth go next door to Philosophy department.
Re:Consensus proves nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
All these government scientists know they can keep getting grant money toeing the standard modelist line.
And besides, even if the Higgs Field does exist, it doesn't prove the theory is correct, so why should we be spending millions of dollars to change textbooks when there is nothing we can do with this knowledge anyway.
When the electron was discovered, it could have also, and naively been considered useless. However here we are commenting on the latest discovery of science, utilising that very knowledge. The point is, you don't know what will be usefull and what won't be useful. Besides it's fun, interesting and nearly always useful to learn how the universe works. The internet was made at CERN, you could say as a result of this research. So.....
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the new sub-atomic particle announced last summer bears one of the classic signatures of the proposed Higgs boson – it does not spin or rotate like all other known sub-atomic particles.
The fact that this new particle is “spin zero”, combined with further evidence based on the way it decays into other known sub-atomic particles, is a convincing indication that it is indeed the Higgs boson,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/have-they-found-the-higgs-boson-at-last-cern-physicists-say-theyre-confident-of-breakthrough-8534012.html [independent.co.uk]
Re:Now name it (Score:4, Informative)
well, there are "fermions", after Fermi, and "bosons", after Bose, but those are the two classes of particles. There are "gluons", ending in -on, but from English "glue". Then there are the W and Z bosons, which are just letters, and the quarks...