Years After Shutting Down, Tevatron Reveals Properties of Higgs Boson 73
sciencehabit writes: A U.S. atom smasher has made an important scientific contribution 3.5 years after it shut down. Scientists are reporting that the Tevatron collider in Batavia, Illinois, has provided new details about the nature of the famed Higgs boson — the particle that's key to physicists' explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass and the piece in a theory called the standard model. The new result bolsters the case that the Higgs, which was discovered at a different atom smasher, exactly fits the standard model predictions.
Re: A different atom smasher (Score:2, Informative)
The submitter merely quoted text from the article. They didn't change anything to slight the LHC.
Re:A different atom smasher (Score:5, Informative)
The submitter funnily avoids naming the largest and most complex instrument ever built by man, the European Large Hadron Collider, by casually downplaying and referring to it as "a different atom smasher". Methinks the submitter is an envious American.
While EU countries contributed the bulk of the resources, personnel, and location of course, the US also contributed over half a billion dollars of the estimated $6.4 billion (€4.6 billion) total cost, technical and scientific contributions, and more than a few personnel. It was and still is a massive international effort, with scientists and engineers from 100 different countries contributing.
As a US citizen, I was actually quite proud of *humanity* for creating such an amazing device, all for the purpose of advancing our scientific understanding. What's there to be envious of? I think it's fantastic. No one but you seems intent on turning it into an international pissing match.
Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete (Score:4, Informative)
But we know we aren't right. We cannot correct our flawed models of the natural world until we find the flaws in them.
Well, we know on principle that all scietific theories are flawed; that's why it is cience, not religion. The problem is that we have two theories that have, so far, checked out in every detail, but which appear to be fundamentally incompatible. And, even worse, we have not been able to find any discrepancy between the two, that is small enough to guide our intuition; all the data that point to something being wrong, are somehow wildly off.
Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete (Score:5, Informative)
> the Hiiggs Boson either doesn't exists or has different properties than the Standard Model predicts
Well he got his wish, in a way.
The SM doesn't predict any particular mass for the Higgs. It doesn't predict masses at all, except in the way that it defines relative masses, sort of. So if the mass of particle A is 1 then B has to be at least 2 for the theory to work, but it doesn't say that A has to be 1, and if it's 0.5 then B can be 1. A number of new theories do predict masses directly, or have relative masses like the SM, but require those relative masses to be different.
Right now the entire field is basically up in the air over how to continue development, whether that be supersymmetry or multiple dimensions. They both require different Higgs mass, one around (going completely on memory here) 114 GeV and the other a little less than 140.
Atlas and CMS both put the mass around 125, which means both are wrong. This is a good thing, because both systems stink.
Re:A different atom smasher (Score:4, Informative)