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.
But we know the Standard Model is incomplete (Score:4, Interesting)
Yea FermiLab! (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife is a staff physicist at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. They collected so many exabytes of data from the Tevatron before it was shut down and superseded by the LHC at Cern, that physicists will be spending many more years analyzing the data. Many PhD theses and major discoveries will likely come out of that mass of data. The work that is going on at Fermi now will likely be similarly important. I can only think of one other neutrino experiment that can duplicate (maybe) what they are doing at FermiLab now. For more really interesting information about what they are doing there, go to www.fnal.gov.
Re:But we know the Standard Model is incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
But we know we aren't right. We cannot correct our flawed models of the natural world until we find the flaws in them. We know that our models are wrong, but we don't know why. The whole point of building equipment like this is to find out where our models break down so that we can build better models. If we spend billions of dollars only to learn that we were right (up to the resolution of the instrument), then we wasted billions of dollars and need to build a better instrument.