By JOHN HEILPRIN and SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
GENEVA (AP) — Scientists believe the “God particle” that might explain the underpinnings of the universe is real, and they are about to present their evidence to the world.
Physicists at the world’s biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have nearly confirmed the primary plank of a theory that could shape the scientific understanding of all matter.
The idea is much like gravity and Isaac Newton’s discovery: It was there all the time before Newton explained it. But now scientists know what it is and can put that knowledge to further use.
The focus of the excitement is the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that, if confirmed, could help explain why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight.
…
But two independent teams of physicists are cautious after decades of work and billions of dollars spent. They don’t plan to use the word “discovery.” They say they will come as close as possible to a “eureka” announcement without uttering a pronouncement as if from the scientific mountaintop.
full AP story here
Lobos Motl has more here and writes:
According to an incognito ATLAS member who spoke to Nature, they have a discovery without any doubts. Pure elation that will culminate on Wednesday morning.
A live webcast will be provided, though I expect it it will be so overloaded as to be useless:
Watch at webcast.cern.ch
i wish they would spend more time, money, and manpower on curing diseases, cancer, etc
Someone on Thunderbolts said it best: “CERN – too big to fail…” 😀
It really annoys me that I need to keep explaining that… no, scientists are not claiming to have discovered/are searching for a particle that replaces/disproves God. It’s a Higgs! A Higgs!! don’t even bother with the “boson” part–hardly anyone knows what that is. A Higgs particle. Not God Not a God particle. Not anything about knowing the mind or touching the face of God. When scientists try to reach out to the public through theology they are as competent at said theology as preachers are at science when they try to use science to convert secular people. There are ways of communicating the importance of such research without confusing everyone. I know most of this stuff comes from the press but some of it comes from scientists speaking in an overly poetic manner. Please stop it. If you find yourself about to mention God to a reporter… change the subject.
These inferential “things” that are detected in the accelerator are at best resonances. What they’re finding is a new resonance that seems to satisfy the terms of their equations. Equal in importance to a rock guitarist finding just the right chord to finish his latest song.
The only difference is that the rock guitarist isn’t costing everyone billions of dollars to pursue his artistic vision.
Here’s how one reporter describes the situation. 99.996% sounds like much better confidence than anything in climate science. Presumably this is still some kind of interim report, whether or not a word like “discovery” is used, because they can keep collecting data for a very long time to come and see whether the additional data takes them to 5 sigma or not??
http://news.discovery.com/space/higgs-boson-discovered-120702.html
“So far, the strength of this particular Higgs signal hasn’t exceeded 4.3-sigma — which relates to a 99.996 percent chance of the signal being real (and a 0.0004 percent chance that it’s just noise). A 5-sigma signal, on the other hand, is regarded as the “Gold Standard” in particle physics, relating to a 99.99994 percent chance that the signal is real (and only a 0.00006 percent chance of it being noise). Only when the signal hits that magical 5-sigma standard can a discovery be announced.”
On the plus side, I am enthused about having such important results become available to physicists. I also hope this leads to more than just knowing the mass of the Higgs (or higgs maybe?). It would be a real shame if there wasn’t something unexpected about the Higgs that could advance our understanding. Can we at least be assured that a defined Higgs mass will at least disprove some existing hypotheses?
The ‘God particle’ tag was probably invented by a science journalist. As we know, they rarely check their facts and thus have plently of time to invent stoooopid names.
dukeofurl says (July 2, 2012 at 4:15 pm)
“Five Sigma for particle physics discoveries, does this mean that climate science uses
1 or 2 sigma ?”
Nah. Any real science in modern climate pronouncements are entirely a sigment of your imagination. 🙂
>>
dogald says:
July 2, 2012 at 2:13 pm
I do wish people would stop using “God particle”
<<
I’m not sure why it bothers you. It’s based on the title of a book, “The God Particle,” written by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi in 1993. You can blame Lederman for the term.
Jim
gofer says – “Something will be announced, to justify why they need a few more billion to confirm their suspicions and justify their existence.”
What gofer was thinking, except change the “b” of ‘illion’ to “tr”. Dare we say CERN Rev. 2.0?
But can you blame them, the ploy has worked so well for Mann, Jones, Hansen, Gore, …
“wikeroy says:
July 2, 2012 at 2:36 pm
What spin-off effects might this give, I wonder.’
Finally the possibility of a decent disintegrator gun !
Did they find it? Or did they create it? How did science fall so far in such a short period of time? So wish Thomas Kuhn was still alive.
JustMEinT Musings says:
July 2, 2012 at 3:50 pm
the USA has to one of the most Godless places on this planet these days
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Doesn’t every president end every speech with “god bless america”?
Rob L says:
July 2, 2012 at 4:16 pm
the 3-4-5 sigma thing is all rather arbitrary, 3 sigma is 99.73% sure, 4 sigma is 99.99%, 5 sigma 99.9999% sure. No sane person would be betting against this even at 2 sigma. So perhaps we can scale back the criticism?
If you think 2 sigma is sufficient proof, you could have saved a lot of money by re-writing the standards. The fact is, there is a line they have to cross before it is official. There is a reason it is 5 sigma and not 2.
Pamela Gray says:
July 2, 2012 at 4:09 pm
The degree of pre-hype is directly negatively proportional to the degree of “nearly”.
I agree. More or less. 😉
Luboš Motl is talking about who should get the Nobel Prize. He sounds pretty sure this is the real deal.
Searching for God in a particle and then founding the religion of CAGW seems reasonable.
There was a time when science was trying to do the complete opposite.
oh boy….you know the first step will be to make it ‘weapons-grade’…
I saw this on Star Trek: Voyager, except it was the Omega molecule.
Oh, and Sheldon will be skeptical (Big Bang Theory reference)
AndrewS says:
July 2, 2012 at 2:17 pm
No, the physicists didn’t really claim they had measured particles going faster than light. The group in question didn’t believe they had actually measured anything going faster than light. They did say the measurements indicated neutrinos had traveled faster than the speed of light, but they didn’t believe the results. They reported the observations, and asked for people to help solve the problem. It turns out they were right to be skeptical. The error in timing was apparenty due to a loose GPS instrument cable. The leaders did resign, but said they did so not because of errors they made on OPERA, but because of internal (political) pressures.
http://news.discovery.com/space/opera-leaders-resign-after-no-confidence-vote-120404.html
Claims of having found some effect or particle in high energy physics requires several orders of magnitude more evidence than climate scientist will ever have in their wildest dreams. But I think that very few physicists doubted the existence of the Higgs. Several may have been wrong about whether the LHC could probe at the right energies to find it 😉
Pretty awesome stuff, anyway.
This is almost anti-climatic, They aren’t even up to full power yet and all they have to do is collect enough data to push them over 5 sigma and the higgs is discovered; I was hoping for a quantum blackhole streaking through the planet and out into space at near the speed of light!
leftinbrooklyn says:
July 2, 2012 at 5:18 pm
“oh boy….you know the first step will be to make it ‘weapons-grade’…”
Yeah, like the Quark bomb, the Neutrino bomb and the Muon ray.
I’m pretty certain that God is not a particle, and that he is a she.
Those reservations aside, I think this is exciting stuff. I’m not going to pooh pooh it until I see what they announce.
How nice of them to make the announcement on the 4th of July.
and what happens when we split the higgs-boson?