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
Why scientists hate that you call it the “god particle”… http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/14/the-higgs-boson-why-scientists-hate-that-you-call-it-the-god-particle/
Jack says:
July 2, 2012 at 2:17 pm
It would be so nice if it were true. ( I want my jetpack!!). And all the societal wealth that comes with such a scientific advance. Either it is true, or it is not. And time will tell.
I remember listening to the radio in the 1970′s, and reading in the newspapers, about a carburator design that would give 100 miles per gallon…but that the Saudi’s bought the rights to it and denied it to the world.
The 100 mph carb is a myth – for a 10:1 compression ratio engine the maximum thermal efficiency is .6 (60%) – this ignores friction losses, air conditioning, water pump, heat lost to the cooling system, running at idle (or any speed that gives less than peak efficiency) etc. Actual efficiency is about 35%.
The actual Pogue system was pre-carburetor and used the exhaust to vaporize the fuel. Since the last major advance in efficiency was direct fuel injection – there is little or no chance that the Pogue system was more efficient. Since he would never show his carb to anyone any discussion of the Pogue carburetor (or any of the 250 or so similar products) is premature.
Thats almost the same confidence Michael Mann feels about his Hockey Stick!!!!
I’ve been looking at these numbers for the higgs bogus particle. It’s still garbage.
Cannot explain itself into being through its sheer rarity.
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…”
________________________
One could make comparisons…
You made that statement without fear of retribution and there are many places on the planet where you would’ve been well served to hold your tongue, not that it has any bearing on your statement.
After all, don’t scriptures say that “ye are gods”?
(little g)
Just think how many god particles there are around here.
dogald said:
July 2, 2012 at 2:13 pm
I do wish people would stop using “God particle”
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Aye – it implies an anti-God particle or a Satan particle.
…and maybe even a Unitarian Field Theory.
Next they will be building an atom and Eve smasher.
James says: “Not to be out done by the Cern Scientists, Chicago scientists are today claiming that they have also found God.”
What say the Utah scientists at the Melvin Dumar Institute of Technology?
There is still time for CERN to create a more stable vacuum state, thus destroying the universe, as prophesied by the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Vacuum alarmists.
Somebody should really set up a sceptical blog countering these claims.
All that money spent…. they have to come up with something. So they’ll make up some gobbledygook to explain something plasma physics already has long ago.
Just to rock the boat a little:
Francois Englert is the real ‘father’ of the so-called Higgs Boson.
In 1964, before all the well-known papers written by Peter Higgs were released, Francois Englert published a paper with Robert Brout – who unfortunately died in May 2011 – in which the foundations of the Higgs/BEH/God mechanism were built.
Keith says
“At least Mr Higgs is still going strong and able to pick up his Nobel Prize for physics next year.”
Shame it will come after Gore and Obama, a real shame.
If the Higgs “discovery” is true, I sure hope its track doesn’t look like a hockey stick.
While the science may in fact be amazing, isn’t this a press release for a press release? Must be from the Department of Redundancy Department.
DirkH says:
July 2, 2012 at 5:51 pm
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.
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The Q Bomb. Don’t they keep that in a dungeon in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick?
Now that you found me listen to me roar…
They are talking about black matter I presume. Nothing new about this, explained on Stephen Hawkins video ‘The Universe’ – So what? Maybe it can explain galactic sub atomic particles as a creator of clouds when there is no solar activity to interfere with them coming in contact with Earth.
How many “God Particles” does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Damned if we know.
Wagathon at 8.09 am. Only one Michael Mann. Or if he can’t handle it Al Gore, no I am wrong, the whole IPCC!
Five Sigma for particle physics discoveries, does this mean that climate science uses
1 or 2 sigma ?
Hardly. Take a dozen or so sketchy studies with maybe 0.5 sigma confidence, then proclaim a “body of evidence” that proves that the overall conclusion is “unequivocal”. These dozen studies will be selected from among many dozens of other studies that reach the opposite conclusion. Then you get a Nobel prize and $70 billion to spend on your friends. Easy.
5 sigma is solid (alpha=2.87105E-07). Climate could learn something here.
Leaving aside the “did/didn’t” aspect of this press release (and therefore Leif’s “doesn’t cut it in my book”, as that’s as relevant as the press release), the important thing is who will win the Hawking/Higgs wager? Any takers? Will this lead to a bitter, bitchy discussion as to who is right (if either), or will it lead to a new era of discovery?
Just think: the possibility of new hypotheses, or further proof of existing theories. The subsumation of ego to the advancement of science. What a thought.
Now what if Climate Scientists were running CERN, the press releases may have been a bit different…
“…The science is settled, the Higgs boson exists and confirms the current trends towards anthropogenic global interdimensional portal catastrophy (AGIPoC) …’
“…I know that some so-called scientists disagree about the existence of the Higgs Boson, but 97% of particle physicists firmly agree that it exists…”
“…disbelief in the existence of the Higgs Boson is caused by misinformation spread by paid for, political activitists working for Big Particle Industry…”
“…a four sigma deviation is a very large hockey stick…”
“…some bloggers have claimed that the Higgs Boson discovery relies on the sighting of a single particle by the physicist Briffaovolich, who refers to it as the YAD06 sighting, this is an entirely spurious claim and there have in fact been many sightings of the Higgs Boson…”
“….only reasonable adjustments to the data were made, and it is now clear that the Higgs Boson does indeed exist…”
“…of course, you have to look at the data first, to see if the Higgs Boson exists, the data where it doesn’t exist is clearly not the data that we were looking for, and obviously does not carry a Higgs Boson signal – so of course that data was excluded from our final study…”
“..The Peer Review Process clearly shows that the Higgs Boson exists…”
“…That’s clearly not a reputable journal… it simply puts out propaganda by Big Particle…If people spent less time thinking about fermions and more time thinking about bosons… all this controversy would simply die out…”
“…Those of us who believe in the Higgs Boson have history on our side…”
“…Allowing people to have access to cheap fermions is like giving a particle accelerator to a child… my god… any one could open up an interdimensional portal and allow who knows what catastrophic monsters to come through…”
“… as a CERN director, all I can say is that more funding will be required to ensure that the advent of anthropogenic global interdimensional portal catastrophy is adverted… surely everyone has a stake in that outcome…”
CodeTech says:
July 2, 2012 at 5:19 pm
I saw this on Star Trek: Voyager, except it was the Omega molecule.
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Wrong. It was Galaxy Quest and it was the Omega 13. It let you go back in time 13 seconds to correct a mistake. At U of Va. Mann made an Omega (plug in a really, Really, REALLY big number) that let him go back in time to nail a thermometer to some tree in Yamal…….
This announcement is right up there with the announcement that once the DNA of a human was mapped, it would mean the end of medicinal guessing, that all diseases would be cured/curable.
What a load of bunk. Now they have many copies of people’s DNA and we now know that there is a heck of a lot more to life that gene codes for physical beings.
After deciding they have detected the Higg’s Boson they will find that there are different types of them (like neutrinos and quarks) and they are made up of yet-smaller ‘Higglets’. This has been going on all my life. It will carry on doing so for centuries.
Physicists should give up the arrogance that pretends they have found the finality of anything at all.
Just carry on and report your findings and theories. If they find out how to make low-mass metals by expelling the Higg’s particles, call me.
Physicist: We have a 5 sigma confidence that the Higgs Boson exists.
Climate Scientist: What’s sigma? …Is it a type of Hockey Stick? …we love Hockey Sticks – they’re everywhere.
125 Gev was the standard model energy for the particle, and some phenomenon at that energy is what they found.
The problem with the Higgs is they found exactly what they were looking for – which tosses out some of the supersymmetry theories and doesn’t induce any new physics.
This should accelerate the crisis in physics in that they have a standard model that explains all most everything without explaining the important things (it is correct without being complete).