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
Once/If they make this discovery, will they get Mr Scotty in to get the damn thing up to full power?
What is the point of having such a large instrument if you ain’t going to use it at full power?
AllanJ
Your question is a good one. However, its impossible to answer it other than to say that this is cutting edge research and this type of cutting edge research has traditionally led to advances. Eg electronics, nuclear power, NMR scanning machines, the world wide web. It would be wrong to speculate since this is research and one simply doesn’t know in advance how things are going to look.
My own “justification” for this type of work is that its the equivalent of going to the Moon. To many folk this was a wholly unnecessary and costly exercise. To others its a statement of the continuing progress of mankind. The time to worry is when we stagnate and stop seeking new knowledge. This is one reason why I’m a little unhappy with climate science. The “debate is over” is never something one would hear in particle physics. Our aim is to overturn the “consensus” since we know how fragile it is.
****
Lubos Motl says:
July 2, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Dear beng and everyone with a weak enough computer or browser, please use this version of my blog:
http://motls.blogspot.com/?m=1
****
Hey, I resemble that remark! j/k
IE8 at least displays the page (badly), but gives some kind of stack overflow error.
Thanks for the link.
Roger: “Being sceptical is always good but being dogmatic isn’t. My field tries to avoid false claims.”
Well then, I’ll try to avoid false skepticism. Any appeal to the need for trust deserves none.
If you can pick it up at Walmart then no one cares whether you believe it or not. It still plays the latest Spiderman remake on your telly. But for everything else, and for everyone that hasn’t personally watched Spiderman, it’s a pure issue of faith. You are either trusting your dreams, or what someone else tells you about what they did. Or what someone else tells about what someone else told them about…
“Put up or shut up” is skepticism. And it is dogmatic. And it is empiricism. You, and anyone else, can take every strained pretense about they you should be one of the wise-men to reveal the True Religion and shove it.
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?”
I believe the statistical confidence is based upon the concept that one might be 95, 96, 97…. or whatever % confident that the results were not due to random error. There are all kinds of other types of error possible in any research other than random statistical error. I am sure Newtonian physics looked pretty good until Einstein came along and then we needed several years for the ability to measure to the proper degree of accuracy with the Mercury observation.
Goldie says:
July 2, 2012 at 9:59 pm
“……..Anyway the article is only semi right in stating that mass combined with gravity produces weight. In truth it is mass that generates a gravity in the first place and the gravity generated is proportional to the mass. ”
Excellent! However an even more direct way of looking at the issue, under general relativity, would be that the the Higgs Boson, if it really exists, is what curves space to give us the illusion of a “force” called gravity. But perhaps we simply do not understand gravity as thoroughly as we need to given all of the “dark matter and dark energy” required to explain astronomical observations.
Hitchens already found the God particle.
Now, you may watch a 7-minute video by the CMS boss Joe Incandella of Santa Barbara
http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-125-gev-higgs-boson-isnt-quite.html?m=1
that was leaked today although it will officially be recorded tomorrow, given the date stamp on the video. 😉
AGW science sits at one-sigma degree of confidence !!
Alternatively, gravity is a simple dipolar effect at an atomic level, with the “inner pole positive and the outer pole negative, all planets being effectively electrets”:
http://zekeunlimited.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/gravity-a-simple-dipolar-effect-at-an-atomic-level/
And “mass is a measure the ease of electrically deforming a particle.”
http://zekeunlimited.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/mass-a-simple-model-requiring-no-newly-invented-particles/
“Large particles are easier to deform and so appear more massive.” ~W. Thornhill
davidmhoffer says:
July 2, 2012 at 9:50 pm
Wow. Lotsa harsh language for physicists. Has climate science made us so cynical that we see corruption in all sciences at all times?
Sadly, yes.
This is the amount of damage the data fudging society has caused. Nothing in science from now
will ever be taken at face value and rightly so.
Regards
A Physicist
Roger says:
July 3, 2012 at 1:31 am
I’m a particle physicist working on one of the LHC experiments.
The reason for the announcement now is that this is our deadline for producing new results ahead of the major summer conferences
And there you have it, Roger, the worst possible reason to make an announcement of a non-discovery.
Maus
Since when do I say “trust us” ? I gave you an example of how we dealt with an apparent signal. We explicitly asked people not to trust us. Hardly an appeal to authority. Regarding the Higgs, If you think the experimental procedure I described is inadequate, please point out why rather just moaning (in true internet whinge-warrior style).
Stephen
On the contrary, this is science. We were scheduled give an update and that’s what we’re doing. Even if there is no discovery, it represents a lot of first rate science in a long journey. To not give a promised update would have been wrong. If it all turns out to be a 4.99999 sigma excess from both experiments then that’s just unlucky. Nature doesn’t always run to our timetables. This is how science is done. Why give the (inaccurate) impression that its an easy single step between data taking and discovery ?
Let us be clear. The Higgs Boson does not exist.
At least it does not exist in our present reality, no more than the electro-weak force actually exists. In the latter case, there is the electric force and the weak nuclear force. But, at high enough energy, both forces combine into a unified force.
The Higgs does not exist, but the high energy collisions have (apparently) created a Higgs, which comes into existence for an unbelievably short span of time before disintegrating. This time span is too short to show even a trajectory, but instead other trajectories from its disintegration are examined, and the Higgs inferred. This, if correct, demonstrates that the Higgs existed in the universe for a minute fraction to time after the big bang before disappearing from our universe.
I presume that the Higgs field must still exist – although how that works without the boson is a mystery to me. It is the field that Peter Higgs hypothesised to account for inertia, although the idea of inertia being the result of interaction of matter with a field is counter intuitive, since we know from experience (and Newton) that objects tend to continue on their straight line paths for ever, and the presence of a field would obviously imply a deceleration, and worse, in reintroduces the spectre of the ether and absolute space.
And if the Higgs Bosun exists, so what? The greatest problems in physics are the inability to unify the physics of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Every attack, whether by quantum gravity or string theory has failed. In short, GR and Quantum mechanics, cannot both be correct.
The question is, does confirming the Higgs provide the direction that physics should take, or is it the last nail being hammered into the coffin of our current (non)understanding?
you know they are going to come up with something like this, if they have to torture the data for years they are going to justify their boondoggle of a project.
Roger:
Thankyou for your comments. They are well said, and they needed saying.
Sadly, that need is an outcome (which several of us predicted) of the discredit of all science that has resulted from the practices of so-called ‘climate science’.
Richard
This is a great thing if true, and how much will be small if it is not true?
Scientists do not know what there is in these accelerators, although under high vacuum.
Who knows what the particle “pick up” from the “empty” space on the target and how it all returns to its initial state. Maybe they think of the debris that a particle of God, and how much energy should be produced on the earth radiation of several trillion al. volts. It is on Earth will never happen.
A particle of God is much more subtle than any you can imagine
As I understand it, they may have found a particle with 133 times the mass of a proton. How it gives other particles mass and how they know that this is the particle that gives other particles mass I don’t yet understand. Also, since it has 133 times the mass of a proton, it would also have to give itself mass.
There seems to be some disagreement about wether the new particle will support the standard model more or supersymetry more.
It seems to me that we have lots and lots of data on the table, but the theoretical physicists can’t really make sense of it. For example, we’ve know for about 70 or 80 years that a single photon partical can create a wave type interference pattern with itself. But we don’t even have a reasonable guess at a physical model that would make such a thing possible.
According to the standard model, forces are carried by force carrier particles called bosons. As an example, imagine two guys standing on ice skates about 5 feet appart and they are throwing a heavy ball back and forth between them. The guy who throws the ball creates kinetic energy away from the other guy. The guy who catches the ball also get kinetic energy away from the other guy. So as they keep throwing the ball between them, they keep accelerting away from each other. A boson would be like the ball in this example. If I remember correctly, there are four different kinds of forces in the universe and they all have different bosons associated with them. At least that is the theory.
Vince: “The greatest problems in physics are the inability to unify the physics of general relativity with quantum mechanics. ”
I thought that Paul Dirac had done something like that when he produced a relatavistic version of the Shroedinger equations?
Vince: “It is the field that Peter Higgs hypothesised to account for inertia, although the idea of inertia being the result of interaction of matter with a field is counter intuitive,”
Yeah, that stumps me as well. If the Higgs field resists the acceleration of an object, why would it not also resist the continued motion of an object. I’m also confused by the idea that characteristics of particles must come from outside of the particles rather than being inherent charateristics of the particle. So if it takes an seperate particle like the Higgs boson, to give another particle mass, then what gives the Higgs boson its characteristic of giving other particles mass. Seems like one could follow that chain eternally.
I spoke with my friend who works directly at Cern in Switzerland. (He’s a member of team CMS…Team ATLAS was the team who claimed to make the discovery.) He told me it was like a race between CMS and ATLAS as to who “find the Higs boson first” Team ATLAS’ came out first claiming a 4 sigma result which equates to 99.9995% certainty. Now, what they REALLY need to claim “discovery” is a 5 sigma result 99.99995% certainty accompanied by a second independent verifying test (hopefully from team CMS!) THEN they will claim discovery. According to my friend, they are about 10 days away from making an official announcement.
Cheers,
Chris
Nearly confirmed? Is that like a little bit pregnant?
Wednesday? So, those Europeans really like to poke the U.S. in the eye for no good reason, don’t they?
Barbara at 5.33. LOL. To me it seems to suggest ‘we think we are pregnant’.
Scientists quietly submit their works to peer review. Pseudo-scientists schedule gigantic press events to engender funds their pseudo-scientific activities. I predict this press release manipulation will eventually be exposed as a farce, but the exposure of the farce will be negligible compared to the press coverage of the farce.