From CERN, another science press release with a “could” and “preliminary” caveat. Sigh. I expected fireworks. It is encouraging though. 5 sigma isn’t anything to sneeze at.
I have to wonder though, if the fact that CERN delayed this press release (from Monday when it became known) to today, the 4th of July, wasn’t a final dig at the legacy of the failed US effort with the superconducting supercollider. They write at the CERN page:
Higgs within reach
Our understanding of the universe is about to change…
The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN today presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
The experiments found hints of the new particle by analysing trillions of proton-proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2011 and 2012. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that a Higgs boson would decay into different particles – which the LHC experiments then detect.
Both ATLAS and CMS gave the level of significance of the result as 5 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a discovery.
One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, 3 sigma counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery. The results presented today are preliminary, as the data from 2012 is still under analysis. The complete analysis is expected to be published around the end of July.
The press release:
CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson
Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN1 today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.
“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”
“The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”
“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”
The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today’s observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.
The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”
Positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.
Contact:
CERN press office, press.office@cern.ch
+41 22 767 34 32
+41 22 767 21 41
Further information:
UPDATE: My friend John Coleman at KUSI-TV in San Diego has produced an interesting video report based on input from the WUWT thread. Watch it here
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Eric Simpson,
Well said. I agree. anna v is a voice of reason and of physics knowledge.
Re: “but no fireworks on the 4th of July”
A Little Bang:
A week or so ago I heard a dull boom (probably from high-speed ground transmitted sound) followed by a sharp crack as if someone had discharged a firearm in the area. I later found out that, about 16 miles away, someone was target shooting right next to the bunker where the explosives for the city of Poulsbo WA fireworks display were being stored and fired an unlucky shot. The explosion is said to have left a sizable crater in the ground.
http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2012/jun/26/investigation-continues-after-belfair-firework/
I am in no position to question or affirm the significance of this discovery or its importance to understanding the nature of existence. I sometimes wonder, however, if the singularity we call our universe might be part of a larger multiplicity of which we may have only punctuated contact.
“””””…..oe says:
July 5, 2012 at 1:27 am
@davidmhoffer
The problem isn’t the speed of light or getting enough data to the CPU, after all we are feeding all those extra cores with data. The problem is waste heat. The faster the CPU goes the more energy it needs and the more heat is generated in a given area. That heat has to be dealt with before it melts the chip and that quickly becomes very expensive. To overcome the waste heat problem we increase the chip size by adding more cores and as most problems that most computers have to solve can be broken down into separate tasks we get more work done in the same time.
This is all just a delaying action though, the heat problem has never gone away and after a certain size, the lag inside the chip will counter out any benefit from more cores. After that we will probably move to more discrete chips and CPU’s layered upon each over as the cheapest way to increase performance. Then the cheapest way will probably be to deal with the heat at which point CPU’s will get faster again. “””””
Well there is method in the madness of the multicore chips, that is a little more subtle than surface appearances. Modern computer chips generalloy employ either CMOS logic, or dynamic gates as in memory chips; which are misnamed, because they are mostly “forget” chips, and lose their gate charge faster than a speeding bullet, so they have to be refreshed constantly, even when they computer isn’t doing anything.
CMOS gates draw next to zero static power, since only the PMOS, or the NMOS device is on in each state. The power dissipation is almost entirely due to displacement currents charging and discharging gate capacitances through small parasitic resistances, and on resistance of the active devices. This dispacement current power increases as the square of the clock frequency.
So when photolithography limits go down with each chip generation, the capacitances go down, and because of the physics the operating Voltage also has to be reduced, so both cause power consumption to drop for the same clock frequency.
If I can get double the work done at a given clock speed by having two cores, I will double the power for the same minimum feature size, but also it would be double the chip area or at least the core area.
If instead, I double the clock speed for the same geometry, then the switching displacement current power goes up by a factor of four.
So multiplying cores is more power efficient than raising clock speed, so long as the software can really share the task between multiple cores. But with M$ bloatware philosophy, the software expands to consume even more clock cycles.
Windows must be a mosaic of tiny islands of sanity tied together with a multiple layer overlay of continuously updated bandaids.
My SS hard drive computer now boots up at lightning speed only to inform me that is will now instsall the latest layer of Johnson’s band aid dressings.
If anybody had the guts to tell those clowns to go back and rewrite the whole damn thing, and eliminate all the patches, that cover holes in the patches underneath, we might have some semblance of an operating system that works.
I spent an hour today, trying to write a pamphlet, and it would have only taken a fraction of that time, if M$ provided WORD with a key called “TYPE”, that turned the darn program into an IBM Selectric typewriter, that didn’t keep claiming I was spelling things incorrectly, or trying to put words into my mouth. I want a word processor, that types what I type, and does nothing else, and assumes nothing about what I want to do, other than to put down the character on the key that I pushed.. If I type (c), M$ erases what I just typed and substitutes a copyright symbol in its place. Who the hell ever uses a copyright symbol in a mathematical equation ?
And excel is a gem of a math program. You have to type sin(radians(30)) just to get the sin of an angle. didn’t any of those nerds ever takle a mathematics course and find out there actually is standard nomenclature for virtually all of mathematics.
Despite all of that rant, I don’t begrudge Bill Gates, one brass razoo of his inestimable wealth. He has done more good for more of the world’s people than any politician to come along since the stone age.
Tenuk says:
July 5, 2012 at 1:53 am
I can understand why CERN did the press release before the full result is in. They knew the MSM would pick up their rather guarded statement that, after much massaging of the data up to the sigma 5 level, the Higgs particle has at last been found.
Ay-up. From that unimpeachable source of truthy truthiness, the self-described “newspaper of record,” the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/science/cern-physicists-may-have-discovered-higgs-boson-particle.html?pagewanted=all
You just *knew* they had to throw “diversity” in there…
Spector says:
July 5, 2012 at 10:48 pm
Re: “but no fireworks on the 4th of July”
A Little Bang:
A week or so ago I heard a dull boom … followed by a sharp crack as if someone had discharged a firearm in the area. I later found out that, about 16 miles away, someone was target shooting right next to the bunker where the explosives for the city of Poulsbo WA fireworks display were being stored and fired an unlucky shot.
Prime candidate for the 2012 Darwin Award.
George E. Smith; says:
July 6, 2012 at 2:01 am
“If anybody had the guts to tell those clowns to go back and rewrite the whole damn thing, and eliminate all the patches, that cover holes in the patches underneath, we might have some semblance of an operating system that works.”
Ah, but you see, George, that would be difficult.
It is all outsourced to India and China nowadays. All the americans wants to be bosses, you see.
All the germans has resigned in NASA also, so only american bosses left.
So, unless you can invent “The Ultimate Powerpoint Compiler” which can convert a Powerpoint into anything, the bosses cannot create a damn thing. Except meet with each other and discuss some boxes on ….a Powerpoint.
I wonder how much CO2 is created every second that contraption is running? Not that I think it matters to me. It does not. It seems to me that the very “big science” wonks that attend the church of global warming are the same “big science” wonks that need to fill the atmosphere with CO2 in the name of their curiosity. The hypocrisy is with them not me.
On Friday nights when they are consuming beer, the self proclaimed geniuses and science elite contrive green schemes to service their socialist inclinations. But on Monday morning at 8 am they are all business and burn energy as if they are a small country.
Oh! We might have a Higgs Boson. T’was worth it! (sarc)
George E Smith;
I spent an hour today, trying to write a pamphlet, and it would have only taken a fraction of that time, if M$ provided WORD with a key called “TYPE”, that turned the darn program into an IBM Selectric typewriter, that didn’t keep claiming I was spelling things incorrectly, or trying to put words into my mouth.>>>>>
Try Notepad. Pretty much exactly what you asked for. It is in the Accessories folder.
You can also turn off a lot of those annoying helper applets in Word. Some are easy to turn off…. and some require a registry edit which can have…. unexpected results that are difficult to revers if you do it wrong.
But yeah, my first computer had a cpu that ran in the khz range, and there was no way I could type faster than it could accept my key strokes. My current computer is (literaly) capable of millions of times the performace, but due to the bloated o/s and apps it has to run, sometimes it has trouble keeping up with me (and I ain’t that fast a typist!)
anna v says:
July 4, 2012 at 12:01 pm
“…………. More statistics will allow us to discriminate between alternate propositions .”
That is the disturbing issue in much of this. The wave/particle construction of the quantum/particle physics world is (necessarily) a construct of the available mathmatic languages, as is general relativity. When these languages tell us there are particles of different “colors”, for instance, that descriptive is a mathmatical construct used to differentiate between, say, neutrino types, but has no real world counterpart. Likewise, dark matter and dark energy seem to be fudge factors invented to explain why we cannot find 96% of the mass of the visible universe which we think might be out there based upon our present understanding of observational astronomical results. This is all fine as long as all is qualified as “theoretical” and bias for existing theories can be overcome so that real scientists think outside the box now and again. And perhaps our mathmatical languages are themselves deficient in undertaking the task at hand.
Weird how Coleman and others want to pronounce it like “bosun/bos’n”. It should be like “bows-on”. (Tie two bows on your shoelaces.)
Or Wordpad, same place. It permits basic formatting like bold, etc., which Notepad does not. Easiest way to get it is Start/Run/Wordpad . It will open immediately.
P.S. Actually, Wordpad may be tucked away somewhere else in your Windows directory, but it doesn’t matter. Just do the Start-Run-Wordpad sequence and Windows will open it. Save formatted text as .rtf (Rich Text File). All wordprocessors know how to deal with it.
I love these not inconsistent with “proofs”. The new science.
timetochooseagain – you call Smolin a crackpot twice, and suggest people don’t read his works, but you offer nothing but your own opinion as evidence. I have read “The Trouble With Physics” and found it to be anything but “crackpot”.
Why do you call Smolin a crackpot? You offer no reason. And why should your opinion carry any weight with me? Again, you offer no reason.
I’ve only spotted on comment regarding this but it would be nice if more people knew of it or could discuss the “Electric Universe” concept (or “plasma universe”).
It seems to make searching for “dark matter”, “dark energy”, “black holes” or even the “big bang” unnecessary..?
[REPLY: This is not on Anthony’s list of unwelcome topics, but we’ve already seen how “accepted science” has resulted in nasty exchanges. WUWT does not take a “position” on any topic, but recognizes that some topics are more incendiary than others. Please comment without getting personal. -REP]