Final Analysis Suggests Tevatron Saw Hint of the Higgs Boson 184
ananyo writes with exciting news from the world of particle physics: "A hint of the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the standard model of particle physics, has been found in data collected by the Tevatron, the now-shuttered U.S. particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. While not statistically significant enough in themselves to count as a 'discovery', the indications announced on 7 March at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, are consistent with 2011 reports of a possible standard model Higgs particle with a mass of around 125 GeV from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The data is more direct evidence of the Higgs than the constraints on its mass offered by the precise W boson mass measurement reported on Monday. On a sad note, the find vindicates Tevatron scientists who campaigned unsuccessfully to extend the collider's run. The request was turned down by the Department of Energy but this last hurrah suggests that Tevatron might indeed have found the Higgs ahead of CERN's Large Hadron Collider if they'd secured the funding required. The Tevatron is currently being raided for parts."
I LOVE the Tevatron (Score:4, Funny)
It's my favorite ride at the fair!
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It's my favorite ride at the fair!
But the radiation makes me ill.
sign of the times (Score:2)
shutting things down right when they can make the most difference.
it sucks, but when you don't have the money to maintain them,,,,.
at least the shuttles are going to museums.
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Really? Is finding proof of the Higgs Boson really the "most difference" that the Tevatron will have made during its long life?
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Yes.
Re:sign of the times (Score:4, Informative)
Is finding proof of the Higgs Boson really the "most difference" that the Tevatron will have made during its long life?
No, it found the Top quark too, and that was really straining its capabilities, which is why the LHC was built (after the abandonment of the SSC).
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at least the shuttles are going to museums.
The Shuttles made the Hubble Space Telescope possible. That was, far and away, the most difference they could have made, and they did it in the 90s. We need something cheaper and more reliable now.
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No, they didn't.
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This was my point. It would have been prohibitively difficult to repair and then routinely service the HST using any other launch system.
Considering the cost per launch for the entire duration of the shuttle program, it's likely that it was one of the most prohibitively expensive delivery systems they could have possibly employed.
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The Shuttles made the Hubble Space Telescope possible.
No, they didn't.
Yes, they did. Without them, there'd have been no way to fix its astigmatism. It was sent up flawed.
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At the time it was shut down, it was far from sure that the higgs could be found with that accellerator to begin with.
In the meantime a much better tool became available, one could argue making the Tevatron obsolete - at least for that part of particle research. I'm European and I don't really care whether the current largerst collider is in US or EU. Nice to have it on our side of the ocean but that's it. And it's not as if US scientists are kept out or so, right?
Re:sign of the times (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, this was found long after the funding was gone and the Tevatron was being taken apart for other experiments, but you go on insinuating that they're simply lying.
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Oh yeah. It's amasing how much stuff they find when their funding is up for review. Surely that is just a coincidence....
Not really, considering that they've already started cannibalising the machine for parts.
Re:sign of the times (Score:4, Funny)
Oh yeah. It's amazing how much stuff they find when their funding is up for review. Surely that is just a coincidence....
"So, wtf do we do now that funding's been cut and the thing's being mothballed or cannibalized?"
"Uh, how's about we analyze the data it collected?"
"Brillant [sic]! Smoley hokes, would you look at that? A freakin' Higgs boson!?!"
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Funding? They got axed? Fucking christ, but there are some really retarded people posting here. I don't mean just sort of a little on the dull side, but full on cognitively challenged halfwits, the kind of people that should be stuck in institutions and given soft toys to play with so they don't hurt themselves.
Thank you... (Score:5, Insightful)
...for not calling it the "God particle".
Re:Thank you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your analogy confuses these.
If the local newspapers started calling Christchuch, "The God city.", I would still call it Christchurch.
Re:Thank you... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, "The God Particle" is a name coined by a Nobel prize winning physicist. Sort of. He wanted to call it the Goddamn Particle but his publisher wouldn't let him.
It's not exactly unjustified either. A sea of Higg's Bosons are theorized to pervade the entire universe and the interact with every particle of matter. That's not entirely dissimilar to the Christian description of god being a force or entity that is everywhere at once. Various Christian theologians have also posited that god's ongoing influence is required to keep the planets in their orbits, guide thrown stones, etc. all of which are things the Higgs is supposed to do.
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No, it is what opposes "The Force", giving mass to particles.
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A better question is do you, every time you go to Disneylad, say you're visiting "Godsville"?
Wouldn't MAFIAAville (or "The Evil Kingdom (tm)") be more appropriate?
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Transform and Roll Out (Score:3)
Tevatron is on the loose, let's call in Optimus Prime!
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Already did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e7DEw70LVWs [youtube.com]
What is a Higgs Bosom worth? (Score:3)
http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/blog/index.cfm?postid=2156439899482364662 [physicscentral.com]
And the better answer is:
The sum total of what it cost to find one.
Re:What is a Higgs Bosom worth? (Score:5, Funny)
A Higgs Bosom ? ... now thats gotta be a worth a look!
Bosom [google.co.uk]
N ...
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A Higgs Bosom ? ... now thats gotta be a worth a look!
Bosom [google.co.uk]
N ...
Do you really want to see Higgs' [wikipedia.org] bosom? Well, whatever floats your boat.....
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I once had a bosun who's name was "Higgs". Guy knew everybody and could fix anything.
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About $5,000 to $15,000 [yourplasti...yguide.com], Ms. Higgs.
50 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span. Today it's 10 years just to develop one.
50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.
I seriously feel bad for the future country my kids will inherit. It doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction on the science and technology front.
Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh my God, we've turned into the AMARR!
I don't even like lasers!
Re:50 years ago... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, 50 years ago, the U.S. could manufacture most of its own consumer electronics.
50 years ago, the Federal Reserve hadn't ordered the printing of anywhere near the amount of money they have today, either.
The reality is, yes, the United States is in a state of decline, after arguably having "peaked" somewhere in the 1950's or 60's. Today, you can't even buy a kid a model rocket or a chemistry set without someone limiting the sale or fretting that you might be a terrorist.
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Indeed, what good is the ability to manufacture your own electronic devices if the MAFIAA tells you which devices you are allowed to manufacture? And what good is the ability to run a successful economy if the MAFIAA then hits you up for protection money (also known as royalties and license fees...)
Re:50 years ago... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think it's a fascinating thought experiment to try to understand the reason for the decline in the United States. Is it a nationwide form of apathy? We have done mostly everything that is humanly possible, and discovered that nothing is different in the end.
Welcome to the Q Continuum?
Maybe "Serenity" is more apt. 99% of the population just laid down and died of apathy, and the last 1% turned into psychopathic cannibals.
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50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span. Today it's 10 years just to develop one.
50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.
I seriously feel bad for the future country my kids will inherit. It doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction on the science and technology front.
I completely agree. We need to spend more money developing science and math education courses that engage children when they are young. Its sad to me the number of kids who don't even attempt word problems because they are "too hard".
Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's fair to guess that in his own mind, he was comparing some utopian ideal of communism vs. a straw man capitalism, but even so, he had a point.
Re:50 years ago... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, it took China fifty years to recover from Mao's economic depredations ...
I don't think China has recovered yet, but then I wouldn't blame all of that mess on Mao either. That country's been under the thumb of one dictator after another going back four thousand years. Chaing Kai Shek was no better than Mao, nor Emperor Chin.
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A Maoist would just maintain that Mao's system required 60 years to recover from the previous government's failure.
Re:50 years ago... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except that in the decayed hybrid, the central planners aren't expected to even maintain the pretense of working for the common good.
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War has always been a reason for mankind to invent stuff. Mostly better ways to destroy stuff but often tech trickles down from there to less deadly use. Even now the US military is doing a lot of research, e.g. when it comes to building faster / stealthier / unmanned / etc aircraft. That can only be good for advancing flight tech, and in return giving us safer, more comfortable and more efficient airliners. And so there is a lot more coming out of this strange desire to destroy.
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Not even close. Basic scientific research, which is what we're running out of now, can't justify it's budget based purely on short term profit.
People estimate that 80% of the west's economy is based on quantum mechanics, which was developed from about 1900-1930, with the not-so-basic engineering done mostly in the 50s and 60s. Since then we've been shortsightedly reaping the rewards, and we're starting to run out now.
Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Funny)
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, we would have colonized the solar system 50 years ago instead of just putting a man in space.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, we would have pwned particle physics so hard it would be taught to 4th graders today in private religious schools the way God intended.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, you would be able to buy a spacecraft at your local Ford dealership in any of 40 different models, 5 different trim levels, and hundreds of different colors.
If we had just lowered all taxes to zero and cut all job-killing regulations, no one would care about Mach 3.35 except the hippies that own Prii today. Everyone else would be getting on with their lives commuting between the Earth and Mars in their Ford spacecraft at a quarter of the speed of light.
PS... NASA still has operating SR-71's, so we technically still have a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. And, God only knows what the slow, Government-teat-sucking, mouth-breathing engineers have been able to cook up in the past 50 years. Maybe they have us up to Mach 4 now.
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Me not being able to tell whether this is satire or honest opinion scares the crap out of me...
Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Informative)
PS... NASA still has operating SR-71's, so we technically still have a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. And, God only knows what the slow, Government-teat-sucking, mouth-breathing engineers have been able to cook up in the past 50 years. Maybe they have us up to Mach 4 now.
No they don't. They haven't since 1999...
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-030-DFRC.html [nasa.gov]
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And we also have a spaceplane that's been in orbit for over a year now. Keep in mind that there's ton of top secret stuff that we don't know about as well. The Blackbird itself was a secret program for a long time. God knows what we have in the wings.
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God knows what we have in the wings.
Sorry, but God lost his security clearance when we discovered correspondence addressed to him from known terrorists.
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"50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't."
and 60 years ago we couldn't. What;s tyiour point? It hasn't been a goal. If congress said 'Go to the moon' we would be there in less then 10 years.
"50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
Because other countries are spending money and our competitive.
"50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span."
because they had money and were
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48 years is close enough to 50 for this discussion. We had big dreams back then, making things that only DC Comics would imagine. Now those dreams belong to other countries.
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"50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.
this is just false.
Fine. The A12 broke Mach 3 in 1963. So 49 years ago. I concede your point, it doesn't change the fact that this country has continued to shy away from the industrial and scientific frontiers that used to be established on a near weekly basis here. It isn't waxing nostalgic, its a simple truth. Our frontiers no longer lie in a national interest in being better than our forefathers. They lie in getting news that someone's kid took a bike ride to my friends list on facebook faster.
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Mach 3.35 was the (declassified) speed achieved by the A12 in 1963 with the installation of the J58 engines.
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50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
Today, being at the forefront of particle physics is beyond the means of any one country. Particle physicists left the nationalistic dickwaving behind and decided to collaborate on the biggest and most complicated piece of measuring equipment ever devised. This is progress.
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These things are expensive. The 50-years-ago golden age (1950s-1970s) had the top income tax bracket between 70 and 90%.
http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html [ntu.org]
Something to think about...
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50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't..
But we still have the know-how and we are actively building new launch systems that can and will support manned spaceflight.
Just because we had to retire the Shuttle's before we have a replacement ready doesn't mean we can't.
Besides, using the Suyuz craft is far more cost effective than continuing shuttle flights.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
Yes we are. Just because we don't have the biggest dick on the Super-Collider block doesn't mean we aren't participating. How many colliders do we need? Do you know how big and expensive the LHC is
Smooth glide path (Score:3)
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50 years ago you could catch smallpox. Today you can't
50 years ago all production cars required petroleum products to run. Today you can buy electric.
50 years ago the average life expectancy was 70. Today its 78 (enough time for two advanced degrees)
50 years ago you needed an expensive encyclopedia set or journal to research a subject. Today all thats in front of your face, largely free...on that note...
50 years ago random people around the world didn't really care what you thought. Today....well some
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Yes, but
50 years ago you needed a spy plane to take pictures. Today you don't need one
50 years ago you didn't have spacecraft orbiting or landing on Mars and other planets (and sending high quality pictures). Today you have
50 years ago we were still learning how to send objects into orbit. Today it's common
50 years ago sending data across the planet was a PitA. Today it's trivial
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Re:50 years ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. Nothing ever came out of the space program, aerospace industry or particle physics labs that equated back to our day to day life.
To quote JFK, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too"
The U.S. learned from going to the moon. From building the tevatron and the A-12/SR-71. From the Manhattan project.
It doesn't matter if the goals are social equality and food for all, or freeing ourselves from the Oil economy. What matters is the single, common and focused goals to drive projects and technology further. The type of projects that lead to new and better lives for everyone in it. The list of discoveries and advancements made *JUST* off of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo projects would fill pages. It was not about putting a footprint on the moon. It was putting a footprint on the moon and learning everything we could about doing it. It was about the advancement in computers, radio, rocketry, electronics and a myriad of other fields. The A-12 project advanced our understanding of supersonic travel to a new level.
The point is, I really think as a society, we've fallen into the prediction that John Steinbeck made at the height of the progress of the 60's.
"We now face the danger, which in the past has been the most destructive to the humans: Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."
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Good thing the Higgs will be confirmed at LHC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good thing the Higgs will be confirmed at LHC (Score:5, Interesting)
1. CERN finds some hints in where the Higgs is, ie around 125 GeV
2. Tevatron looks at their logs in the range ~125 GeV and says "well it could have been here, indeed"
3. Tevatron announces that they may have discovered the Higgs before, if
Questions:
1. What if CERN found at 110 GeV - maybe the Tevatron logs would show a similar indication?
2. I thought there was a matter of collider power/energy, and the Tevatron is not powerful for that discovery in the first place, anyway?
--
March 7, 2012 Not a good day for my karma
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The Tevatron was powerful enough, it's just that if the mass is near the top end of your accessible energies you need a lot more time to find something than if the mass is in the middle. The Tevatron may have been able to find some indications of the Higgs (especially when they knew where to look) but it might have taken a long time for them to amass enough events to make a definite discovery.
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What we need to do is figure out how to shoot a particle accelerator like a big gun. Then the US would build one in a heartbeat.
We could use Montana; there's basically nothing out there as it is.
Urh Urh Urh! (Score:5, Funny)
The Tevatron is currently being raided for parts
Now I have an image of it being pulled apart by a gang of Sandpeople
Whotidee! (Score:2)
Actually the proper term is Jawa, racist.
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The proper term is grad student, elitist.
the search is a very intricate calculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the search is a very intricate calculation (Score:4, Informative)
Last years LHC proposed energy "bump" was only five contending events out of several trillion studied.
It's more than 5. For the ATLAS detector by itself, as of Dec 2011 [quantumdiaries.org] they had 89,760 probable Higgs events. (Whether or not they 'actually are' the Higgs remains to be seen of course.)
Your overall point about the low frequency of events is correct, though. Those 89k events are from 380 trillion proton-proton collisions, which translates to an efficiency of 2.4×10^(-10).
Note for the America hating audience: (Score:5, Insightful)
Fun Fact: People from all over the world worked at the Tevatron in Illinois. We should all be sad it's gone. Also, many Americans are now working at, and helping to fund the LHC.
It's sad that these projects that bring us together in peace, get treated as if they were sporting events or yet another political pissing match.
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It's sad that these projects that bring us together in peace, get treated as if they were sporting events or yet another political pissing match.
Hell, no! Projects like this are far more suited to that sort of thing than what's ordinarily done. Would you rather be watching a bit of dead pig skin flying through the air, or watching atoms being smashed together at X% of the speed of light?
This game doesn't even have the distractions of things like wardrobe malfunctions, or Madonna's latest boring commercial. It's all meat! :-)
Disagreement from the field (Score:5, Interesting)
Shutting down the Tevatron with the turn-on of the LHC was the right move, from my perspective in the field. The Tevatron would NEVER have reached the magic 5sigma threshold for discovery confirmation, something the LHC will do easily if the Higgs is really near 125GeV. And running the Tevatron isn't free: it's tens of millions of dollars a year, and many hundreds of man-years of effort. This funding would have been essentially "lost", but more importantly, the lost man-years would have decimated many other projects that Fermilab and the high energy physics community considered much more valuable than an additional year or two of Tevatron running. It would also have delayed for years the development of new accelerator projects at Fermilab that are considered extremely high priority within the field. These issues are why the shutdown decision was taken in the first place. Tevatron was a great machine for thirty plus years. But time marches on, and we don't keep high cost infrastructure running based just on nostalgia....
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As a particle phisicist who worked at Tevatron... (Score:5, Insightful)
(and on LHC too) let me call the conclusions of the article bullshit.
This last hurrah suggests that Tevatron might indeed have found the Higgs ahead of CERN's Large Hadron Collider if they'd secured the funding required.
It took Tevatron 10 years to accumulate as enough data to reach a 4 sigma result (let us not discuss the statistical details). It would have taken years to reach the 5 sigma level. On the other hand LHC has obtained in one year almost as much data as Tevatron in 10. By summer 2012 the amount of data recorded by LHC will be an impossible goal for Tevatron to accomplish. It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on.
The sad thing is not that Tevatron has been shut down but that the USA government is not investing any money in using the Fermilab infrastructure for some awesome future project (I'd love to see them try a muon collider).
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Thanks for the excellent explain. "It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on." It's thirty years old. Damned straight it's obsolete, even if very cool tech for its time.
I'd love to see them try a muon collider.
Like this [cms.cern.ch]? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.
Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).
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For those interested, Tomasso gives a good run down on the report here [science20.com]
raided for parts eh? (Score:2)
if they'd secured the funding required (Score:2)
Looking towards the future of what's next... (Score:2)
LEP saw the very first sign of Higg (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Electron%E2%80%93Positron_Collider#An_unfinished_discovery_of_the_Higgs_boson
LEP was able to do 200GeV near the end of his operation. Probably that it could have been hacked to discover the Higg.
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Now if I can find away to swap it's case with my friends toaster case. heh.
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You americans trying to take the glory again?
What could be more American than that?
-- The Butler, Clue
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You americans trying to take the glory again?
What could be more American than that?
-- The Butler, Clue
Shooting the Higgs boson for trespassing on your particle detector chamber?
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Not finding the Higgs boson wouldn't be terribly interesting, that would just leave us where we started. But yeah, finding some other totally unexpected particle would be interesting for sure.
Re:I hope they don't find it (Score:4, Insightful)
Er, not finding the Higgs Boson -- when we would be able to find it if with the LHC if it existed anywhere in the range allowed by the Standard Model -- would not leave us in the same place we started. We started not knowing if this final prediction of the Standard Model would be borne out or not. We'd end up knowing that the Standard Model was incorrect beyond those predictions that had already been verified, and that there was new physics that would have to be explored in order to find out how massive particles get their mass.
This would be very exciting for many people. Ruling out the Higgs would open the door for a lot of new avenues of research.
Probably the least exciting thing that could happen is that we verify the existence of the Higgs at ~125 GeV, and then find nothing else.
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The thing is not finding the Higgs wouldn't lend us to any new theories that we aren't already in the position to come up with. Higgs isn't the first explanation people came up with for why particles have mass, it's just the best. Since it is still an unproven theory there are no doubt plenty of people who have been researching alternatives to it all along. Not finding it isn't likely to give anyone a great insight that they couldn't have come up with otherwise. Finding something new and unexpected on the o
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I've heard that the new season of Jersey Shore contains 8.6% more indecent exposure incidents and 5% more Guido fights.
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What happened to the word "closed"?
It was shuttered.
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Parts for what? All the other active GeV range particle accelerators that the US is maggoty with?
Rail guns? Unwind the Tevatron and install those superconducting magnets onto the side of a mountain. Could we actually use something like that to reach escape velocity? Wouldn't it be worth it to find out?
Heinlein was a smart guy, even if he was a bit daft.