Higgs Boson so called "god particle" discovered claim LHC!

[Gritt23]

Betelgeuse could die tomorrow or the next thousand years. And boy will it be fun when it happens.

Higgs almost proves particle physics theories from the 50's about how mass is created. It's a special day.

LOL, I thought Beetlejuice was a name too cool to be true, but I only heard him say it, and not written down. #shame

 

[Gritt23]

physicists can get on with adding in all of the other missing pieces (such as gravity) knowing that they have a relatively solid base on which to build.

Surely you need gravity BEFORE you have a solid base.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

Was watching Prof Brian Cox on Eden last night, try to explain to me how a dying star collapses and creates all the elements. I do REALLY try to understand, but it is just too much for me. He really does try to explain it in such a logical way, with such enthusiasm, that I think if he'd been my physics / chemistry teacher, I'd have absolutely LOVED the whole subject. But as it is, I find it really hard to get my head around almost any of it.

That's relatively easy. Put simpy, if you merge two hydrogen atoms (1 proton each) in a star together you get a helium atom (two protons) - you need a huge amount of energy to do that though, i.e. the energy you get when a star is collapsing in on itself. If you then merge two helium atoms together, you get a Berylium atom (4 protons), and so on getting larger & larger atoms until you get Oxygen, Carbon etc.

All these atoms eventually go into making everything else, from planets to us.

 

[Gritt23]

That's relatively easy. Put simpy, if you merge two hydrogen atoms (1 proton each) in a star together you get a helium atom (two protons) - you need a huge amount of energy to do that though, i.e. the energy you get when a star is collapsing in on itself. If you then merge two helium atoms together, you get a Berylium atom (4 protons), and so on getting larger & larger atoms until you get Oxygen, Carbon etc.

All these atoms eventually go into making everything else, from planets to us.

It was just the sheer magnitude of temperature that was blowing my mind. It sounds unfeasibly hot and he tells us it's only enough to produce hydrogen and helium, then gets even more unbelievably hot and only produces the first 26 elements, and by teh time we are at heavy metals we are at a billion degrees! Jees, no wonder alchemists never had much luck, they needed to get that old test tube just a little hotter to turn base metals into GOLD.

The principle, I do sort of get, but it's just the sheer magnitude that leaves me spinning.

 

[Manx Shearwater]

What these alchemists needed was a Dell laptop wth a dodgy battery. Now THEY get hot!

 

[Don Quixote]

WOW! What a lot of difference this makes! I am glad they're spending Billions of pounds on something so worthwhile.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

It was just the sheer magnitude of temperature that was blowing my mind. It sounds unfeasibly hot and he tells us it's only enough to produce hydrogen and helium, then gets even more unbelievably hot and only produces the first 26 elements, and by teh time we are at heavy metals we are at a billion degrees! Jees, no wonder alchemists never had much luck, they needed to get that old test tube just a little hotter to turn base metals into GOLD.

The principle, I do sort of get, but it's just the sheer magnitude that leaves me spinning.

The stat that always gets me is (which obviosuly makes me quite sad), given that photons travel at the speed of light (186,000 mph), a photon created at the centre of the sun, taking a direct route should take a few seconds to get to the outer edge of the sun. Our sun is so compressed and dense that a single photon takes 30,000 years to get to the edge of the sun.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

OK, in simple terms,

Protons and neutrons are made up of fermions. There are 12 types of fermions, 6 are called quarks, and 6 are called leptons ( one of these 6 leptons is an electron, others include muons and neutrinos ).

A boson is a type of particle that allows these fermions ( quarks and leptons ) to interact with each other.

A photon is a particular form of a boson, the Higgs boson is another. There's also a W+ and W-, a Z0 and 8 types of gluons.

In general terms the bosons determine why protons and neutrons exist ( and why they can have measurable properties such as mass, electrical charge ), because they explain why fermions can clump together to form stable atomic nuclei ( and stay clumped together ) why they have an electrical charge, why they exhibit spin ( think of it like the earth spinning around it's own axis, spin + is clockwise, spin - is anticlockwise ), why they absorb and emit light ( as photons or light waves ) and why they have mass ( the Higgs boson ). The Higgs boson also explains why some other bosons have mass properties as well.

A hadron ( as in Large Hadron collider ) is a combination of quarks permanantly joined together. So by hitting hadrons against each other ( at very high speeds, usually measured in terms of energy or eV (electron volts ), you can (hopefully) split them apart into individual quarks, and see how the bosons affect the way they split up.

One other consequence is that you create very exotic and unstable forms of quark combinations when you try bashing them together, most of which are so unstable that they are very difficult to detect as they don't exist for very long. The results from CERN are quoting a 5sigma level of probability ( sigma being the standard deviation that an event has a likelihood of occuring ) which means they are 97% certain that what they are detecting is a new particle at 125 GeV ( giga electron volt ) or 125,000,000,000 eV. ( In fact 5sigma means it's actually only a 3% chance that the particle they are observing is some random event down to chance ).

To get hadrons up to 125,000,000,000 eV requires some extremely powerful accelerators to speed them up and electromagnets to confine them to the path you want them to travel, around a 27km circumference ring. That's why the LHC uses superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium, as it's the only way to lower electrical resistance and get the high current. Without that current the hadrons would just spin off course into the side of the accelerator where they would be scattered any old which way ( and probably make the equipment highly radioactive - that's why when the LHC magnets failed a couple of years back it took so long to repair ). And you have to cool them down and heat them up slowly to avoid breaking them ( at such high magnetic fields they can 'quench' due to eddy currents, and all the helium rapidly boils off, the electrical resistance rapidly increases and before you know it your expensive magnet has started to get so hot that it's irreperably damaged ). Both the Atlas and CMS detectors are contained in huge cryostats, again cooled by liquid helium, so that they can measure incredibly small electrical signals that occur when quarks hit detectors - if they were at room temperature all you would measure is electrical noise.

I work at a facility called ISIS, and we only have an 800 MeV accelerator - by comparison we only need to cool the magnets with water at 18 degrees centigrade to stop them getting too hot. A typical television cathode ray tube works at around 1 KeV and just needs some air vents at the back of the set. The LHC accelerate protons at 7 TeV, that's 7,000,000,000,000 eV. That makes CERN 8,750x more powerful than ISIS, and a lot brighter than your average TV.

But of course, it might not be a Higgs boson, it might be something completely new.

 

[Gritt23]

34064 - thank you for putting it so simply.

 

[Was not Was]

OK, in simple terms,

Protons and neutrons are made up of fermions. There are 12 types of fermions, 6 are called quarks, and 6 are called leptons ( one of these 6 leptons is an electron, others include muons and neutrinos ).

A boson is a type of particle that allows these fermions ( quarks and leptons ) to interact with each other.

A photon is a particular form of a boson, the Higgs boson is another. There's also a W+ and W-, a Z0 and 8 types of gluons.

In general terms the bosons determine why protons and neutrons exist ( and why they can have measurable properties such as mass, electrical charge ), because they explain why fermions can clump together to form stable atomic nuclei ( and stay clumped together ) why they have an electrical charge, why they exhibit spin ( think of it like the earth spinning around it's own axis, spin + is clockwise, spin - is anticlockwise ), why they absorb and emit light ( as photons or light waves ) and why they have mass ( the Higgs boson ). The Higgs boson also explains why some other bosons have mass properties as well.

A hadron ( as in Large Hadron collider ) is a combination of quarks permanantly joined together. So by hitting hadrons against each other ( at very high speeds, usually measured in terms of energy or eV (electron volts ), you can (hopefully) split them apart into individual quarks, and see how the bosons affect the way they split up.

Good work. That's probably as simply as it can be explained, but it's still complicated.

I think it's easier to understand the (theoretical) problem they're trying to solve. The way I understand it, stuff is made out of molecules. But we've realised that nearly all of a molecule is just space / nothing / nada, with almost no weight. And finding these other particles can show what it is that gives things mass and solidity. Is that sort of right?

Could we see it as the Crystal Palace problem? There's nothing there of any substance except a shell of a club, but when you come up against them first hand, they do actually have players, etc.

 

[Hillian1]

OK, in simple terms,

Protons and neutrons are made up of fermions. There are 12 types of fermions, 6 are called quarks, and 6 are called leptons ( one of these 6 leptons is an electron, others include muons and neutrinos ).

A boson is a type of particle that allows these fermions ( quarks and leptons ) to interact with each other.

A photon is a particular form of a boson, the Higgs boson is another. There's also a W+ and W-, a Z0 and 8 types of gluons.

In general terms the bosons determine why protons and neutrons exist ( and why they can have measurable properties such as mass, electrical charge ), because they explain why fermions can clump together to form stable atomic nuclei ( and stay clumped together ) why they have an electrical charge, why they exhibit spin ( think of it like the earth spinning around it's own axis, spin + is clockwise, spin - is anticlockwise ), why they absorb and emit light ( as photons or light waves ) and why they have mass ( the Higgs boson ). The Higgs boson also explains why some other bosons have mass properties as well.

A hadron ( as in Large Hadron collider ) is a combination of quarks permanantly joined together. So by hitting hadrons against each other ( at very high speeds, usually measured in terms of energy or eV (electron volts ), you can (hopefully) split them apart into individual quarks, and see how the bosons affect the way they split up.

Any chance you could put that a wee bit simpler than the simple terms you just used?

All I get from any of this is that an atom hit the Higgs thingy, created mass and mass creates stuff.

I was watching BBC Breakfast however and was sidetracked by Susana Reids breasts.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

OK, think of an atomic nucleus as a box of sugar cubes, the protons and neutrons are the individual sugar cubes, and the quarks and leptons are the individual grains of sugar in each cube. What their doing is firing very small lumps of sugar ( only a few grains clumped together ) at each other and seeing how the individual grains are knocked off, to establish just what it is that is holding the sugar cube together ( a boson ) - hence the idea of a cosmic 'syrup', 'treacle' or glue. ( Funnily enough that's why some bosons are called gluons, because they act like glue holding the grains together ).

 

[Tricky Dicky]

I was watching BBC Breakfast however and was sidetracked by Susana Reids breasts.

You can thank the good 'ol Higgs B for giving THEM mass.

 

[Hillian1]

OK, think of an atomic nucleus as a box of sugar cubes, the protons and neutrons are the individual sugar cubes, and the quarks and leptons are the individual grains of sugar in each cube. What their doing is firing very small lumps of sugar ( only a few grains clumped together ) at each other and seeing how the individual grains are knocked off, to establish just what it is that is holding the sugar cube together ( a boson - hence the idea of a cosmic 'syrup' ).

Right I get it, each sugar lump is made up of little grains, they are firing stuff at them to work out how the lump stays together.

Which leads me to ask, Why?

 

[Seagull27]

Prof. Higgs did a guest lecture at my uni not long ago. I was going to go, but on the day I think I was too hungover or something. Kind of wish I did now.

 

[KZNSeagull]

Right I get it, each sugar lump is made up of little grains, they are firing stuff at them to work out how the lump stays together.

Which leads me to ask, Why?

To help them prove that their current theory regarding how the Universe works is correct.

Or to help them to invent matter transporters ala Star Trek and remove our reliance on the Car. Maybe.

 

[Manx Shearwater]

Right I get it, each sugar lump is made up of little grains, they are firing stuff at them to work out how the lump stays together.

Which leads me to ask, Why?

Your tea wouldn't taste the same, unless they found this stuff out.

Or something.

 

[Silent Bob]

The internet is the best place to register your opinion that CERN is a f***ing waste of time.

 

[Hillian1]

Your tea wouldn't taste the same, unless they found this stuff out.

Or something.

My tea won't taste the same if they use up all the sugar lumps trying to find this out, tea without sugar is rank.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

Right I get it, each sugar lump is made up of little grains, they are firing stuff at them to work out how the lump stays together.

Which leads me to ask, Why?

That's the $ 64,000,000 question. They're Scientists and enjoy this kind of thing. Fortunately I'm just a humble Engineer, it's my job to build the thing, not justify what they do with it.

However CERN does cost a fortune to run, because :

a) It's so complicated.
b) It's big.
c) It uses a lot of liquid helium, which is expensive to produce (and a lot of liquid nitrogen too, but that is much cheaper).