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

[Bold Seagull]

Check out the size of Betelgeuse:

Are you sure!?!

 

[Kumquat]

Higgs Boson walks into Catholic Church, Priest says "what are you doing here?"
HB says "You can't have Mass without me!"

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

Cheers 36064 F C. Your explanations have kind of made me understand it a bit better. Am I right then in thinking that matter at its smallest and most basic form is made up of various particles, some of which we know about and have identified and can predict how they interact and function and some particles are more elusive or difficult to detect such as the Higgs Boson? And the Higgs is important because it is a particle that can prove certain theories and also is believed to be the particle that explains why collections of particles have actual mass and everything isn't just floating about in space in a big particle soup.

Something like that - most of the particles have been detected by replicating the experiments at other accelerators, like the earler LEP accelerator at CERN or the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago ( for a list of particle accelerators it's easier to read Wikipedia : Particle accelerator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and List of accelerators in particle physics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ). The Higgs is supposed to be 'the missing link' in the Standard Model, it gives particles the property of mass - which is fundamental to explaining gravitational pull, density, momentum, energy and force that were originaly linked by Newton in his Principia Mathmatica of 1687.

As I understand it you can't really detect a boson directly, you can only do computer simulations on how you expect a boson would affect a quark or lepton, and try to replicate the behaviour in the real world by experiment, the conclusion being that if the experiments confirm your simulations, then your original theory must be correct. The big experiments at CERN are trying to study all the particles that fly off in a collision at once, not just one particular type, which is why they generate such a large amount of data.

ATLAS experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The official CERN ATLAS webpage has far better images to explain how it works than I can write down here.

ATLAS Experiment

 

[The Large One]

I've just read through this thread.

Now my brain is full and my head hurts.

 

[Triggaaar]

Are you sure!?!

Reading this thread is giving me an insight into Dougal.

 

[Frutos]

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.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[Hillian1]

OK, I think I've got it.

1) Bang,
2) As a result of bang things fly around at the speed of light.
3) Things should continue to fly around at the speed of light but dont because of Higgs
4) Higgs is present as a result of bang.
5) Things attach themselves to Higgs.
6) Things attaching to Higgs create mass.
7) Mass creates stuff.
8) Universe is made from stuff.

Possibly.

Where do I collect the Nobel prize from?

 

[chimneys]

OK, I think I've got it.

1) Bang,
2) As a result of bang things fly around at the speed of light.
3) Things should continue to fly around at the speed of light but dont because of Higgs
4) Higgs is present as a result of bang.
5) Things attach themselves to Higgs.
6) Things attaching to Higgs create mass.
7) Mass creates stuff.
8) Universe is made from stuff.

Possibly.

Where do I collect the Nobel prize from?

So does this discovery puts the bible bashers' creationism to bed once and for all?

Thank God for Darwin!!

 

[Hillian1]

So does this discovery puts the bible bashers' creationism to bed once and for all?

Thank God for Darwin!!

No, God lit the blue touch paper for the bang.

 

[chimneys]

No, God lit the blue touch paper for the bang.

Dont recall reading that in Genesis? I do, though, recall reading that he created the world in 6 days and watched the Albion on the 7th (as we were on Sky)!

 

[Manx Shearwater]

All this is just God testing our reserve. Its a big prank, just like all those fossils.

He's like that, God.

 

[Dave the OAP]

and because they can measure where all the galaxies and stars are, they can see that they are all moving away from eachother...so proving the theory that the big bag happened and things are rushing away from where it did......I think

 

[Brixtaan]

I can't believe you morons haven't grasped this yet, it's not rocket science ffs!

 

[Silk]

I can't believe you morons haven't grasped this yet, it's not rocket science ffs!

No it's not it's particle physics. There are some particle physicists opposite the amex, we should ask them.

 

[Jimmy Come Lately]

Cheers 36064 F C. Your explanations have kind of made me understand it a bit better. Am I right then in thinking that matter at its smallest and most basic form is made up of various particles, some of which we know about and have identified and can predict how they interact and function and some particles are more elusive or difficult to detect such as the Higgs Boson?

More or less, although the Higgs isn't really one of the particles that matter is "made up of", just one that hops around between those particles governing the way they interact.

And the Higgs is important because it is a particle that can prove certain theories

The important framework that it slots into is what's called the Standard Model. The Standard Model is what particle physicists have been filling up for almost as long as there's been such a thing as particle physics. They smash particles together, see what other particles fly out of the collisions, measure the properties of those particles and fit them into a grid a bit like chemistry's periodic table. The standard Standard Model couldn't explan mass, though, but Higgs (and some other theorists at about the same time) came up with a way to extend it so that it could: a field (the Standard Model has other fields) created by a boson (the Standard Model always has bosons underpinning fields) that gave some of the other particles mass. It was a nice and Standard Modelly explanation.

So in one sense the discovery of the Higgs boson is just a boring last bit of box-ticking for the Standard Model. But actually that theory has gained a number of rivals in recent years, partly because of the continued non-appearance of the Higgs boson in other experiments, but also because as a theory it's not very elegant: to some extent it's just a description of the properties of the particles that we've found, and it doesn't really explain why they're like that. Cataloguing stuff is a good first step, but scientists were much happier with the periodic table when they understood how the quantum properties of atoms and electron shells led to the different elements' classifications. So the Standard Model has been challenged by theories that try to dig deeper than it, or to extend it, or to replace it with something else altogether. Some of these competing theories predict no Higgs boson, or a Higgs boson with a different mass, and those now look like they're in serious trouble. The LHC appears to have discovered a particle that matches the predictions of the Standard Model Higgs. Yay Standard Model.

In case it sounds like a colossal amount of money to spend on something that 99% of physicists were pretty confident of anyway, I'd like to say that it is important to follow up on these last details. The physicists at the end of the 19th century thought they had everything figured out apart from a couple of loose ends, one of which led to quantum theory. Understanding quantum theory gave us transistors and lasers and ultimately smartphones and broadband. The missing Higgs boson could have been a similar loose end that opened up whole new fields of discovery in physics. As it is it looks like being a neatly tied-off end, but it's still early days. Just don't expect the discovery to lead to new features for your phone for another 50-100 years.

and also is believed to be the particle that explains why collections of particles have actual mass and everything isn't just floating about in space in a big particle soup.

Exactly that.

Disclaimer: I only did physics to undergrad level and was only taught the things that had actually been discovered, which back then wasn't the Higgs boson. I imagine new editions of most of the textbooks are being written right now. So most of this I picked up from news media popular science sources, and it may not be totally accurate.

 

[Superseagull]

A friend of mine worked on Cern a few years back during the construction stage. I can remember discussing the rights and wrongs of spending so much money employing so many really clever people on the project. I can remember being a bit shocked when he said it was a good way of keeping all the top scientists focused on doing something for mankind rather than inventing new ways of destroying mankind. That seemed to be the general view of all the normal people who worked there!

 

[Tony Towner's Fridge]

First pictures of the Higgs Boson particle split into two.

Quite inspiring really, it was amongst us all the time.


TNBA

TTF

 

[Tricky Dicky]

More or less, although the Higgs isn't really one of the particles that matter is "made up of", just one that hops around between those particles governing the way they interact.



The important framework that it slots into is what's called the Standard Model. The Standard Model is what particle physicists have been filling up for almost as long as there's been such a thing as particle physics. They smash particles together, see what other particles fly out of the collisions, measure the properties of those particles and fit them into a grid a bit like chemistry's periodic table. The standard Standard Model couldn't explan mass, though, but Higgs (and some other theorists at about the same time) came up with a way to extend it so that it could: a field (the Standard Model has other fields) created by a boson (the Standard Model always has bosons underpinning fields) that gave some of the other particles mass. It was a nice and Standard Modelly explanation.

So in one sense the discovery of the Higgs boson is just a boring last bit of box-ticking for the Standard Model. But actually that theory has gained a number of rivals in recent years, partly because of the continued non-appearance of the Higgs boson in other experiments, but also because as a theory it's not very elegant: to some extent it's just a description of the properties of the particles that we've found, and it doesn't really explain why they're like that. Cataloguing stuff is a good first step, but scientists were much happier with the periodic table when they understood how the quantum properties of atoms and electron shells led to the different elements' classifications. So the Standard Model has been challenged by theories that try to dig deeper than it, or to extend it, or to replace it with something else altogether. Some of these competing theories predict no Higgs boson, or a Higgs boson with a different mass, and those now look like they're in serious trouble. The LHC appears to have discovered a particle that matches the predictions of the Standard Model Higgs. Yay Standard Model.

In case it sounds like a colossal amount of money to spend on something that 99% of physicists were pretty confident of anyway, I'd like to say that it is important to follow up on these last details. The physicists at the end of the 19th century thought they had everything figured out apart from a couple of loose ends, one of which led to quantum theory. Understanding quantum theory gave us transistors and lasers and ultimately smartphones and broadband. The missing Higgs boson could have been a similar loose end that opened up whole new fields of discovery in physics. As it is it looks like being a neatly tied-off end, but it's still early days. Just don't expect the discovery to lead to new features for your phone for another 50-100 years.



Exactly that.

Disclaimer: I only did physics to undergrad level and was only taught the things that had actually been discovered, which back then wasn't the Higgs boson. I imagine new editions of most of the textbooks are being written right now. So most of this I picked up from news media popular science sources, and it may not be totally accurate.

You are Stephen Hawking, and I claim my ten pounds.

 

[Discodoktor]

So how is it going to change my world.

Will I be able to teleport?
Will I be able to buy a hover board in the near future?
Can I have a robot sex slave?
Do I still have to work?
Can BHA create a Messi replica?
Can I live forever ?

 

[Seagull58]

No, God lit the blue touch paper for the bang.

4,000 years ago!