© UnknownGod particle
Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God Particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist.
But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.
Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson - all but proving it exists - but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.
It appears to be a fine distinction.
Senior CERN scientists say that the two independent teams of physicists who plan to present their work at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border on July 4 are about as close as you can get to a discovery without actually calling it one.
"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s, told The Associated Press. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."
CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
For particle physicists, finding the Higgs boson is a key to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed. Each of the two teams known as ATLAS and CMS involve thousands of people working independently from one another, to ensure accuracy.
Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, said: "Particle physicists have a very high standard for what it takes to be a discovery," and he thinks it is a hair's breadth away.
Rosen compared the results that scientists are preparing to announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: "You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don't actually see it."
Though an impenetrable concept to many, the Higgs boson has until now been just that - a concept intended to explain a riddle: How were the subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, themselves formed? What gives them their mass?
The answer came in a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. It envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.
The idea is that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. Some liken the effect to a ubiquitous Higgs snowfield that affects other particles traveling through it depending on whether they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, skis, snowshoes or just shoes.
Officially, CERN is presenting its evidence at a physics conference in Australia this week, but plans to accompany the announcement with meetings in Geneva. The two teams, ATLAS and CMS, then plan to publicly unveil more data on the Higgs boson at physics meetings in October and December.
Scientists with access to the new CERN data say it shows with a high degree of certainty that the Higgs boson may already have been glimpsed, and that by unofficially combining the separate results from ATLAS and CMS it can be argued that a discovery is near at hand. Ellis says at least one physicist-blogger has done just that in a credible way.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said Monday, however, that he would be "very cautious" about unofficial combinations of ATLAS and CMS data. "Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday," he told AP.
But if the calculations are indeed correct, said John Guinon, a longtime physics professor at the University of California at Davis and author of the book "The Higgs Hunter's Guide," then it is fair to say that "in some sense we have reached the mountaintop."
Sean M. Carroll, a California Institute of Technology physicist flying to Geneva for the July 4th announcement, said that if both ATLAS and CMS have independently reached these high thresholds on the Higgs boson, then "only the most curmudgeonly will not believe that they have found it."
Reader Comments
"Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God Particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist."
Almost certainly? Is that anything like a definite maybe?
I mean spending all this money to find out if a particle exists, what will this mean or what can it be used for...then what?
“But the Standard Model [of particle physics], currently in use, is a theory for massless particles. Incorporating mass throws the Standard Model into chaos, producing infinities which have to be fudged away, and an unobserved entity, the unlikely Higgs Boson, has been invented to “endow” particles with mass in some unspecified manner.”
In essence, all this means is that the Standard Model of particle physics as it is presently configured can only work if you put in a fudge factor to make it work. As Hotson explains in his papers, physics went terribly wrong back in 1934, when they ignored and discarded two solutions to Dirac's Relativistic Schrodinger wave equation for the hydrogen atom. Ever since, instead of physics becoming simpler with less entities and less complexity, the opposite has occurred. A treatment with Occam's Razor says its wrong, since fudging is definitely not making anything any simpler.
D.L. Hoston's 2 Other Papers:
Part 1 - [Link]Part 2 - [Link]
I just downloaded, printed and twice read thru Hotson's above linked paper.
Not being a theoretical physicist the first several pages were beyond me but when he got into the philosophy of fudge factors, his making fun of "sacred cows" made a lot of sense.
Now you might say, "How can you know if he made sense or not if you do not understand the first parts of the paper ? ?" and that's a reasonable question to which I can only reply, "Read the paper, I think you'll enjoy it, see what I'm getting at -- and -- maybe come away with some better understandings."
I just downloaded Parts 1 & 2, here's the text from a sidebar on pg. 1 of pt.1:
The Hotson "family business" is English literature. Mr. Hotson's father and uncle had Harvard Ph.D.s in the subject, and his late uncle was a famous Shakespeare scholar.
Mr. Hotson, however, always intended a career in physics. Unfortunately, he could not resist asking awkward questions. His professors taught that conservation of mass-energy is the never-violated, rock-solid foundation of all physics. In "pair production" a photon of at least 1.022 MeV "creates"
an electron-positron pair, each with 0.511 MeV of rest energy, with any excess being the momentum of the "created" pair. So supposedly the conservation books balance. But the "created" electron and positron both have spin (angular momentum) energy of h/4p.
By any assumption as to the size of electron or positron, this is far more energy than that supplied by the photon at "creation."
"Isn't angular momentum energy?" he asked a professor.
"Of course it is. This half-integer spin angular momentum is the energy needed by the electron to set up a stable standing wave around the proton.
Thus it is responsible for the Pauli exclusion principle, hence for the extension and stability of all matter. You could say it is the sole cause of the periodic table of elements."
"Then where does all this energy come from? How can the 'created'
electron have something like sixteen times more energy than the photon that supposedly 'created' it? Isn't this a huge violation of your never-violated rock-solid foundation of all physics?"
"We regard spin angular momentum as an 'inherent property' of electron and positron, not as a violation of conservation."
"But if it's real energy, where does it come from? Does the Energy Fairy step in and proclaim a miracle every time 'creation' is invoked, billions of times a second? How does this fit your never-violated conservation?"
"Inherent property' means we don't talk about it, and you won't either if you want to pass this course."
Well, this answer sounded to him like the Stephen Leacock aphorism:
"'Shut up,' he explained."
Later Mr. Hotson was taken aside and told that his "attitude" was disrupting the class, and that further, with his "attitude," there was no chance in hell of his completing a graduate program in physics, so "save your money."
He ended up at the Sorbonne studying French literature, and later became a professional land surveyor. However, he has retained a lifelong interest in the "awkward questions" of physics, and with Dirac's Equation has found some answers.
e-Maill: donhotson@yahoo.com
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From kust this I expect you might be able to see that this work is a lot of fun to read. How correct it might be I cannot begin to debate . . .
. . . other such are taken up by Nassim Haramein, who has provided the very interesting and entertaining YouTube seen at this [Link]
That said, I have no real basis upon which to base any conclusions about this talk, I just found it interesting and might well watch it a couple more times to let things get better seated in my mind, then see what shakes out.
The concept of a "God particle" doesn't ring true with me as it seems a notion rather embedded in physicality while, for instance, the Cs speak of themselves as being, " . . in no way physical," and a "particle" as I reckon one is a "physical" item, whatever that might actually mean. So the whole notion God particles throws up huge question marks.
Perhaps Ark might care to weigh in briefly . . .
I know what Duncan O'Finioan thinks about the CERN project, and it is unprintable here.
It would be more appropriate to call it the "godless particle."
I am sure that everyone who hopes that our entire concept of God can be reduced to a particle will be very happy to celebrate this "breakthrough."
I, for one, plan to celebrate the US Declaration of Independence on that date.
There are no "gods". It isn't really a god particle either, just some silly name.