Higgs

[FLOZi]

Most significant day of our lifetimes?

Discuss.

[Kloot]

Not really. The history of particle physics is littered with instances of "there should be particle X, wait a few years for a more powerful accelerator, find X", this one just took longer due to the law of diminishing returns when going to higher and higher energy levels. So on the one hand the standard model again doesn't need to be thrown away, but on the other it still contains that big gaping hole labelled G (and doesn't explain dark energy or dark matter) which means its days are numbered anyway, Higgs or no Higgs.

it is always satisfying to see fundamental (maybe) science march ever forward though

also, sigma=4.9 lies below CERN's threshold for what they call a "discovery", technically this remains an "observation"

[PicassoCT]

I was so shure the movies killed him... and now the found him..

[luckywaldo7]

It think its really badass though that physicists make these models that predict certain behaviors that don't get verified by experiments until much later.

[PicassoCT]

yep, sort of like someone standing on a stone, saying, here a meteorite will impact in 50 years, and the people laugh in 50 years later booom. Sience bitches- it works! Wish everyone condemning it, would have the decency to also not use its products.

[KaiserJ]

[Forboding Angel]

*groans*

[PicassoCT]

the gag, so old, it rises again,ass by ancients foretold

[hoijui]

its more like...
crazy geek, having lived in a cellar since birth predicts some thing to exist, which is so small that no human and no microscope can see it, and 2 generations later, his children, also having born in a celar and ever after lived there with their alikes, invent a machine that noone else can understand, and run it, and after some time they claim, that their grand daddy was right, and the machine showed he was right.
this trick is used by every sekt since .. ever, just that they don't get billions of cash to get it alive.
i mean.... this machine is so crazy, that even the americans though it is too crazy, so they did not build it ...
no more to say!

excpet maybe...
did you know that LSD was invented in the same country where they built this machine?

[PicassoCT]

what so exotic about a microscopic battering ram?

[FLOZi]

its more like...
crazy geek, having lived in a cellar since birth predicts some thing to exist, which is so small that no human and no microscope can see it, and 2 generations later, his children, also having born in a celar and ever after lived there with their alikes, invent a machine that noone else can understand, and run it, and after some time they claim, that their grand daddy was right, and the machine showed he was right.
this trick is used by every sekt since .. ever, just that they don't get billions of cash to get it alive.
i mean.... this machine is so crazy, that even the americans though it is too crazy, so they did not build it ...
no more to say!

excpet maybe...
did you know that LSD was invented in the same country where they built this machine?

[AF]

The Americans already have big expensive machines they've been trying to use, and particle accelerators helped us discover the technologies you're using to write this. Please do your research, and lookup the scientific method, in particular reproducibility

[FireStorm_]

I like hoijui's scepticism.

Today I thought:
Sub particles put together form a particle with mass. Most of the identified sub particles do not seem the have (enough) mass. The idea is that an unidentified sub particle must be responsible for the mass of the particle by having mass itself. This seems silly to me.

It's like scientists dissemble a bike with dynamo and bulb in very small pieces, and expect to find a piece that emits light.

But we know only when the bike parts are assembled and move together in a certain specific way it will emit light.

So for all I know maybe the sub particles only exhibit the property of mass when they are assembled and move together in a certain specific way.


Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist earning my lively hood by building a huge expensive thingamagig, so I might be wrong.

[gajop]

I might be wrong.

You probably are. Whenever a complete layman tries to speak about whether something's true/false, it's probably not worth listening to.

Thankfully the time to explain nature through random conjectures like in pre-modern philosophy has long since passed and we've moved to experimental science. The only theory that can be accepted is explained with a bunch of formulas that try to link the experimental results together.

[FireStorm_]

I might be wrong.

You probably are. Whenever a complete layman tries to speak about whether something's true/false, it's probably not worth listening to.

Thankfully the time to explain nature through random conjectures like in pre-modern philosophy has long since passed and we've moved to experimental science. The only theory that can be accepted is explained with a bunch of formulas that try to link the experimental results together.

What makes you think I'm a complete layman?

Also I didn't say anything was true or false. I only proposed the problem might be approached in the wrong way, that the solution might lay elsewhere, witch to me is always an important possibility to consider when using scientific method.

I do not consider an analogy and an example to this an explanation.

And I though philosophy could be the basis for forming a theory witch then could be proven true or false. The idea that philosophy no longer has a place in science sounds very strange to me.

But maybe I'm wrong

[gajop]

What makes you think I'm a complete layman?

The disclaimer. It sounded to me like you weren't a physicist, like maybe you read a couple of better physics books like the Feynman's ones, or something similar.

Also I didn't say anything was true or false. I only proposed the problem might be approached in the wrong way, that the solution might lay elsewhere, witch to me is always an important possibility to consider when using scientific method.

I do not consider an analogy and an example to this an explanation.

And I though philosophy could be the basis for forming a theory witch then could be proven true or false. The idea that philosophy no longer has a place in science sounds very strange to me.

But maybe I'm wrong

I think physics stopped being common sense the moment we discovered quantum physics - that is more like math based on experiments than anything that could be backed up by human intuition.

PS: Here's my favorite physicist explaining what I meant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E383eEA5 ... age#t=228s

[FireStorm_]

I don't understand.

For me a lot of explanations of phenomena in nature or even the phenomena themselves are counter intuitive. Doing experiments and conducting objective observation (or reading about them) taught me things often times do not work as you expect or theorise. Like heavier objects not falling faster or light not going straight through a diffraction grating.

So terms like "common sense" and "human intuition" confuse me. To me they never had a place in science. That is what science means to me.

Also note that Feynman talks about "The earliest days of science." I image some guys in togas philosophising without thinking observations are necessary. I doubt he refers to the entire pre quantum physics era.

I think scepticism has a place in science and I call thinking of alternative explanations for what one has observed a form of philosophy, witch thus also has a place in science.

Meanwhile I wonder what you meant, and suspect me not understanding is due to semantics.

Lastly: I'm still sceptical about if what has been observed in reality matches the Higgs-boson prediction.

[Das Bruce]

This seems silly to me.

As a partial physic major, let me assure you this feeling is completely natural.

[SwiftSpear]

I like hoijui's scepticism.

Today I thought:
Sub particles put together form a particle with mass. Most of the identified sub particles do not seem the have (enough) mass. The idea is that an unidentified sub particle must be responsible for the mass of the particle by having mass itself. This seems silly to me.

It's like scientists dissemble a bike with dynamo and bulb in very small pieces, and expect to find a piece that emits light.

But we know only when the bike parts are assembled and move together in a certain specific way it will emit light.

So for all I know maybe the sub particles only exhibit the property of mass when they are assembled and move together in a certain specific way.


Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist earning my lively hood by building a huge expensive thingamagig, so I might be wrong.

Isn't that basically what the "proved" wrong? The HB particle is supposed to be that part that gives particles mass as I understand it, so they "found" that part.

@ hoijui: I'm a bit surprised there is one of your type on these forums, it's pretty rare amounts serious computer geeks, and that describes this place pretty well.

I wouldn't phrase it the same way you did, and I can't say I'd agree with any conclusion in that direction, but ya, it's pretty clear at this point that scientific discoveries to this degree are no longer within the realm of observability by the common man. Even things like how computers work, I've studied it in depth, if we were reset to the stone age, assuming the science I've studied is valid, I could probably reproduce some basic computational device, but a lot of the physics that forms the basis of my knowledge I just have to assume is correct. I can fundamentally never really observe the path of electrons through a silicon block, even if I understand exactly how they are supposed to be working.

In this day and age, what we understand about the world is one giant expensive experiment stacked on the shoulders of hundreds of others. In effect, we put faith in it mostly because there's an air of authority and all of the explanations make sense and build on the stance of the one before it. In the end of the day however, I wouldn't be surprised to head off into the afterlife and God tells me "oh ya, they've been lying to you ever since they buried Tesla". I'm not going to live my life in constant distrust of the scientific system just for the hell of it however. I think human selfishness and basic corruption is more than sufficient to explain the screwed up nature of the world, so I distrust people monkeying with systems, not systems themselves, and the scientific system would be very difficult to monkey with, because it's fundamentally impartial, and it's very easy for someone to unravel all your screwing around with it by just producing contradictory results. It's easy to accidentally 'prove' something that's actually true as false in science, but it's VERY difficult to 'prove' something false as true. That's why I personally will take the ideology that science, in general, is trustworthy.

[Forboding Angel]

Apple owns the patent. Lolgg.