http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/b...boson-discovered-live-coverage-cern?fb=native
Pretty exciting stuff.
Pretty exciting stuff.
lmao i get it all now!!!
Pretty much. The existence of the Higgs Boson fills a major gap in the current theory of quantum mechanics, the Standard Model. As of now they are seeing a Sigma 5 level (I've heard 4.9 as well), which means that there is a 1 in 3.5 million chance that what they are seeing isn't the the Higgs Boson.I'm really out of my depth here and I've only got a very elementary understanding of it all, but it seems that the Higgs Boson is a type of "missing particle" of sorts that, if it were actually real, would more or less be the key to explaining a lot of occurrences and scientific laws of the universe. The problem is that they've never found anything resembling the Higgs Boson until recently.
god yes it was on 10.09.08 (September 10th) and someone told me that and i was like "are you fucking kidding me you son of a bitch"Anyone remember when the LHC was supposed to open up a black hole and destroy the world?
So he was basically explaining a bit about how the tools being used were becoming more refined and more accurate than ever before, and that the results regarding the Higgs Boson had "trapped" it within an even tinier range of possible sizes. Hence the 5 standard deviations thing.Our task is to identify each tiny piece from the debris and reconstruct the initial object from the pieces that flew away in all directions.
The hope is to find new particles never seen before, like the Higgs boson that could explain how particles acquire their mass, or dark matter particles, the unidentified matter that makes up most of the universe.
The data come from millions of different parts of the detector, carrying information on where the debris flew or lost energy. That’s a huge amount of information and it takes the Grid, a network of thousands of computers, to be able to tackle this task.
Other people scrutinize these data every day, making sure they are of good quality with all information available.
In parallel, we simulate billions of events called Monte Carlo events that look just like the events recorded in the detector but that are based on current knowledge or hypothesized ideas (like the Higgs bosons or dark matter particles). By comparing the Monte Carlo with the real data, we can see if all is already known or if new particles are present.
Before using the simulated data, we must check they reproduce every single aspect of the data we collect. We must check every type of information we use for the physics analysis. If the simulation differs from the real data, we correct it until all is reliable.
Not only was it informative, but it was entertaining. Awesome.
Thanks, this is by far the best explanation of the Higgs I have ever seen. I watch a lo of science channel to, but hey love to use the crappy analogy of "a celebrity walking down a hallway distracting attention from the Higgs." Easily one of the best real world explanation without getting o technical.
loli don't know shit about chem though
NOOh God... It's happening...
You're confusing the meaning of "discovery" here. This essentially is a "discovery"; the rest consists of people looking at the experiment and repeating it for confirmation. But in a sense, you're right; in the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge deal. The media (I found out about this through a news anchor calling it *shivers* the "God Particle") and the silly anti-science people hyped it up so that it seemed like a bigger deal than it was. It would have been a bigger deal if there were no Higgs. That would have meant different physics, questioning the Standard Model (though it's already under scrutiny for being rather ugly in some respects), and all that fun stuff. Not saying that finding the Higgs is bad, though, just that, yes, it's more of a theory confirmation than anything else.So their whole wait for the reveal was that they found higgs-like particles? I thought they did that before. Call me when they're actually announcing a discovery instead of hype at what could be particles of it.
They have basically certainly (approx 1 in 3 million chance it's nothing special) discovered a particle, and it's a Boson, and according to the scientists, they're pretty damn sure it's a Higgs Boson since it's in the right range and has a few of the right properties. However, there are theoretically possibly several kinds of Higgs Bosons and whether it's THE Higgs Boson, that is, the one with all the properties predicted by the conventional Standard Model, still needs confirmation, but it looks very likely.So their whole wait for the reveal was that they found higgs-like particles? I thought they did that before. Call me when they're actually announcing a discovery instead of hype at what could be particles of it.
What other properties besides 125 gev? I thought it only had the right mass?They have basically certainly (approx 1 in 3 million chance it's nothing special) discovered a particle, and it's a Boson, and according to the scientists, they're pretty damn sure it's a Higgs Boson since it's in the right range and has a few of the right properties.
love this, incredibly useful in explaining what's going on, and informative, and inspiring. when i saw the higgs boson telling the other particle that it was fat i paused the video and went rooting around the web to find the rest of this guy's stuff because i was so besotted. I'm almost certain I've seen this animation style somewhere, can't think where though.
http://www.phdcomics.com/i paused the video and went rooting around the web to find the rest of this guy's stuff because i was so besotted. I'm almost certain I've seen this animation style somewhere, can't think where though.