Searching for the wily Higgs Boson

What with the new multi-multi-billion euro CERN hagiocopter... or haplodiploidoscope... or heffalumpian accelerator, or whatever it is, I expect the earth will be swarming with Higgs bosons in a couple of eyeblinks, if not sooner. They shall be subjected to coy celebrity interviews and disclose their favorite cookie recipes. We shall not be able to sleep for the piles of them in our bedclothes. rly

discuss

no

you don't say

why, God, is there not currently a busty, buxom broad in the public eye who bears the surname Higgs

http://www.particlezoo.net/individual_pages/info/higgs_boson.jpg

well, now we've kicked off the discussion right and proper like

It is my observation that all lasses named Higgs who reach the age of buxom-blossoming soon change their names to Kandy or Bubbles or such and the Higgs handle falls off like an ill-pasted pastie.

xpost to neddie

That's a Freudian slip! I thought we established years ago that I wasn't a Ned clone ;-)

Anyway...

(If the Higgs Boson is anywhere, it is probably in there somewhere)

CERN presentation streaming live here: http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs_alternative.html

I hope this physicist throws down the mic at the end of this.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/07/live-blog-higgs-results-from-c.html for the background.

"we have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 ± 0.6 GeV at 4.9 sigma significance."

understatement there guys

wow

so does that mean the last measurement was like 125 at 4-sigma and so they downgraded it to 115-135?

i'm shaky on statistics

I hope this physicist throws down the mic at the end of this.

― Elvis Telecom, Wednesday, July 4, 2012 2:15 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is hilarious. A+

also i kind of need somebody to explain the significance of this to me like i am two years old.

The popular press call it the god particle because it allows religious people (but others too) to have mass.

My understanding is that the Higgs boson is how something gets made from nothing, i.e. the big bang and existence as we know it.

It's pretty cool how they knocked this out like a year or so after fixing the large hard-on

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6n7ranRnX1qzxozao1_500.jpg

we finally found the bigg-bosom particle after it was felt up in the large hard-on collider xp

I always like these "here's what's really going on" pieces by Bad Astronomy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/04/higgs/

Here's a very good breakdown too: http://www.universetoday.com/96122/whats-a-higgs-boson-anyway/

so does that mean the last measurement was like 125 at 4-sigma and so they downgraded it to 115-135?

yes?

my last hurrah in physics was working at the lbl cyclotron, after that undergrad experience i dropped my double major and switched to chemistry

this kind of news always makes me a little sad because it reminds me of where i stepped off the bus

start reading wikipedia articles on su(2) groups and my head starts spinning in about five seconds

My understanding is that the Higgs boson is how something gets made from nothing

So i guess now we go on to what makes the Higgs boson particle?

nah, the higgs field makes it

Eagerly awaiting the first Higgs-Boson-including cosmetic product (like the quantum ion activated wrinkle remover thing I saw being advertised once)

anybody want to buy a vacuum energy generator? i got one that runs on higgs bosons.

So is the higgs field supposed to pre-date the big bang or is it before mechanical physics develop or something?

http://donzauker.it/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Higgins1.jpg

my understanding is there was no higgs field until the big bang had spread out a bit, at the beginning of the big bang nothing really has any mass, its all like photons

my last hurrah in physics was working at the lbl cyclotron, after that undergrad experience i dropped my double major and switched to chemistry

this kind of news always makes me a little sad because it reminds me of where i stepped off the bus

The high point of my physics career (if I can call it one) was to number-crunch some data from the Super-K neutrino detector in Japan. One of my physics professors back then would go on to win the Nobel Prize for discovering neutrinos.

This could have been the Elvis Boson!

hm! i was in this guy's lab.

appropriately my learning stopped right about at weak force

This could have been the Late Great Boson. If only you hadn't quit :-(

"theory of fuzzy forces" might be more appropriate

Ironically, the man himself got all teary eyed at today's announcement, unexpectedly suffering from higgs-boson allergy.

http://i.imgur.com/IMzer.jpg

http://www.paperbackfantasies.jjelmquist.com/images/whelan/PiperFuzzySapiensB.JPG

^ fuzzy forces

hm! i was in this guy's lab.

I had this guy for a couple of classes and then worked in this guy's lab for awhile. It was that work (programming the NeXT and developing 1988-era Internet skills) that ironically gave me an out from being a mediocre-level physicist.

Damn... I didn't know Dr. Mayer had passed away last Dec. His story is pretty awesome.

wdyll july 2012

“If the boson really is not acting standard, then that will imply that there is more to the story — more particles, maybe more forces around the corner,” Neal Weiner, a theorist at New York University, wrote in an e-mail. “What that would be is anyone’s guess at the moment.”

can't wait for al-qaeda to get hands on some antimatter

being on mr fusion

(via nyt)

Cosmic Sans

Rather, we were blown away by the fact that a team made up of some of the most undoubtedly brilliant people in the world believe that Comic Sans is an appropriate font for such a historic occasion. While criticizing the much-maligned typeface is almost as much of a cliché as using it by now, and there could even have been worse choices, Comic Sans designer Vincent Connare seems to agree that his infamous creation isn't quite the best match for particle physics announcements.

I highly recommend for armchair quantum physicists the book "'A Universe From Nothing,' by Lawrence M. Krauss. Pretty easy to follow, relatively (ha) speaking.

Great guy, pretty funny & entertaining during talks too (some are on youtube)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/all-signs-point-to-higgs-boson-but-still-waiting-for-scientific-certainty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

oh hey

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/nervous/afraid.gifhttp://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/nervous/afraid.gifhttp://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/nervous/afraid.gif

Congrats! Will there be a Mass to celebrate this god particle thing?

.... so I already made that joke, yeah.

http://i.imgur.com/9eL2RVQ.jpg

is higgs boson not just the biggest 'let x = the rest' in history? nb i have not been keppign up with my reading ;_;