
Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson - mef
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/03/14/world/europe/ap-eu-switzerland-god-particle.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0
======
randomdrake
With big science news like this, it's always best to go to the source[0] to
avoid sensationalism. Of note, is the following statement which isn't getting
repeated much in the mainstream news sources:

" _It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of
the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several
bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model. Finding
the answer to this question will take time._ "

I find this to be a pretty important distinguishing factor. Not only will it
take a while before they really do know, but it may not, in fact, be the Higgs
so many have been searching for to fit into the Standard Model.

Many news sources are already claiming that the "god particle" has been found.

[0] - [http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2013/03/new-
results-...](http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2013/03/new-results-
indicate-particle-discovered-cern-higgs-boson)

~~~
harshreality
Science is pretty boring to most people, who aren't interested in science per
se but only want news bites for use in casual conversation. Media distorts
scientific claims in order to appeal to a wider audience and make more money.

 _God Particle Found! News at eleventy eleven!eleventy!_

~~~
senko
I'm wondering whether some (or rather, how many) people will now conclude that
there's a proof God exists, since scientists have found "God particle".

~~~
ryanmolden
I predict roughly everyone who already believes in god and follows this kind
of news (only half-jokingly).

In my experience most people don't form their opinions based on the totality
of current knowledge and keep adjusting them in some Bayesian fashion as more
info becomes known. Rather they make up their minds based on something (could
be their knowledge of currently accepted facts, could be what they were taught
growing up, could be just what they think makes sense, etc..) and then simply
scan for confirmatory data, or simply don't pay any attention because they
already have it 'figured out'.

Thus if you already believe in god and heard that scientists had discovered
the 'god particle' you would likely say 'see, I knew it!', if you didn't
believe in god and saw the same thing you would say 'I am skeptical, let me
read this article', and you would walk away saying 'that is just a name, it
has nothing to do with god, who still doesn't exist'. So really I guess both
sides win, and we all lose, or maybe I am just too cynical.

------
Jabbles
The physics involved is fascinating, although a true appreciation of what a
Higgs Boson is would take years (i.e. most of a PhD).

The organisation of such a vast data-processing task has surely brought about
many discoveries in "big-data" and parallel computing that are not directly
related to the discoveries in physics. Much like the research into the magnets
that power the accelerator has led to new MRI machines. To people who don't
see the point in "science for science's sake", this is a massive spin-off of
CERN that will hopefully greatly benefit the world.

<http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing>

~~~
Retric
Part of me is rather skeptical that the giant mound of assumptions about
hardware, software, and physics backing this discovery is correct. However, I
have a lot more faith in them then I do in most human endeavors and I
fundamentally don't understand what's going on. Which I find to be an odd
feeling.

~~~
raverbashing
Their assumptions are validated by everything else working and showing up as
expected

Still, I have a similar feeling, that there may be some hidden 'tuning' to
make things match, or some assumptions or values that have been erroneously
determined or set.

~~~
btilly
Many of the parameters are actually not specified by the theory, and have to
be fitted by experiment. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization>
for one of the reasons why.

~~~
shardling
I don't think that renormalization has much to do with this! :P

It's enough to say that the standard model has to have some input from the
real world -- mostly the masses of the particles and their mixing angles.
Renormalization just makes it harder to talk about what a particle's mass
"really" is; it doesn't really increase the number of parameters in the
theory.

~~~
claudius
Renormalisation, however, does suggest that coupling constants[0] change with
the energy level involved, which then leads to the nice idea that, given an
appropriate theory, one could make all these runnings match at a certain
energy and then get a grand unified theory (of the strong and electroweak
force) which breaks down at lower energies and leads to our three different
coupling constants of the gauge groups[1].

[0] Effectively the basic rate of things happening per particle/energy/volume
of spacetime etc., originally assumed to be constant. [1] Effectively things
happening faster for certain types of interactions (electromagnetic vs. weak
vs. strong).

------
oneandoneis2
Just in time for the new Pope, they confirm the existence of the particle that
gives Mass!

Someone up there having a joke, obviously.

~~~
laumars
I'm glad you want that way with the joke rather than a take on the popularised
media term, "god particle".

------
EA
Radio waves were described by their co-discoverer in 1888 as "an interesting
laboratory experiment" with "no useful purpose" whatsoever. - Wikipedia entry
for Higgs boson

~~~
InclinedPlane
The first laser was originally described as a "solution looking for a
problem", in 1960.

------
huhtenberg
A physicist friend of mine said, half jokingly, that with that much money
poured into the project they had no other option but to find that damn boson.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Sort of related question, which may sound a bit rubbish since I don't really
know the physics or their scientific method at that scale, but were they doing
enough experiments that they'd have eventually said it couldn't exist if they
never found it for some amount of time? Or was it always something that could
only be proven, not disproven?

~~~
ISL
The scientific method applies at all scales.

While it not possible to disprove the existence, of, say, unicorns. It is
possible to say "I've searched the length and breadth of Central Park, looking
for unicorns with 99.9% detection probability for each square meter of the
park. I found no unicorns."

Whether you find this sufficient to reasonably exclude any unicorn hypotheses
is up to you and will depend upon whatever unicorn hypothesis you wish to
test. If the hypothesis is that the world should be uniformly populated with
unicorns once every hundred meters, then the above observation should place
strong constraints on the viability of the hypothesis, as about 340 unicorns
should have been observed.

In the case of the Higgs, had the signal not popped up, they would have been
able to exclude any Higgs-like particle over a huge range, which includes the
now-claimed value. At the present mass, with the data up till now, they would
have excluded a Standard Higgs to better than 5-sigma (less than a one in a
million chance that they missed it).

Want to see the one of the peaks as it forms? (you have to trust that the
scientists are doing the analysis right before they make this plot)

[https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/AtlasPublic/HiggsPublicResul...](https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/AtlasPublic/HiggsPublicResults//4l-FloatingScale-
NoMuProf2.gif)

~~~
duaneb
All scientists should take philosophy of science, IMHO, to avoid the
misunderstanding of te scientific method that comes from dogmatic belief in
it. I would guess most scientists don't know the difference between an
inductive and deductive proof, both of which are crucial for scientific
progress.

------
sid6376
There was a fascinating series of articles on New York times on the search for
the Higgs Boson.[1]

There was also an attempt to explain what is the Higgs Boson , by means of
some drawings and analogies in the second part of the series. Perhaps someone
knowledgeable could comment how accurate the explanation is.

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-
higgs-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-higgs-boson-
how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searched-for-physics-most-elusive-
particle.html?view=introduction)

------
ichinaski
Yet still all the newspapers worldwide have a Pope in their frontpage. What a
frustrating coincidence.

~~~
DougWebb
A new pope can start making a difference in the lives of a lot of people as
soon as tomorrow. Proving the existence of a Higgs boson won't matter to
nearly everyone for many years, if it ever matters. In the past new physics
has eventually lead to new engineering which lead to new products that change
peoples lives. In this case I'm not sure that will happen, given the energy
needed to reach the new physics. At most the engineering needed to reach those
energy levels might spin off new products, but they're not likely to be
drastically new, just an extension of existing products.

------
InclinedPlane
If anyone wants some solid background on understanding the Higgs, I highly
recommend this set of videos from minutephysics:

pt1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uh5mTxRQcg>

pt2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASRpIym_jFM>

pt3: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6guXMfg88Z8>

------
SoftwareMaven
How do you give the discovery of the Higgs a Nobel prize? _Particularly_ in
experimental particle physics, the ability to give a nobel prize (even after
discounting grad students :) seems impossible today. The number of people who
have to be part of any "discovery" is huge. It seems like the prize would then
become the prize for who had the most political (office and governmental) sway
on the team.

~~~
tomkinstinch
They can be given to groups, as in the case of the 2007 Peace Prize:

<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/>

~~~
cshimmin
A colleague of mine at CERN once told me that if they ever get a nobel prize,
it will be a peace prize. The number of nations and institutions brought
together for science is quite amazing!

------
lutusp
> It [the LHC] has been creating high-energy collisions to smash protons and
> then study the collisions and determine how subatomic particles acquire mass
> — _without which the particles would fail to stick together_.

Too bad -- a science writer wouldn't have made this elementary error.

------
JabavuAdams
Question about the menagerie of particles:

At what point do we stop giving names to particles? Are we there yet?

In other fields I see a pattern of trying to categorize things into relatively
short lists that a human can comprehend. E.g. phonemes for speech. It turns
out that phonemes don't work, but by using a much finer-grained classification
you get a system that does work.

So for particles, charm quark or top quark are not particularly descriptive.
The names are really no better than "excitation 112" and "excitation 236b".
Perhaps a bit more memorable, but not more descriptive of the physics.

------
anonymousDan
As it happens, about a fortnight ago I was talking to a recently retired but
still active professor at CERN (he is the father of a friend of mine). I asked
him where things stood with the Higgs Boson, and his reply was that they are
definitely seeing a pretty strong signal in the data they've gathered, but
they're not sure what it is yet exactly. In particular, it could match any one
of a number of different competing theories (Disclaimer: I am not a particle
physicist so I might have misremembered the precise terminology he used).

------
adonisn
From the article: 'The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the
physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as
the "God particle."' Calling it the "God particle" is an insult to science,
and "Higgs Boson" is definitely the more popular term. Here's the adword
keyword analysis for both: <http://imgur.com/dsNVbum> "Higgs Boson" as a
search term is 4.078 times more popular globally and 3.322 times in the US.

------
gammarator
The question in my mind is: is there anything beyond the Higgs? Particle
theorists hoped the LHC would find whole new families of particles supporting
any number of exotic theories. If the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else,
there will be a huge exodus from the field: given the cost of the experiment,
a bigger one will be a hard sell in this climate.

Could be a good time to pick up some physics PhDs for your data science team.

------
ra
I wonder. If this adds one more trust factor to the standard model, does that
mean it'll hold forever? Maybe? There must be some level on which we can
baseline our understanding of the universe. Maybe this is it? maybe [1]?

[1] [http://news.discovery.com/space/we-might-not-live-in-a-
holog...](http://news.discovery.com/space/we-might-not-live-in-a-hologram-
after-all-110701.htm)

~~~
Steuard
It seems clear that any more complete theory describing particle physics must
inevitably reduce to something equivalent to the standard model in the
appropriate limits. So in that sense, the standard model _will_ hold forever.

It's exactly the same as saying that Newton's law of gravity will hold
forever. It applies _very_ accurately under most circumstances; situations
that require us to deal with the complexities of general relativity are quite
rare. (GR only begins to differ from Newton's gravity when you have extremely
strong gravity or when you need extremely high precision.)

But if you want to really understand the inner workings of the universe,
Newtonian gravity won't cut it: you need GR. And it's pretty well established
that the standard model can't be the whole story, either: its mathematics
eventually break down when the energies get high enough. So there's got to be
something else up there... we just aren't sure what it is.

------
out_of_protocol
Physicists just saying "we found it!" and re-re-re-checking existing data for
hmmm... last year i suppose. And processing LHC (which already stopped) data
will take a lot more time. They found "evidence" (five standard deviations) -
but it's slightly more than detection threshold - and because of that they
still unsure.

------
jeffcasavant
The Nobel Committee will only give out the Prize to three or less people at
once (
[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/commit...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/committee/)
, heading "From Nomination to Ceremony ). So will one be given out at all?

------
RockofStrength
"The particle's existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their
size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle,
the Higgs boson. The more they attract, so the theory goes, the bigger their
mass will be."

So does this mean that an ether really does permeate space?

~~~
elwin
The Higgs field is something like the idea of an ether, pervading all space,
but it is not related to the propagation of light.

~~~
gus_massa
Not very similar. The problem with ether is that it fixed a preferred frame.
So some objects were truly still and some objects were truly moving.

The Higgs field also permeates all objects, but the mathematical structure is
different and it has no preferred frame, so there is no truly still object,
all the movements are relative.

This is not a strange thing. The photons are the bosons of the electromagnetic
field, that also permeates all objects and it has no preferred frame, so there
is no truly still object, all the movements are relative.

And the gluons are the bosons of the strong force field with exactly the same
properties.

Even the electrons have and associated field that that also permeates all
objects and it has no preferred frame, so there is no truly still object, all
the movements are relative. But electrons are fermions, no bosons, so some
properties are different, but they have an associated field.

The same happens with the up and down quarks (and neutrinos). Each one has a
associated field, with the same properties. (And the other particles too, but
this is becoming too repetitive.)

The strange thing is not that the Higgs Bosons have an associated field. The
strange thing is that the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs Fields is not
zero.

In all the other cases (photons, electrons, ...) the vacuum expectation value
is zero, so if you have an empty box, there are almost no particles there
(some virtual particles appear, but in some sense they are only a few, (in
another sense they are a lot, but it's better to think that they are only a
few).) The important thing is that if any particle pass through the box, it
will almost not bounce against any other particle (photons, electrons, ...)
because it is empty.

But for the Higgs fields the vacuum expectation value is not zero! So even
inside the empty box the value of the Higgs field is not zero, there is
something like a background value. If any particle passes through the box, it
will bounce many many many times against the background even if the box is
empty. An easy way to interpret all this bouncing is to say that the particle
has apparent mass.

But the Higgs field is not even, it has bumps, and those bumps are the Higgs
Bosons. The empty box has only very few Higgs Bosons (or a lot in another
technical sense). The normal particles can bounce against the background
(vacuum expectation value) and we call it "mass" and they can also bounce
against the bumps (bosons) and we call it "interactions".

------
Create
just for the record, in order to warn any non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices
in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value
of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264>

<http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en>

------
nicklaforge
don't ever read beyond mass media headlines for HEP; just go here instead:
<http://profmattstrassler.com>

------
fabriceleal
Another science news that will be disconfirmed in 1-2 days?

~~~
Udo
No, this one is actual science, this time it's not from some dubious guy with
a philosophical agenda.

"Finding" the Higgs is a prolonged statistical process involving tons of data
that need to be crunched and the experiment itself also needs to run for a
long time in order to yield this data. Physicists have been talking about a
strong signal indicating the existence of the Higgs for quite a while now, so
its existence has not really in question for some time. The problem with
continuous and statistical analyses then becomes: when do you _actually
announce_ you found the damn thing? That's why it has been announced several
times (and probably will be a few times more).

But it's real.

It would have been surprising, but way more exciting, if the Higgs didn't
exist.

~~~
yakiv
I was hoping that the neutrinos were actually going faster than light.
Confirming established theories is boring, but breaking them is exciting.

------
stackcollision
This article reads like it was written by a third grader.

------
JimmaDaRustla
Higgs Boson - Hide & Seek World Champion

------
aaaron
... on Einstein's bday, slash Pi day.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein>

------
antsam
El Psy Congroo.

------
ichirotherager
Somewhere there is another parallel universe where scientists are excited they
have found normal matter after digging through all their higgs bosons.

