

Tevatron confirms a 115-135 GeV Higgs - dochtman
http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/03/tevatron-confirms-115-135-gev-higgs.html

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Zarathust
phd-comics.com got it right years ago. This is how news are relayed from the
science community <http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif>

I've been trying to ward off time travel discussions on facebook since the
"ftl neutrino". "We measured X, can you help us find out what is wrong with
the experiment" to "omg ftl cars next year!!!" is such a common step

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yummybear
"Confirms" is a little strong for sigma 2.2

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saulrh
On the other hand, they're seeing a spike in exactly the same place that the
LHC's been seeing a spike. That's good news - it means that there's new
physics in there rather than just a measurement error.

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kellenfujimoto
Even so, agreement in data does not constitute proof, it's just "closer" to
proof, whatever that's worth.

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xpose2000
It doesn't seem to be fully confirmed yet. There is just much stronger
evidence that points to its existence.

Better link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/science/higgs-boson-may-
be...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/science/higgs-boson-may-be-indicated-
in-new-data.html?_r=2)

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voodoomagicman
Does anyone here have a good understanding of what the higgs boson is supposed
to be?

If I understand correctly it is supposed to be the carrier of masss. At the
same time its proposed mass is larger then the mass of a proton or electron.
How can mass not be quantized to multiples of the value of a single higgs
boson?

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InclinedPlane
The Higgs isn't like some sort of "mass coin", particles don't have mass by
containing one or more instances of a Higgs boson. Instead there is a Higgs
field which individual particles couple to which gives rise to mass. The Higgs
boson is an excitation of the Higgs field the same way a photon is an
excitation of the EM field, a graviton is an excitation of the gravitational
field, etc.

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repsilat
A couple of quick clarifications:

90-99% of the mass in regular matter is due to strong force interactions. In
things like protons, neutrons etc the Higgs is only responsible for a small
amount. See [1] for a little more detail.

As a quick aside, gravitons aren't quite kosher science yet. We haven't
observed them, and we don't even have a coherent theory of how they would
work. Something to do with equations being non-renormalizable, I don't claim
to understand any of it.

1:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pd6wc/why_is_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pd6wc/why_is_there_a_problem_with_the_weakness_of/c3oieh4)

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squarecat
Is that page TRYING to make me hate the internet??

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AznHisoka
So does this mean we can travel to the future now? Woot.

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antoko
We've always been able to travel to the future, in fact we can't help but do
that. Pausing time or going back in it is where the problem-space is.

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vlisivka
How you can confirm that there is no pauses in time? To confirm that, we need
to watch something outside of our space-time continuum.

