

CERN to announce Higgs boson observation at LHC - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/108599-cern-to-announce-higgs-boson-observation-at-lhc

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mattheww
There are several things to keep in mind when reading things like this piece:

1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who
then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was
that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the
Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger
friends roughly what they saw.

2) The most familiar exclusion plots are showing the line at which the cross
section is excluded at 95% along with the 2-sigma uncertainty on the
_expected_ location of this curve. Since the people spreading rumors are not
very familiar with the analysis, they do not realize that n-sigma deviations
between the observed and expected lines are not the same thing as n-sigma
observations. The actual significance of observation will usually be lower.

3) Again because the people spreading rumors are not familiar with the
analysis, they are not able to add appropriate caveats about systematic
uncertainties, which can substantially reduce significance. Because these
rumors started last week, I guarantee the plots on which they were based do
not include all systematic effects. And because the bloggers are predominantly
theorists, they don't have the experience to add that information themselves
either.

So I hope you will take rumors for what they are: rumors.

~~~
demallien
_1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who
then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was
that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the
Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger
friends roughly what they saw._

Are you saying that you _do_ have actual knowledge, or are you just guessing
this stuff just like the others? I'm not trtying to be snarky, I really want
to know if you have good hard info or not.

~~~
mattheww
Let's just say that regardless of whether I have any actual knowledge about
this specific situation, I know that what I outlined is what happens from
other, similar situations where I definitely have actual knowledge. Let's also
say that if I did have any actual knowledge, I would know better than to
confirm it and I would definitely know better than to say what I know to a
blogger.

I do know that knowledgeable people will probably be more open-mouthed around
this time tomorrow.

~~~
juiceandjuice
Ahh the good ole' pre-publication information embargo :)

You're right though... somebody (i.e. one of the thousands of collaborators,
from undergrads to PIs) probably got the email that said something to the
effect "we'll be releasing results on the search for the Higgs tomorrow, and
until those results are released you aren't allowed to
talk/tweet/email/post/facebook any information about the experiment. Of
course, this doesn't mean they know anything about the paper, only that they
know there's going to be a paper that discusses something. The people who
really know are going to be the ones with the tightest lips.

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suprgeek
When the LHC was built - one of the biggest reasons used to justify its
massive cost was that it would lead to new physics. Th Higgs sighting is sort
of the Good News/Bad News scenario.

At the energies predicted, it falls in nicely with mostly established physics
(Standard model). So yes that is the good news part.

The seriously bad news part is that it does not lead us in any new directions
at all. Theoretical Physicists usually feed off of Observations from
experiments like the LHC and new strange results to expand their frontiers.

For a while now unfortunately they have been going down the Warren of String
theory without any falsifiable predictions emerging. Instead people have more
or less stumbled in the Anthropic principle as the new be-all and end-all. I
was really hoping that there was no Higgs to be found at all OR Super symmetry
to be found OR Fine structure constant Variations OR some clue abut dark
matter :(

~~~
VMG
I'm not familiar with the topic, but isn't there still room for new
discoveries?

~~~
suprgeek
Yes certainly there is much room to find new and exciting stuff - but "not"
finding the Higgs was the lowest hanging fruit. If the LHC were not able to
find the Higgs at any energy level, the Standard model wold be rendered
incomplete and a lot of "new" new Physics would follow. They would have had to
explian how Mass is introduced into the model without relying on the Higgs
Field.

Now (if this is confirmed to the 5 sigma needed) the experimenters have to
actually go looking for new stuff - a harder proposition, fraught with
interpretations and Agendas.

~~~
ibuildthings
New for the sake of "new" doesn't make much sense to me. Quoting Einstein "It
can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the
irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to
surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." If
indeed Higgs boson is spotted, it will be indeed a exemplary triumph of this
thought, since the core premise of standard model is symmetry and simplicity.

I consider LHC as the best microscope we humans ever build. Our exploratory
quest and adventure will remain ever more interesting and baffling when we
start to probe in higher energy levels. This will be irrespective of whether
the presence of Higgs boson is established or not. And there is no reason to
think otherwise, since in the past the deeper and in finer scales we probed,
strange phenomena had popped out, requiring more new theorems and scientific
understanding to explain them.

------
andrewheins
I may be in the minority, but I'll be slightly disappointed (although
extremely impressed) if CERN actually does announce they've sighted the Higgs.

I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the
possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.

On the other hand, that our great minds were able to see a problem, come up
with a solution, test it and then say "Yes, we accurately predicted an
unobservable, and yet fundamental principal of our universe" would be damn
impressive.

~~~
cynest
> I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the
> possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.

iirc, the Standard Model is a few pages of equations. Not nicely at all.

~~~
gjm11
"A few pages of equations" is pretty damn good for _the software the universe
runs on_. Imagine saying "iirc, Portal's physics engine is a few pages of
code. Not concise at all".

(In fairness, we can be fairly sure that the Standard Model isn't the whole
deal; it doesn't do gravity properly, for instance. And you need more than
just the bare equations to explain what's going on -- though I think a lot of
that is just impedance matching for the benefit of our not-very-mathematics-
tolerant brains. But, still. "A few pages" isn't so bad.)

~~~
tikhonj
A couple of issues with your comparison: math is _much_ more succinct than
most code--it's more like a few pages of APL than a few pages of C++; also,
code has to deal with performance so elegant solutions tend to give way to
complicated messes in the face of finite hardware and imperfect optimizing
compilers.

That said, you do have a good point. However, extreme complexity arising from
a simple input is not _that_ surprising--just look to the r pentomino in the
game of life or the Mandelbrot set.

------
Steuard
CERN apparently said the following in a press release, which puts some
substantial limits on what's actually going to be announced:

"A seminar will be held at CERN on 13 December at which the ATLAS and CMS
experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model
Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more
data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make
significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make
any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs."

I got that from Matt Strassler's blog entry below (which is worth reading):

[http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/12/07/about-those-
rumors-t...](http://profmattstrassler.com/2011/12/07/about-those-rumors-that-
the-higgs-has-been-discovered/)

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espinchi
Here's the link to the seminar. It is titled "Update on the Standard Model
Higgs searches in ATLAS and CMS". There, you can find a link to the webcast,
since it will be broadcasted live at 14h CET tomorrow, Dec 13:
<http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890>.

From CERN's general director: "ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the
status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson [...] based on the
analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer
conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the
Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence
or non-existence of the Higgs."

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iwwr
Is there a way to explain the Higgs mechanism to a lay computer scientist?

~~~
mrsebastian
Yeah -- I've seen it described like this before:

Basically, Higgs boson particles are like paparazzi (or fans) around a
celebrity (the observable matter that we already know about).

The Higgs boson particles, by affixing onto the celebrity, make their movement
slower/harder -- i.e. they give the celebrity mass/substance.

That's the theory, anyway :)

~~~
giardini
So there's a "Higgs field" that all objects move through and those objects
which have inertial mass are affected by this field? And inertial mass is the
result of interchanges of the force carriers (higgs particle) between objects
with inertial mass?

Inertial mass is ubiquitous. Why does it take so much power to make the Higgs
boson detectable? How _do_ you detect it?

Is the Higgs boson one of the hypotheses of Newton's famous phrase "Hypotheses
non fingo."?

~~~
nohat
To make the Higgs detectable means making a sufficiently high concentration of
energy to make a Higgs particle. That concentration of energy is dependent on
the mass of the particle (and hence energy by e=mc^2). The Higgs boson is
theorized to exist at relatively high mass, hence making it difficult to
create. This higgs particle will decay into a shower of other particles and
these particles will decay, and all these remnant are detected and analyzed to
recreate the original event. So no, Higgs is quite well understood and we
expect to find it for strong reasons.

~~~
giardini
But mass is everywhere, so aren't there Higgs bosons everywhere too?

If so, what is the difference between detecting the Higgs boson via the
presence of mass (i.e., "These particles have mass so there must be one or
more Higgs boson nearby) versus detecting the Higgs boson as a separate
particle?

~~~
nohat
The excitation of the higgs field corresponding to higgs boson's like we are
looking for at LHC are 'manifested' so to speak. The higgs that cause mass are
virtual carrier particles that exist in a state of quantum in betweenness.
Photons, for example are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. They are
not the same, however, as the photons transmitted to your eye. So you don't
see photons being traded between magnets when you hold them together, but can
see the photons bouncing off the magnets from the sun. In the same way we
can't see the higgs carrier particles, but can see (hopefully) the higgs
bosons at LHC.

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bitops
Aside from the good explanations of what the Higgs is below, can someone
explain why discovering the Higgs would be significant? I.e. what problems
does it help illuminate.

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cq
Oh my god, this is amazing. Congratulations!

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giardini
Is this important to string theory?

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aerique
Ugh, the mobile version of that site is awful to use on an iPad.

