
Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins  - Rickasaurus
http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs.html
======
dandelany
So, the magic number here was 5σ, the generally accepted "gold standard" for
discovery, which would mean a 1 in 1.74 million chance that the results
occurred by chance rather than being a signal. As other commenters have
pointed out, the presenter originally announced a 4.1σ observation, then
continued to add data from other experiments until the combined result was
5.1σ. However, right at the end, he added in some additional data which
actually brought the significance down to 4.9σ... That's science - you can't
ignore data just because it ruins your big presentation.

IANAPhysicist, but I'd be interested to know how strict the 5-sigma discovery
rule is considered - for example, could they still get a Nobel prize for a
4.9σ announcement? I suppose it's not that big a deal - the LHC is still
running, and I'm sure they'll have enough data for a true 5σ announcement
soon. Regardless, hats off to all involved, it must be exciting to be at the
forefront of human knowledge :)

~~~
chime
Atlas is still presenting. So let's wait and see what they came up with. 4.9σ
was just from CMS.

Edit: It is worth noting that 125GeV fits well within Fermilab's recent
announcement: [http://news.discovery.com/space/tevatron-data-detects-
higgs-...](http://news.discovery.com/space/tevatron-data-detects-higgs-boson-
existence-120703.html)

~~~
dandelany
I think these physicists have been watching too many Steve Jobs presentations.
"4.9σ... Oh, but one more thing!" ;)

In all seriousness, does anyone know how common it is to do this kind of
gradual reveal during scientific presentations vs. stating your basic final
results in the introduction? It's kind of fun, but you could cut the tension
in that room with a knife!

~~~
chime
The way they handled it was perfect. For over 20 minutes each, the presenters
for CMS and Atlas explained their measurement capabilities, methods, recent
improvements, and recorded measurements before stating their conclusion. They
made sure to cover their bases and justify the conclusion before making a big
announcement. I'm pretty sure the abstract for the papers will state the
conclusion early on but the initial announcement for the greatest achievement
in Particle Physics shouldn't be prefaced with "We found it!" just for the
convenience of the impatient.

------
bobsy
I've given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which
is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people.
I am surprised he didn't start with:

"I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me
break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have
discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we
think this."

I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important -
apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.

If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed
at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to
get people interested in science that has been missed.

Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a
2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first
20 minutes of the presentation.

~~~
JonnieCache
The ATLAS lady has what I think must be the _worst_ set of powerpoint slides
I've ever seen. Epically bad. Pretty amazing.

Even if you are working at CERN running the equipment, there's no way you
could absorb all the info on each of those slides in the 10 to 15 seconds she
shows them. They might as well have pictures of frolicking kittens on them.

~~~
pessimist
Bullshit. She has plenty of informative graphs and useful numbers.

The worst powerpoint presentations are ones that are content-free - this one
could be accused of too much content.

~~~
kaybe
I suspect the slides will be given to people afterwards. In this respect,
they're not that bad.

------
guelo
Final (CMS) summary: We have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 +/- 0.6
GeV at 4.9σ significance!

Atlas comes in at ~126.5 GeV with 5.0σ. That would be a confirmed discovery!

Interesting that Atlas' mass is outside CMS's confidence range, though Atlas
didn't have a range on theirs.

~~~
gorak
Hawking owes Kane $100!

~~~
modarts
I wouldn't think Hawking would be betting on such a result.

~~~
gorak
In 2000, Hawking bet Gordon Kane $100 that the Higgs Boson would never be
found.

~~~
toemetoch
In December 2000, Hawking bet Gordon Kane $100 that the Higgs Boson will be
discovered _at the Fermilab Tevatron_.

Since the funding dried up for the Tevatron and the first hints for the
discovery of the Higgs boson come from LHC we can conclude that Hawking won
the bet and Kane will be the one paying up.

~~~
toemetoch
This just in: "Stephen Hawking on Higgs: 'Discovery has lost me $100'"

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18708626>

~~~
modarts
That look he gives at the end really makes me tear up. What a great sentiment.

------
zethraeus
The world's most cutting edge scientific results presented with comic sans. :)

(edit: The current ATLAS talk, not the first one on the CMS data)

~~~
biot
It's certainly an incredibly readable font, even with the webcast being
somewhat blurry. A good choice.

~~~
zethraeus
Twitter is full of bashing. I don't think it matters. The presentation is
already unfriendly to anyone not in the scientific community, so presentation
isn't really that important.

However, as everyone else has said, it would have been lovely to have a
layman's TL;DR. Perhaps that's the press conference at 11:00, and expecting it
beforehand is arrogant.

------
drostie
I love how we're using Hacker News here -- this is definitely not what it was
designed for. What we're really doing is something like a live chat room while
watching a common talk, but unlike chat rooms it can be threaded and points
can be allocated. Also unlike a chat room, HN does not automatically update
when we get new discussion messages, but that's a constraint of the
technologies at the time it was built.

It might be very interesting to try to use comet-casting or websockets to
revolutionize chat in precisely that way, realtime threaded discussions. So,
in addition to all of the chat constraints you have the ability to dynamically
mark certain chat messages as replying to other messages, and as the noise in
the chat room gets higher you can filter yourself to just "I want to follow
this discussion."

~~~
dandelany
This is why Google Wave got me so excited - and why I was so disappointed when
it was botched and silently killed. I think an app like Wave could be great
for many things, including discussing a live event like this.

~~~
JohnLBevan
My thoughts precisely. The code is still out there though - just waiting for
someone to pick up where Google left off. . .
<http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html> My plan is to try to rewrite
this as a sharepoint add in, so that all those companies who install
sharepoint as their "solution to everything" get something good with it; that
could help grow the user base / promote belief in the technology. Then it
could be openned out into allowing people to connect to hosted public
services, and eventually get back to Google's original vision. ps. In honour
of the subject matter, perhaps we should be calling it Google Duality?

~~~
Angostura
This guys have picked up where Google left off:<http://rizzoma.com/>

in fact, many of my Waves were transferred to it

~~~
JohnLBevan
Awesome - thanks for the link :)

------
ehsanu1
Really striking what a large percentage of the words are jargon. Sometimes I
understand less than 10% of the words in a sentence. I think I might now
better understand how a non-programmer feels when seeing a talk related to
programming.

~~~
nsns
That's true for almost every field of academic research and work; around
70-80% of the words are not in any dictionary (or, if they are, their standard
definition has nothing to do with their professional meaning).

~~~
tikhonj
What always interested me is how the ratio of new words to repurposed words
varies per field.

For example, in CS we use a whole bunch of words like "string", "thread",
"class", "type", "object", "arrow", "map" and "macro" to denote CS-specific
concepts related at best tangentially to the words' original meanings. On the
other hand, biology seems to prefer to come up with new words for their
technical terminology.

I wonder if this is a product of different cultures or something like that.

~~~
repsilat
The worst is botany. Botanists use common culinary words to describe almost
entirely non-overlapping sets of plants/fruit etc. The "Tomato a fruit?"
question is nothing compared to the "berry" thing. According to the botanical
definition cherries, raspberries, strawberries, boysenberries and blackberries
are not berries, but bananas, watermelon, avocado and pumpkin _are_.

Nuts are worse. According botanists, peanuts, cashews, macadamias, pistachios,
walnuts, almonds, pecans, pine-nuts and Brazil nuts are not nuts. According to
most lay-people, though, botanists are nuts.

------
dmvaldman
That's Joe Incandela speaking, he taught me graduate quantum physics at UCSB.
I feel awesome now :-P

~~~
syassami
gaucho here too! :) Edit: Had David Stuart, (Cern -Compact Muon Solenoid
(CMS))

~~~
modarts
UCSB Physics Alum checking in.

------
exolab
I am having a lot of fun watching this, although I don't understand a single
word of what he is saying :D

------
gouranga
Pedant here.

Can people please stop posting intervals in headlines i.e. "20 minutes!"

It expired a long time ago and was probably too late by the time the first
people read it.

Please use at 12:00 UTC or something (a time).

------
korussian
Why is the speaker in such a rush? He seems to be under a constant time-
crunch. He keeps saying he's going to go over time and that he'll speed up.

Didn't he practice this before? Can't he just tell us what he wants to tell
us, and skip over the rest?

~~~
jmcqk6
If you're going to make an announcement that is going to be held up to the
highest rigorous standards, figuring out exactly what to say is going to be a
difficult issue. This presentation isn't for you, this is for the physics
community.

~~~
korussian
Right now, he's presenting general stuff that everyone in the room already
knows, including him. It's just a summary of the status of the project up to
now.

He could have practiced this 6 months ago.

Aaaand... at this very second he's starting on the new stuff, I think.

------
modarts
So I see a lot of people are frustrated about the impenetrable physics
"jargon".

I'm not exactly sure how you'd expect some sort of tldr; of potentially one of
the most important scientific announcements of the last 100 years.

~~~
unconed
Probably because the guy's presentation style is terrible, rushed, and his
slides are a graphical disaster. He jumps from overload to overload,
connecting with "obviously" and "as you can see". There is no overview,
nothing connecting the endless series of slides. Everyone in the room is just
waiting for the Higgs announcement.

I gather that they wanted to include last minute data, but given that they're
livestreaming this and tons of people are watching, it was a huge chance to
get a decent presentation done that would at least highlight the important
results clearly rather than having them be throwaway lines between jargon.

------
tomjakubowski
The ATLAS presentation is set in Comic Sans. Monumental.

------
lancefisher
The Monte Carlo method: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method>

------
dgquintas
"We have observed a new boson at 125.3 +/- 0.6 GeV at 4.9 signa significance"

------
Maro
CMS is at 4.9 sigma. Soooooooo close.

~~~
ehsanu1
5 sigma is kind of arbitrary, isn't it? Just a nice "round" number. Obviously
better than 4.9, but the line is fuzzy, if it even exists.

~~~
Maro
Correct. What really counts is independent verification, all at high sigmas:
Tevatron, CMS, Atlas.

------
obilgic
This is basically lecturer giving lecture to lecturers. Pretty amazing.

------
chime
Peter Higgs just teared up. This is amazing.

~~~
mkramlich
I heard once that when Peter Higgs tears up, each teardrop is 126.5 GeV.

And now it has been confirmed to 5 sigma. :)

------
timcederman
Is that comic sans?

~~~
trafficlight
Nothing says High Energy Physics like Comic Sans.

~~~
mkramlich
Designers vs physicists:

Designer sits in coffee shop wearing his hipster outfit drinking his hipster
coffee, writing incensed blog post about the outrages of Comic Sans.

Physicist makes presentation on what is clearly a state-of-the-art advancement
in the progress of high-energy particle physics (and thus, physics) to a
world-wide community, live, and NOT a fuck was given as to what font is used.
:P

Much respect to the latter folks.

~~~
nilaykumar
Thank you! It seems very few people understand the immense pressure and
intense atmosphere that surrounds work like this, especially in culminating
times like these.

Fabiola would likely rather spend her time improving the quality of her
analysis, which is undeniably more valuable to the scientific community than
agonizing over the font.

------
JonnieCache
Sean Carroll is liveblogging from the room and has some actual interpretation
of what's being said:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/07/03/...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/07/03/live-
blogging-the-higgs-seminar/)

------
Sukotto
I'm in a place with single-bar wifi signal and the livestream is really
choppy.

Does anyone have something like a buffered stream on a delay so I can be sure
I don't miss anything, even if I have to stop to buffer more of the stream?

I have a vanilla, chrome browser, and a fairly recent VLC.

~~~
humbert
Try the RTMP stream: rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900

If that's choppy, save it to disk with rtmpdump: rtmpdump -v -o cern1_900.flv
-r rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900

edit: alternate bitrates (thanks to Brajeshwar): cern1_900 cern1_600 cern1_300

------
grumblepeet
Nothing to do with the science, but it looks suspiciously like they are using
Squeak to produce their slides. Maybe they are using it in some capacity to
collate data?

------
ErikHuisman
Mr. Higgs just walked in.

~~~
nodesocket
Sorry, noob, who is this?

~~~
corin_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs>

------
JonnieCache
The magic number for CMS is 4.1 sigma. That was combined across all channels I
think?

~~~
mattheww
At the point you made the comment, the full number has not yet been shown.
That's only the combined number for Higgs to gamma-gamma for 2011 and 2012 (so
far).

~~~
JonnieCache
Sorry about that. He _just_ said 5 sigma for the combined signals (I think?
maybe I misunderstood again.)

Nobel prizes all round!

~~~
lostsock
Can someone please explain what 5 sigma signifies?

Edit: “Evidence” usually means a 3-sigma signal, which existed last December,
“Proof” would be a better way to describe a 5+ sigma signal, if that’s what
the combined CMS/ATLAS data shows -
<http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4809>

~~~
caladri
99.999% confidence.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Actually, it's 99.99994% confidence (1 in 1.7 million chance of error).

------
rangibaby
TL;DR: New boson discovered!

------
scotty79
What they actually established except for mass and the fact that it's
previously undetected particle?

Do they know that it's a boson not ferminon? Do they know that's elementary
particle?

------
chadnickbok
Just announced 5 sigma.

------
chris_wot
Sorry if this sounds ignorant, but were they doing some sort of regression
analysis over large data sets?

------
detay
CERN: Makes you feel stupid since 1954

------
tvon
Meta, but come on, "in 20 Mins"? The headline was wrong seconds after it was
posted...

------
zvrba
OK, when can I order my bottle of Higgs bosons? ;-P

------
10dpd
Why is potentially the worlds finest discovery of the 21st century being
communicated using the worst software to be cobbled together in the 20th? (Aka
Flash)

~~~
Brajeshwar
It works. Flash Player is the only browser plugin yet that can do an actual
streaming (not progressive download) using either Adobe's own Media Server or
other similar Open Source at the back-end. If need be, that is the best form
of protection against content theft so far.

It is not that difficult to setup the whole streaming with lots of free and
open source solutions available today. It's just a good means to a useful end.

 _EDITS:_

Just as I suspected, it's using a Media Server Streaming Server.
"rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/"

It is also automatically streaming corresponding quality depending on the
user's bandwidth.

    
    
      { bitrate: '1000', width: '640', file: 'cern1_900' },
      { bitrate: '700', width: '640', file: 'cern1_600' },
      { bitrate: '400', width: '640', file: 'cern1_300' },
    

So far, I haven't found a decent way to do that in HTML5 without having to
encode multiple video-streams for multiple bitrates.

~~~
10dpd
_It works_

Unfortunately I was unable to listen in due to being on a mobile device....

------
tdicola
Anyone else getting no sound?

edit: Sound is working now!

~~~
nodesocket
They muting until it starts. ;)

~~~
brok3nmachine
you're right, I have sound now, thanks!=)

------
wqfeng
The 404 page looks great.

------
urbanjunkie
Cool - they just showed a quick shot of Peter Higgs in the audience - he
looked a bit emotional

------
mkramlich
TL;DR: "I think we have it."

------
M4N14C
This guy is excited to get to the conclusion of the talk.

------
rabagaz
Comic sans!

------
kmil
They desperately need a designer. The color scheme,use of comic sans and
broken composition make my eyes bleed.

~~~
modarts
They could care less about the presentation; these guys are all about content.

~~~
Create
I am under the impression, that what you think is not entirely true:

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years
in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified
to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

Perhaps an answer to the naive question:

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

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_(public_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_\(public_relations\)#Techniques)

~~~
modarts
Ok, so how does that contradict my point about content over presentation?

------
Create
The work at CERN is differentiated when it is performed by westerners or by
people from the East:

"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>

Western discrimination is firmly in place there.

~~~
icarus_drowning
Really, I think this might take the cake as the _worst_ comment I've ever read
on Hacker News.

~~~
JonnieCache
He cited a source, so I don't think it can take that particular cake.

~~~
chris_wot
Except he is misusing a source to come to an absurd conclusion!

~~~
icarus_drowning
In an attempt (presumably, I can't really know) to distract from a truly
historic scientific achievement. Don't forget that part.

~~~
Create
No attempts, just plain facts: a reminder of those, who took their fair share
in contributing to such a scientific achievement but were discriminated
negatively compared to their "western equivalents" only for being born in a
non-western country.

The cited document (did all the downvoters also take their time and actually
read the TDRs and papers in detail??? Or are they just ignorant sheep?) is a
rare case of putting the facts on the ground down in a written and approved
document, despite being taboo in an organisation touting "equal opportunities"
and such policies.

No downvotes will change the situation I warn about above, quite to the
contrary: may my previous comment serve as a warning to all non-westerners at
CERN for the time being.

