The Higgs

[stewie]

Got to visit Fermilab last week for an upcoming project the band's involved in. Fermilab let us in to see the CDF portion of the Tevatron, in person. They told us we were the first public tour to see it in person; our tour guide, an older lady who used to be a biology teacher, said that in 10 years of giving tours at Fermi, she had never seen the CDF in person until last Wednesday, when they let us in. I felt like i was visiting Stonehenge.

Wow, that's amazing.

Jealous beyond belief. Incredible!

[DrAwkward]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the Higgs is found, it's supposed to be the smallest element.

Nope. The Higgs is thought to be a particle with mass that also delivers/assigns mass to other, otherwise massless, particles.

Particles already known as less massive than the Higgs include the photon and the neutrino, which are both massless and thus able to travel the speed of light.

[Chromodynamic]

...Particles already known as less massive than the Higgs include the photon and the neutrino, which are both massless and thus able to travel the speed of light.

Well.. the mass of the neutrino is still a bit up in the air, disputed as being incredibly small but not zero which is why that hullabaloo about it being superluminal was/is such a big deal.

[DrAwkward]

...Particles already known as less massive than the Higgs include the photon and the neutrino, which are both massless and thus able to travel the speed of light.

Well.. the mass of the neutrino is still a bit up in the air, disputed as being incredibly small but not zero which is why that hullabaloo about it being superluminal was/is such a big deal.

True, that occurred to me after i posted that. Dur! I stand corrected.

[madraso_]

pretty cool project they have going on over there. a few years back, as a grad student I had a job writing event reconstruction software to calibrate one of the detection chambers in the forward calorimeter. on paper, it sounds way cooler than it was... what it really consisted of was fitting/solving y=mx+b millions upon millions of times to establish trajectories in order to deduce q/m (charge to mass ratios.) What it meant to me at the time was lots of long stretches in front of a monitor fueled by coffee and interrupted by profanity as the stats package [ROOT] I was calling kept updating itself and leaving me to revise my inefficient code.

[DrAwkward]

HAPPY MOTHER FUCKING FOURTH OF JULY

[iembalm]

Funny, I thought about starting a thread called "Higgs Mother Fucking Boson" today until my search brought up this one.

[brando562]

the funny thing is, even though they have confirmed the particle, they continue to search for evidence as to whether or not it exists ::facepalm::

[Cranius]

the funny thing is, even though they have confirmed the particle, they continue to search for evidence as to whether or not it exists ::facepalm::

There is a question about whether £2.6bn to confirm the existence theoretically derived particle is good value. This price-tag puts a lot of pressure on the scientists to come up with substantial proof that they've achieved anything. So there's a wariness amongst some scientists, especially those opposed to the concept of fundamental particles about yesterday's announcement.

[jimmy two hands]

the funny thing is, even though they have confirmed the particle, they continue to search for evidence as to whether or not it exists ::facepalm::

There is a question about whether £2.6bn to confirm the existence theoretically derived particle is good value. This price-tag puts a lot of pressure on the scientists to come up with substantial proof that they've achieved anything. So there's a wariness amongst some scientists, especially those opposed to the concept of fundamental particles about yesterday's announcement.

From what I understand, they've confirmed the particle exists, but they haven't yet confirmed that it behaves exactly as predicted and how it fits into the standard model and so they will have to continue testing.

On a side note, I want to bitch-slap whoever decided it would be a good idea to call this thing the "god particle".

[Cranius]

On a side note, I want to bitch-slap whoever decided it would be a good idea to call this thing the "god particle".

[amelia]

Right now CERN is like Galileo. It is just a glimpse. They are going to keep at it until they can capture the slippery motherfucker. An article I read referred to it aptly as molasses. I was amused.

[Andrew.]

Just learned: Physicist Peter Higgs supports the campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, and refused to attend an awards ceremony in Israel in his and his colleagues' honor years ago.

http://www.kadaitcha.com/2012/07/06/pro ... of-israel/