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1. Max wrote,
   

   “Does this prove the existence of god?”

   What a boson!

   Did somebody really ask that?

   Comment on July 4, 2012 @ 10:33 am

2. SkyHarbor wrote,
   

   The query actually was implied, couched in terms of the “God Particle”. What a total boson!

   It was nice to see Peter Higgs, who first hypothesised the ‘Higgs boson’ particle back in the 1960′s, sitting in the audience at the press conference. Of course the press (politely) hounded the old gentleman (he’s now 83) with questions… which he wisely deferred to the CERN group. But during the press conference, one could see him occasionally remove his glasses and dab his eyes, clearly moved by the proceedings.

   Comment on July 4, 2012 @ 3:54 pm

3. SkyHarbor wrote,
   

   Speaking of Bosons…

   Behold… The Standard Model of Particle Physics:

   

   It’s odd (for non-physicists anyway) to think of electron Volts (eV) as weights, but if you solve E=mc² for m (mass) you get m=E/c². In this case, the energy (E) is the electric charge gained as a single electron is moved across a 1 volt potential (1 joule per coulomb).

   In the lovely grid image of the ‘Standard Model’ of things that can’t be seen, the Higgs boson corresponds to the Z⁰ gauge boson in the rightmost column.

   At best, I only understand gauge symmetries in a very vague, arm-waving way, so I shan’t muddy the subatomic waters further except to put the image of a sharpened pencil balanced on its tip in your mind. Perfectly symmetrical, right? But once you ‘let go’ of said pencil, it will fall over… thus ‘breaking’ that symmetry.

   Comment on July 5, 2012 @ 9:09 pm

4. Max wrote,
   

   That’s the real stuff, right there.

   Comment on July 5, 2012 @ 9:42 pm

5. SkyHarbor wrote,
   

   (I hope Cat-eyes jumps in at some point… as I’m quickly getting well beyond my depth!)

   The handy ‘Standard Model’ grid (above) includes the family of Quarks (the ‘mirror image’ anti-particles not shown), three of which comprise the other particles. I’ve always enjoyed the somewhat whimsical names given to Quarks, ‘Top’ and ‘Bottom’ are fine, but what about properties like ‘Charm’ and ‘Strange’?

   The ‘Top’ (also called ‘Truth’) quark was only observed in 1995 at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. Note its very large mass. It was elusive for the same reason as Higgs… You have to smack protons and anti-protons together REALLY hard to produce one and it decays almost IMMEDIATELY into a cloud of smaller and smaller bits and pieces… like THIS:

   the ‘Top’ quark appears momentarily in this Feynman diagram

   Max may appreciate Murray Gell-Mann’s ‘Eightfold Path’ of particle physics. Here’s Dr. Gell-Mann (who co-discovered and named ‘quarks’*) at TED:

   Isn’t he delightful?

   A moment of silence, please, for Fermilab and the Tevatron. Shut down by GOP budget cuts and outclassed by CERN’s new LHC.

   ---

   * Any physicist who also reads James Joyce has piled up points in my humble estimation:
   

   Three quarks for Muster Mark!
   Sure he has not got much of a bark

   And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

   —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

   Gell-Mann is a rather funny fellow. I’ll just call it ‘Deep Humour’ and leave it at that.

   Comment on July 6, 2012 @ 3:59 am

6. Cat-eyes wrote,
   

   apologies sky been very busy and the best I can do right now is state that I have not the energy to weigh in (pun intended)

   Comment on July 6, 2012 @ 6:50 pm

7. Max wrote,
   

   Charmed by your response.

   Comment on July 6, 2012 @ 8:17 pm

8. byronius wrote,
   

   Critical mass of nerds on this thread.

   Comment on July 7, 2012 @ 1:02 am

9. Max wrote,
   

   Nice spin.

   Comment on July 7, 2012 @ 6:53 am

10. Max wrote,
    

    Lawrence Krauss (one of my faorite TEDsters) has written a nice article explaining what the Higgs is about and why it’s important.

    Comment on July 7, 2012 @ 7:13 am

11. SkyHarbor wrote,
    

    Always proud to gather together or spawn a critical mass of ‘nerdiness’!
    Without such a ‘critical geek’ factor, things would be far more fucked up than they are… as difficult as that is to believe!

    This is well illustrated by the CERN discovery. From a nerdiferous standpoint, it’s really not that big a deal. What would have been a BIG DEAL would have been the FAILURE to find such a ‘mass imparting’ particle… No stars or planets, no DNA, no life, no us. But since we are here, such a result would be ‘problematic’ to say the least. On a less cataclysmic scale, no Higgs would mean we’d got the ‘Standard Model’ completely WRONG. Now THAT would be a big deal!

    But out of gazillions of proton-on-proton ‘encounters’ in a gazillion simulated ‘big bangs’, we saw something very close to what we had expected to see… a Higgs boson. Now we whip out our figurative slide rules and try to figure out WHAT exactly we saw and what that actually MEANS in the larger scheme of things.

    Then, from the ‘normal’ (ie: non-nerdified) population, we have fixations on ‘God Particles’ and fearful predictions (silly and groundless BTW) of LHC-created Black Holes devouring the Earth. This from ‘experts’ who couldn’t integrate sin(x)* to save their life. In other words, the vast majority of the human population…

    Here’s a pretty good LHC doc:

    Oh, that cool music near the beginning? Penguin Cafe Orchestra‘s marvelous “Perpetuum Mobile” (‘Penguin’ is often my personal background music)

    ---

    * -cos(x)

    Comment on July 7, 2012 @ 2:25 pm

12. Max wrote,
    

    * -cos(x)

    I love it when the textbook has the answers in the back. (I used to know that one!)

    Comment on July 7, 2012 @ 5:51 pm

13. Max wrote,
    

    So, a Higgs boson goes into a church and the priests says “you can’t come in here, we don’t recognize your existence.”

    The Higgs boson says “well, without me you can’t have mass.”

    /rimshot

    Comment on July 8, 2012 @ 7:49 am

14. SkyHarbor wrote,
    

    re #10: Max, Lawrence Krauss is a marvellous (and entertaining) lecturer. Here’s a nice example of Prof. Krauss (now at ASU) in action at the 2009 AAI convention in beautiful downtown Burbank, CA.

    re #13: “The stars died so that you might live.”

    (Krauss actually used the word perspicacity in this… and correctly too!)

    You can visit AAI:
    

    Comment on July 9, 2012 @ 4:42 am

15. SkyHarbor wrote,
    

    Cosmology and Evolution. The two scientific disciplines absolutely guaranteed to offend those who believe in all-powerful sky-beings that no one can see or measure but who nonetheless will defend (unto death) as real. If you look at these videos on YouTube and scroll down through the comments, you will find countless less than ‘christian’ remarks from the god-trolls pronouncing eternal damnation upon those ‘benighted scientists’ who have placed these childish fairy-tales made up by illiterate bronze-age shepherds precisely where they belong: in the trash bin with yesterday’s newspaper.

    (Sorry. It just might be possible for me to write an entire BOOK in just one sentence! )

    Anyway, here’s an interesting on-stage conversation between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss at (I think) the same conference as the above video:

    This is why the Gila Monsters sneer at ‘science’ and parade their ignorance and hypocrisy (and astonishing hubris) across Faux News (and elsewhere) every day.

    Perhaps the most telling episode comes from Genesis itself, where Adam and Eve in the ‘Garden of Eden’ are explicitly forbidden to ‘eat of the Tree of Knowledge’. In other words, ‘stay blissfully ignorant… or ELSE’. To my mind, it was this Yaweh fellow’s tacit admission that ‘He’ was pulling the biggest scam of all time!

    Here’s the bottom line. Religion is easy. Science is hard.
    Good video.

    Comment on July 9, 2012 @ 6:03 am

16. Max wrote,
    

    You think science is hard. Try boiling for eternity in a lake of fire. Heathen scum! Bow down to my loving God.

    Comment on July 9, 2012 @ 8:54 am

17. SkyHarbor wrote,
    

    [chortle] I’ll be doing a leisurely backstroke, puffin’ on a hella-good reefer and spittin’ in the devil’s eye at every given opportunity!

    Comment on July 9, 2012 @ 10:15 am

18. Demonweed wrote,
    

    I realize that most visual representations of modern particle accelerator experiments look like this, but it is worth point out to the gullible that the Higgs boson was made in the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s image. All hail the Original Pasta. May His Noodliness be upon thee.

    Comment on July 10, 2012 @ 1:03 am

19. Max wrote,
    

    BTW – thanks Sky for #15. That video is excellent. I’ve seen Dawkins give a TED talk which was basically him reading from something he’d written and the presentation was pretty bad – though the content was brilliant. This is a much better format for him, and Krauss is hugely entertaining as always. Loved it.

    Comment on July 10, 2012 @ 6:21 am

20. Max wrote,
    

    I’m still only halfway through the Dawkins-Krauss video. We stopped at that point and re-watched it from the beginning with Jeremy. It seemed too important to leave him out of it. We’ll finish tonight.

    Near the end of the first half, Krauss makes a particularly stimulating point. A trillion years or so from now, the universe will have expanded to the point where galaxies are so far apart from one another that they will be undetectable by any conceivable astronomical means. All of the ingredients of life will still be present and it is likely that new life will emerge on planets surrounding stars in those galaxies and in some cases will probably develop to a point similar to what we have now. Those civilizations, when they achieve high technology and capability to examine the cosmos, will see no evidence of any other galaxies in the universe. There will be no reason to imagine that there is anything else out there. In this way they will be likely to adopt a view exactly like that of our own astronomers from 100 years ago who had never yet seen a distant galaxy, but their errant view will never be corrected by improved instrumentation. They will be effectively blind to reality.

    It makes you wonder what we might be blind to now, and essentially forever. Kind of sad isn’t it?

    Comment on July 12, 2012 @ 5:54 am

21. Max wrote,
    

    Another interesting point and one where the opinions of Dawkins and Krauss diverged regards the possible inevitability of the path of life. They both held the view that the lack of a creator implies that evolotion, in the earliest stages, will follow an accidental path toward the development of some form of self-replication; presumably functionally equivalent to RNA and then DNA, and from there, as Dawkins says, “Darwinian evolution takes off.” Krauss held the view that it was likely that it could only ultimately take one path, that being the one that results in creatures very much like us with DNA based on a 4 amino acid alphabet. Dawkins was not nearly so certain this would be the case, and postulated base-6 DNA, or 2 or even 3 dimensional forms of replication, rather than the single dimension we have now (not sure how this is the case, but figure Dawkins must know what he’s talking about – maybe Sky can explain better).

    What I find interesting is in trying to guess who is more likely to be right; the physicist (Krauss) with the deep understanding of fundamental quantum-level interactions, or the biologist (Dawkins) who’d studied these phenomena intimately his entire life. My gut feeling would be to go with Krauss, and the implications of this view are pretty astounding. It makes it possible that the universe is like Star Trek, with most of the intelligent beings sufficiently resembling human form that a long-running TV series constrained by the need to stay within budget would make for a plausible simulation of reality.

    Comment on July 12, 2012 @ 6:15 am

22. SkyHarbor wrote,
    

    As the Universe expands, humanity seems to get smaller and smaller. I still think we’re special somehow, or at least have the potential to be. But what do I know?

    What if the Universe is a super-massive black hole?
    What if our sense of 3D is an illusion and we’re really just a 2D hologram?
    Neither has been disproven… and maybe CAN’T be!

    That should be a reason for Hope I think… not Sadness.

    Bill Spooner takes a more pessimistic long term view here:
    ♫ Sputnick Spooner: “When Stars Collide”
    But the song is extremely cool! Nice bass line and the drums are Prairie Prince.

    Comment on July 12, 2012 @ 7:27 am

23. SkyHarbor wrote,
    

    from New Scientist (11 July):

    “LIKE being knocked over by a wave.” That is how Peter Higgs describes the euphoria following last week’s announcement that a particle resembling the one bearing his name had been discovered at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Those in attendance reacted more like victorious football supporters than delegates at a sober scientific seminar.

    The party has been a long time coming. When Higgs and others first conceived of the idea of a field that gives rise to mass, almost half a century ago, they could not have expected evidence for their theory to eventually come from an international collaboration of thousands of people operating the most complex machine ever built.

    What is there to celebrate, though? In some ways, the most honest answer is: we’re not quite sure yet. Most of the possibilities that were on the table when the LHC first powered up are still on the table. But there are ample grounds for jubilation, whatever the new particle turns out to be.

    It could be that CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, has found exactly what was predicted – the boson completing the standard model of particle physics. That would be an intellectual triumph; a tribute to the power of the human mind – or rather, many minds working through the scientific method – to decipher the cosmos.

    Satisfying though that might be for one generation of theorists, it would be frustrating for the next – offering few clues about how to address the universe’s many remaining mysteries. Physicists just embarking on their careers, and those who may be inspired to join them, are hoping that the new particle’s puzzling features will grow more persistent, rather than vanishing, as results are gathered over the next few months (see “Beyond Higgs: Deviant decays hint at exotic physics”).

    That would be even more worthy of celebration than confirmation of the standard model. Surprises are the greatest gift that nature can offer science. They open up new vistas and fresh avenues for exploration.

    “In one sense, it is the end of the road,” says Higgs. “But in another, it’s the beginning of where machines like the LHC go next.” Proposals are already being put forward for the next generation of colliders (see “Let’s build a Higgs factory – on the cheap”). Tellingly, there is considerable emphasis on cost. Big physics is expensive, and cheaper options may prove tempting during times of enforced austerity. Certainly, the high profile of Italian participants at CERN does not seem to have prompted their hard-pressed government to reconsider deep funding cuts for the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics.

    And the desolate tunnels of the Superconducting Super Collider under Waxahachie, Texas – which could have anticipated CERN’s discovery by a decade or more – should be a sobering reminder that politicians are often more concerned with addressing short-term practicalities than fostering long-term possibilities.

    In the current cash-strapped climate, the case for big physics will be tougher to make than ever. But the excitement provoked by CERN’s discovery – for millions outside the conference room, as well as those within it – shows that the basic human urge to push back the boundaries of knowledge still thrives. And that is worth celebrating in itself.

    No argument here…

    Comment on July 16, 2012 @ 10:43 pm

24. byronius wrote,
    

    ‘In the current cash-strapped climate’–

    read

    ‘In the current greedhead-dominated environment, when all knowledge, human welfare and survivable future scenarios must be sacrificed so that Mitt Romney and his friends might hoard even more cash than any human could ever spend or use in any way, because that’s what’s important — more important than life, liberty, or the agony of children, and certainly more than some frilly scientific boondoogle that might hand us the keys to existence –’

    Comment on July 17, 2012 @ 7:24 am

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