Comments on: Making Sense of CERN’s Higgs Circus

By: Amir D. Aczel

Amir D. Aczel — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 02:11:18 +0000

Good question, Scribbler! So, the new particle is a meson. A meson is an intermediate-sized particle made of two quarks (so it is not an elementary particle, like a quark, an electron, or a muon, for example). Pions, for example, are mesons made of the lightest quarks, and then mesons go up in mass from there (remember, there are three generations of quarks and leptons, in increasing mass). The new meson is of very high mass because it is made of very heavy quarks (thus requiring the energy of the LHC to create it). But you can “create” mesons simply by combinatorics: combine a quark with a given mass with an antiquark of a higher mass (higher generation quark) and you’ve got yourself a new meson. This new meson was, therefore, predictable by straightforward combinatorics. If you like abstract math, group theory has been especially useful in predicting new mesons, for example, the famous “Eightfold Way” of Murray Gell-Mann (which won him a Nobel when he predicted the Omega-minus meson) and Y. Ne’eman. Having said all this (as you can see), the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson are completely unaffected by this discovery. The chance that the Higgs exists is simply whatever it was before this new discovery. Happy New Year! Amir

By: scribbler

scribbler — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:37:12 +0000

What effect, if any, does the discovery of the new chi b(3P) particle have on these findings? Do the Higgs results have to be adjusted for this new particle or are they separate/independent of each other?

Thanks in advance!

By: Amir D. Aczel

Amir D. Aczel — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:14:26 +0000

Thanks for the great questions! So here are some attempts at answers: What CERN needs is luminosity (the term they use for how many protons collide per second). That lowers the standard errors and hence makes statistically significant what is true and (hopefully) washes out what is not true. The bump was indeed at the region specified: I used “around 120 GeV” as not to be too specific on something that is still not yet confirmed. Also: the two teams, ATLAS and CMS, found “bumps” not at exactly the same spot. Tevatron had an energy of 1.98 TeV (LHC now is at 7 TeV and going up to 14 in a couple of years from now). Since a TeV is 1,000 times more than a GeV, at roughly 120 GeV, Tevatron could conceivably have found a similar bump (and did). But because of luminosity issues, it was a tenuous bump. With increasing data from CERN and more scrutiny on the Fermilab data collected before closure of the Tevatron, hopefully the statistics will “converge” on the Higgs with very high probability (5-sigma) or the signal will shrink. About the Collider itself: It has repeatedly passed every test of quality and physicists have immense confidence in its performance (because it replicates with high accuracy everything that has been learned before through other accelerators). About Vegas: Oh well…what can I say? Physicists are just so much more exacting with data and probabilities and want to be far surer than odds at any game of chance.

By: Victor Grauer

Victor Grauer — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:37:07 +0000

Seems to me you’d need a lot more than a “bump” to determine that this is actually the Higgs. Especially since they seem to have no idea what mass to look for. Is there any reason this bump couldn’t represent some other particle? Why do they feel so confident it’s the Higgs?

By: chris y

chris y — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:06:20 +0000

a region of energy that attracted less attention because it had been well within the reach of Fermilab’s now-defunct Tevatron accelerator

So what were they doing wrong at Fermilab that they didn’t find it (if it’s there)?

By: Rich F

Rich F — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:58:36 +0000

Oh, please, people! Read ‘em and weep: The odds the Higgs is there when they crack open up that data from next year, weighing in at around 123 Gev, are now set at 4999 chances in 5000. The house in Vegas thrives year after year on odds that are far worse than that. If only Wall Street were so reliable for payout on supposedly AAA investments, reeling in private funding for physics would be child’s play. Get a life!

By: Jim Johnson

Jim Johnson — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:44:12 +0000

I thought the bump was supposed to be at 123-126 GeV.

By: scribbler

scribbler — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:37:41 +0000

Or…

There’s a 99.99998% chance that the accelerator is making the same mistake over and over…

By: Uncle Al

Uncle Al — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:08:46 +0000

Pareidolia. The Higgs requires vacuum symmetries that physical reality is not beholden to supply. Physics – string theory, quantum gravitation, Higgs, SUSY, dark matter – is a bureaucratized grant funding streetwalker. Flash some thigh, demand an outrageous price, and deliver more promises.

Empirical reality brings dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl of theories. Do chemically and macroscopically identical, enantiomorphic atomic mass distributions vacuum free fall non-identically? Do single crystal solid balls of space groups P3(1) versus P3(2) gamma-glycine or space groups P3(1)21 versus P3(2)21 alpha-quartz falsify the Equivalence Principle?

By: Mike B

Mike B — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:25:46 +0000

Its a shame science has come to this. We need to push half baked results to get the media spin to get the government funding to keep the job to push half baked results.