Breaking news from the press conference at CERN. The hunt for the Higgs has officially gone 5 sigma (actually 5.1). This means they are 99.9999% sure it exists. Reports to follow
I figured it was only a matter of time. The people they were calling in to check out the data were quite notable, and they seemed rather excited. This is pretty cool!
It doesn't matter yet. It very well could matter. The question is there a way to manipulate the field. If so, we could manipulate gravity. And that very much fucking matters. We might be years, decades or centuries away from that. But we finally have the potential to really do it.
Break it down for the thinking impaired: what is this particle and how does it factor into physics/science?
Its the particle that gives every other particle in the universe mass. It seems the reason anything has mass is certain particles (all those that travel at sub-light speeds) suffer a kind of 'drag' as they move through an all-permeating field of Higgs particles. It also means the standard model of particle physics really does appear to be correct.
For the uninitiated like myself. The guy kind of looks like Gandolf with glasses, so he's gotta know what he's talking about. [YT="What is the Higgs Boson?"]QG8g5JW64BA[/YT]
Au Contraire. The Higgs Boson is a very massive particle. Ehhhh kind of. It's a boson (i.e. a force mediating particle that does not follow the Pauli Exclusion Principle, has an integer spin value, and follows Bose-Einstein Statistics), but it's not in the same category of a photon or a gluon, which are massless bosons. It's more like a W particle, which is a massive boson.
No worries. Nevertheless, that still leaves unresolved the question of what gives the Higgs boson mass!
It's the Higgs field that gives particles mass, including it's associated particle - the Higgs boson. Mass is just a resistance to acceleration, and the Higgs field causes particles to resist acceleration.
From what my nuclear physics friend tells me, the sigma just means we're sure it's a particle, but there's still a ton of tests to run before it can be declared the Higgs Boson.
That's not true. They've said that there's less than 1 in a million chance that it isn't the Higgs Boson.
There's a one in a million chance their mass readings are wrong. That's it. They have a new boson but they don't know exactly what. They can call it the Higgs Boson for now but even the articles posted by the BBC show a lot of ambivalence. From the CERN website: The results presented today are preliminary, as the data from 2012 is still under analysis. The complete analysis is expected to be published around the end of July. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson. In other words, wait. I haven't been in science too long, but I know how the media reports on things and I know how things can be misconstrued. I'm going to wait for CERN's official findings in a month. In the meantime, we found a new particle, so YAY SCIENCE
No, Talkahuano is correct. 100%. All of the news outlets that are accurately reporting the scientists tend to contain the caveat "...pending further data collection and analysis". EDIT: She beat me to it.
I'm hoping it IS the Higgs. That would be FANTASTIC. I just have a thing against declaring absolutes before the scientists do.
There's much more experimental evidence for this. IIRC all possible fields permeate all of space. They can never be completely absent because of the uncertainty principle and some of them have non-zero resting states - that is, the point of least excitement which they seek to return to and tend to be very near, is not zero. The field that causes dark energy, driving the expansion of the universe, is one of these. I need to read up on this stuff again though. When I do, I can attain some (very basic) understanding of how it all works but it soon falls out of my head again!
That's pretty much how it works for me, too. While I'm reading the book or the article, I can just about grasp the thing. Then when I'm done it fades like a lost dream until I have a sort of cartoon understanding.
Zero spin is still integer spin. That distinguishes it from Fermions which have half integer spins. +1/2, -1/2, etc.
So even though Higgs Boson has no mass, it can acquire it? This means we can concoct artificial gravity? or artificial weightlessness, here on the planet?
