No Sign of the God ParticleFrom the masses and interactions of other particles that we know exist, physicists calculated that the Higgs is most likely to have a mass (or energy) of around 80 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). If particle accelerators smash particles together at that energy or higher, it should be possible to make one. This is what members of the Electroweak Working Group at CERN were doing for the 5 years until LEP (the Large Electron Positron Collider) closed down last year. Since then they've been sifting through the data they gathered--and found nothing. They rule out most possible masses for the Higgs, including the ones considered most likely. "It's more likely than not that there is no Higgs," says working group member John Swain of Northeastern University in Boston... [L]ast year researchers from another group at LEP claimed they had found the Higgs... [b]ut they later admitted to having botched their calculations in the heat of the moment... Frank Wilczek, a particle physics theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology... says he'll start to get uncomfortable if the Higgs doesn't show up by about 130 GeV. "Then I would have a good long think," he says... David Plane, head of LEP's OPAL experiment, is still certain that the Higgs will eventually be found. "It's just at a higher energy than we're sensitive to." ... "There is nothing remotely as plausible or compelling to replace it," says Wilczek. Supersymmetry, which predicts every particle is paired with a heavier partner, is a popular idea. But LEP's results are even worse news for this theory, as it predicts several Higgs particles. The lightest one would have turned up at even lower energies, and couldn't exist above 130 GeV.
Eugenie Samuel
December 5, 2001
“Consciousness is the ground of allbeing.” — Dr. Amit Goswami.
“Consciousness is the ground of all being.” — Dr. Amit Goswami.
Is there a Theory of Everything? By all means, and Murphy voiced it best: “If something can go wrong, it will.”
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Greene:“A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.”
So what if each aspect has its own set of laws? Together, they form the whole and transform nothing-ness into something-ness.
Sure, but it tends to disappear as soon as the pot wears off.
