Posted on 12/06/2001 4:46:03 AM PST by Darth Reagan
LONDON (Reuters) - After years of searching and months of sifting through data, scientists have still not found the elusive sub-atomic particle that could help to unravel the secrets of the universe, a science magazine said on Wednesday.
The Higgs boson, the missing link which could explain why matter has mass and other fundamental laws of particle physics, is still missing -- and physicists fear it may not exist.
``It's more likely than not that there is no Higgs,'' John Swain, of Northeastern University in Boston, told New Scientist magazine.
Scientists have been searching for the Higgs particle ever since Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University first proposed in the 1960s that it could explain why matter has mass.
Using the world's largest particle accelerator at the CERN (news - web sites) nuclear physics lab near Geneva, scientists had hunted for the Higgs boson, which has been dubbed the ``God particle,'' until the accelerator was closed late last year.
Accelerators hurl particles at nearly the speed of light on a collision course to break them up so scientists can study the nature of matter.
Scientists of the Electroweak Working Group at CERN, who had searched for the Higgs, said they had found no evidence of it at the energies where they had expected to find it.
``We've eliminated most of the hunting area,'' Neil Calder, of CERN, told the magazine.
New Scientist said the problem for physicists is that, without the Higgs particle, they do not have a viable theory of matter.
CERN adjourned the search for the Higgs when it closed the LEP (Large Electron-Positron) accelerator, but it is building a Large Hadron Collider that will be able to smash particles at even higher energies in 2007.
Maybe the GOD who is not a "particle" doesn't want to tell them the secrets of HIS universe...
Why, is he ashamed? Petulant? What?
RA: Were you directly involved in the SSC, or just interested in the science?
Not at all. But in a morally neutral world where scientists are scrambling to create life in a laboratory while simultaneously their counterparts are slaughtering millions of innocent babies, and a world where we've developed the ability and power to blow ourselves into oblivion, maybe He thinks it best that there are just some things we don't need to know.
Curiousity is the damnation of man. If we knew everything, we wouldn't have anything to do.
That is because they have not looked in the right place, all they need do is read Genesis one and two. They are looking for proof of the worlds evolving, you can not find proof of somethign that never happened. Oh, you can make up proof, but you can never find any real proof.
Genesis Chapter One
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Alas
Anyway, I don't know why these guys are wringing their hands about the Higgs, unless they are pushing strong electroweak sector models like I described above. LEP had a 2.5-sigma indication of a Higgs at 114 GeV just before it shut down. The only other game in town is the Tevatron at Fermilab, but that won't have enough data to make useful statements about the Higgs for a couple of years, yet.
``We've eliminated most of the hunting area,'' Neil Calder, of CERN, told the magazine.
I have no idea where this claim comes from.
Sane people turn reticent around those who hate them.
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