Posted on 12/06/2001 4:46:03 AM PST by Darth Reagan
You guys suck. At least we programmers and analysts can get stuff working! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Creationism is the Commerce Clause of theology.
That's funny; I use the same argument to demonstrate that curiosity is the blessing of man.
Oh, is that so? Well, just you think what would happen if particle physics stopped working. The vacuum would become unstable and spacetime would go all non-differentiable, and then you'd be sorry!
Quantum wavefunctions make up the roof over your head and the bread you eat, and don't you fergit it, boy.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just witnessed what happens when a classicly-trained PhD in Physics threatens to hold his breath until he turns blue.
(Besides, I'd just reprogram the Sun SPARC UniverseStation to accommodate these minor design changes. ;^D )
Thanks for the cite. There has been a need for something like this accessible to the general reader . . .
Blessing or curse, it is who we are and what we are about.
If you believe in it, just about everything.
Prayers for GW and the Truth!
It is what it is. The result still stands, but it's not statistically strong enough to publish. Nothing can be said without more data. The usual standard in particle physics is 3 sigma to claim evidence for something, and 5 sigma to claim a discovery.
Anyway the above article seems to be their final assessment of the data, and the Higgs was nowhere to be found.
Well, that's just wrong. I don't see how anyone can make that claim. But, don't believe everything you read in the New Scientist.
If it doesn't turn up by 130Gev or so, there's going to be a lot of red-faced physicists -- claiming that it's really there because the theory says so but it must be invisible just isn't going to sit very well.
That's not the way it works, really. Most of the people who are working on this are experimentalists, and we experimentalists love a theory-killer. The holy grail of experimental physics is to discover the unexpected, or to overturn the conventional wisdom. Some theorists might be disappointed, but the results out of left field are what win the Nobel Prize.
Personally, I hope they don't find it in the hadron collider either. It would be a lot more entertaining!!
It's all one to me; I just want the truth. Nature is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be. We don't invent it, we discover it.
Ha! Shows what you know. The deep, dark secret is that the universe is actually MS-DOS 3.0 under the hood.
Why, I'll take back my quarks and leptons and go singular!
AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!
You are cruel.
I looked in there, but it didn't explain the hierarchy of gauge coupling strengths. So unless God has some supplementary texts for us, we still need to do experiments if we want to be able to do useful calculations.
Point of scientific accuracy: the Higgs mechanism may explain why quarks and leptons have mass. Most of the mass of ordinary matter, however, comes from protons and neutrons, and they don't get their mass via the Higgs mechanism, but through quantum chromodynamics. (You can't just add up quark masses to get the proton and neutron masses).
Don't take my word for it, Bozo. Read the papers coming out of the EWWG. Their first take on having found an H was at about a 97% confidence level. After they went back and got the background noise right it was more like 80% minus. Given that they only had around a dozen events to look at, they backtracked posthaste.
If a Higgs doesn't show up by 130Gev, somebody's going to have to start rethinking the Standard Model.
Hah! Particle physicists (or those who write about them) have such delusions of grandeur. Most of the secrets of the universe would remain just as secretive if the "God Particle" were discovered.
For example, we still do not understand how to compute velocity fields in turbulent flows, how to create life from inanimate matter, or how to find socks lost in the drier.
I didn't intend it personally. The New Scientist is notorious for pushing views that are, shall we say, outside of the consensus. There are always people with a different opinion; this is one case. Overall, however, very few physicists consider Higgs masses heavier than around 110 GeV to have been adequately explored. 130 GeV will take years to reach.
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