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.
Perhaps I did not explain myself well. Tthe idea or concept of mass is "basic" or "fundamental" in the sense that it requires no advanced mathematics to understand. (Most humans have at least an vague idea that objects feel heavy and resist motion.) As I am using it, basic does not mean that the mass of an object is unchangeable.
Perhaps a better word than "basic" would be "axiomatic."
Other basic or fundamental physical concepts are length, time, and (perhaps) force. Most people have an intuitive feel for these concepts; they cannot really be explained in terms of simpler concepts.
BTW, under what circumstances is mass convertible into energy? Einstein's famous mass-energy equation (the one equation everyone seems to have seen) implies not that mass and energy are interconvertible, but rather that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy. Increase the energy, you increase the mass.
More accurately, this is a problem that is computationally intractable for all practical purposes, which is quite a bit different than not knowing or even being theoretically impossible. There are an increasingly large number of real problems that are only "impossible" due to limitations on computational resources, not due to limitations of understanding.
I think Physicist is taking what is known as the "intuitionist" position. Loosely, intuitionists regard mathematical concepts as truths rather than as the consequences of logical or formal derivations.
Most mathematicians (and scientists, whether they know it or not) are "formalists." There is no such thing as mathematical truth. There are only theorems derived from a fundamental set of axioms -- we are free to use whatever axioms we want so long as they are consistent. One set of axioms may lead to a theorem that is demonstrably false using another set. Engineers and physicists simply pick axiom sets allowing them to describe their observations, but, fundamentally, all sets are equally valid.
Turns out that, if you take a rigorously intuitionist approach, it's pretty tough to impossible to come up with most of calculus . You can find some interesting links by searching on "axiom of choice," "Godel's Theorem," and "Lowenstein-Skolem Theorem."
That one is apparently what happens in a nuclear reaction of the atom bomb kind. The tremendous power of the bomb is due to conversion of a small amount of mass into a lot of energy. That's what they say, anyway.
As far as basic units are concerned, force is thought of as a product of the mass and the rate of change of the speed of the object. And then speed is a product of space and time. We're not real clear on what time might be, and why it is considered a dimension like height, width, and depth. It gets worse. We say space is 3-dimensional, but it is treated as 4-dimensional when they consider time, and now physicists are thinking in terms of more dimensions, 11 maybe. I don't know, I'm still open to suggestion.
Hey, at least it's stable. Although, running CHKDISK on that sucker is going to take just about forever . . .
What could be more geeky than two physics guys fighting?!?! Whaddya gonna do, slap eachother around with slide rules!??!?
;^)
You may be right, but I was trying to make a different point. The writer of the original article was engaging in hyperbole to say that the the discovery of the Higgs particle could help "unravel the secrets of the universe." Scientists talk this way when they are trying to drum up support for more public funding, but invariably they promise more than they can deliver.
Suppose the Higgs particle were discovered tomorrow. What problems in engineering, biology, or chemistry would suddenly "unravel"? Or suppose the Higgs particle were shown not to exist. Other than the particle physicists, whose work would be affected?
Most mathematicians (and scientists, whether they know it or not) are "formalists." There is no such thing as mathematical truth. There are only theorems derived from a fundamental set of axioms -- we are free to use whatever axioms we want so long as they are consistent. One set of axioms may lead to a theorem that is demonstrably false using another set. Engineers and physicists simply pick axiom sets allowing them to describe their observations, but, fundamentally, all sets are equally valid.
Thanks. Your explanation makes sense to me.
That is the usual explanation, but that is not quite what Einstein's equation implies. Any change in the energy of a system -- whether it be the result of a nuclear reactions, a chemical reaction, or a cooling breeze -- causes the mass of the system to change. Increase the energy, you increase the mass; decrease the energy, and you decrease the mass. It has nothing to do with nuclear reactions.
Mass is not converted to energy in an atom explosion; it might be more accurate to say that as the energy leaves the system, it carries mass with it.
As far as basic units are concerned, force is thought of as a product of the mass and the rate of change of the speed of the object. And then speed is a product of space and time. We're not real clear on what time might be, and why it is considered a dimension like height, width, and depth. It gets worse. We say space is 3-dimensional, but it is treated as 4-dimensional when they consider time, and now physicists are thinking in terms of more dimensions, 11 maybe. I don't know, I'm still open to suggestion.
Two points here:
1. Force is a derived unit in the SI units; however, in the so-called "English Engineering" system, force is a fundamental quantity. As a result, we end up using "pounds" to refer both to force (lbf) and to mass (lbm). (I prefer SI units.)
2. It seems to me that time is taken as a fundamental dimension because it is a basic or axiomatic concept. It is hard for me to imagine explaining time in terms of something simpler. (But like you, I'm still open to suggestion.)
Tachyon beams at 20 parsecs! Wanna make something of it?
I still remember my head throbbing the first time I saw "natural units." In that system, Planck's constant & the speed of light are unitless and everything else's unit is expressed as a fractional exponent. Never did really understand it -- I just did it.
Oh, man! That's almost a verbatim quote! It's famous, you know; Hirohito said it to Oppenheimer.
In physics class they forced us to use the term "poundal". That is the one improvement I will acknowlege the SI metric system made. We don't have to use poundals anymore, although some still do [probably at some NASA Mars contractor's facility.]
I will have to insist that during the explosion of an atom bomb, or the operation of a nuclear fission plant, some mass is irreversibly converted to energy but this does not occur in chemical reactions.
You be Dexter, I'll be Mandark. ;^)
Mathematical truth: seven cannot be factored into integers other than itself and one. Mathematical formalism: multiplication is commutative.
That is quite a leap of faith, isn't it? Not that I have anything against faith, you understand. But how can we know that there are infinitely many potential realities but only one mathematical truth?
No, I'm not going all wobbly on you. No Zen here. If you flip a coin, it's either going to be heads or tails. Both outcomes are possible (potential realities) but only one occurs. Avoiding the topic of quantum superposition, there's only one reality. But just about anything you can point to in "our" reality--including, yes, much of what we call the "laws of physics"--could consistently have been otherwise.
Al Gore might have won the election. The Greeks might have been defeated at Thermopylae. The Permo-Triassic impactor might have missed the Earth. The electroweak symmetry might have broken in such a way that photons were as massive as the Z boson. But seven would be prime regardless.
Positive integers, I mean! :^)
Two physics guys fighting over a girl.
Ah, now I see what you mean. Multiplication could have been defined so that it is not commutative. And indeed, matrix multiplication is not.
On the other hand, primality appears to be an intrinsic property of the integer seven. I cannot imagine how one could "redefine" seven to make it composite. (Unless one wanted to redefine multiplication to make that true.)
Still, I have my doubts. As Kronecker said, "God created the whole numbers; everything else was man's handiwork." Integers suffice if all we are going to do is count things. However, if we also want to measure things, we need more sophisticated mathematics. And the further we get from the integers, the more formalism is found in our mathematics. Thus we decide that multiplication of scalars is to be commutative, because it is more useful that way.
When I said that reality is more fundamental than mathematics, I was thinking that nature is always richer in detail than our mathematics. Mathematical modeling is difficult; invariably, we are forced to omit things from our models. Even the "laws" of physics turn out to be, on closer examination, merely good approximations.
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