Scientists may have found "God particle"

[Fenris]

'God particle' may have been seen

By Paul Rincon
BBC News Online science staff

A scientist says one of the most sought after particles in physics - the Higgs boson - may have been found, but the evidence is still relatively weak.

Peter Renton, of the University of Oxford, says the particle may have been detected by researchers at an atom-smashing facility in Switzerland.

The Higgs boson explains why all other particles have mass and is fundamental to a complete understanding of matter.

More

[scottcsmith]

1. Really?

You know, I have a book on this subject that's been in my bookshelf, unread, for about a year. Maybe it's time to crack it open.

[Catch22Dem]

2. Isn't called

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown? :evilgrin:

[Spider Jerusalem]

27. "The God Particle", by Leon Lederman?

If that's it, it's a fairly good book (gives a pretty decent overview of particle physics for the layman, as well, and Lederman actually has a sense of humour.)

[grannylib]

36. Fabulous book, I agree completely. I am no scientist at all, but I

thoroughly enjoyed that book.

[MrMonk]

3. Found the particle -- next they calculate its precise mass.

[Cush]

4. what is the "God Particle"?

I sucked at chemistry and never took physics, so in english please ;-)

[pmbryant]

7. Here's the summary from the BBC article

Physicists have observed 16 particles that make up all matter under the Standard Model of fundamental particles and interactions.

But the sums do not quite add up for the Standard Model to be true if these particles are considered alone. If only 16 particles existed, they would have no mass - contradicting what we know to be true in nature.

Another particle has to give them this mass. Enter the Higgs boson, first proposed by University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs and colleagues in the late 1960s.

Their theory was that all particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field, which is carried by the Higgs boson.

The Higgs' importance to the Standard Model has led some to dub it the "God particle".

I hope that helps. :-)

If you read the BBC article, though, it becomes clear that they haven't really found the Higgs boson yet.

--Peter

[jmowreader]

14. In my very bad physics...

Remember when we were in school and they told us that all matter was composed of atoms, and atoms were composed of protons and electrons?

Now they have better atom smashers, and they've figured out that all matter is still composed of atoms, but the atoms are composed of sixteen different kinds of basic particles:

Six Quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. Quarks participate in "strong interactions"--they decay like mad, and they have a high electrical charge. A proton is made of two up quarks and a down quark. (Oh. Remember they said a neutron is a proton and an electron bonded together? Turns out it's two down quarks and one up quark--the proton's evil twin cousin Skippy.

Three Leptons: the Electron, the muon and the tau. These don't participate in strong interactions; in other words, they're reasonably stable. They have a moderate electrical charge.

Three Neutrinos: electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino. These are leptons with no electrical charge. They take up space but have no mass.

Four Bosons: the photon, Z boson, W bozon and gluon. The boson is the "carrier particle" of all interactions--when another particle decays, this is what comes out.

This they call the Standard Model. But there is one thing missing: a field that gives all of these particles mass. This is the Higgs field, and it comes from the Higgs boson. Because it is the source of all mass in the universe, they call it the God Particle.

They didn't know this when you and I were young pups because they were still buying atom smashers out of the Johnson Smith catalog. (They're on page 39, between the pepper gum and the whoopee cushions.) An atom smasher works by accelerating particles to ludicrous speed, then driving it into an atom and seeing what comes out. Ludicrous speed is measured in electron volts, and you need a lot of them to get the Higgs boson to fall out; 115 gigaelectronvolts (giga means billion; 115 gigaelectronvolts means they had the thing turned up all the way--the University of Cambridge says there ain't no mo in that old cyclotron) is required. But now that they have really powerful atom smashers, they can find out more than we knew in the 1970s, as one would expect.

This test was done at CERN, the European high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, where they are building a new cyclotron because the old one--the one they think they found the Higgs boson in--wasn't big enough.

And just to add a small Bush slam to this post, these big-ass cyclotrons are jam packed with genuine Government Funding. They're so expensive they can't be built any other way. The one at Fermilab has $120 million in it.

[Dudley_DUright]

16. Acually your physics is quite good

but you forgot one boson, the graviton, carrier of the gravitational force (unlike the others you mentioned, it has not been detected experimentally but thought to exist).

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Graviton.html

[jmowreader]

20. I was using Stanford's "high-energy physics for beginners" page

The one that doesn't contain a definition for "cyclotron" because they have a linear accelerator. I figure they're missing a few other things too.

The only physics I get to play with much anymore is loading on construction; it's handy to be able to whip out the cheap old calculator I pack around on the floor (I will be damned if I take my HP-41 to work in a lumberyard) and figure out how large a board the customer will need to do their project right.

[TXlib]

17. One nitpick

in addition to the graviton bit...

Atoms are composed of three particles, up quarks, down quarks (which combine differently to produce protons and neutrons) and electrons.

All the other quarks and leptons are unstable and decay quickly into the first generation (u, d, e).

[Dudley_DUright]

19. One nitpick with your nitpick

You are right about the muon and tau being unstable and decaying into electrons, but the muon neutrino and tau nueutrino are stable leptons (although they may be able to convert into each other via neutrino oscillations). :-)

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/lepton.html

[TXlib]

23. You are correct

My bad; error of ommision. I didn't want to split hairs too finely.

In fact neutrino oscillation is the proposed mechanism that causes us to observe too few solar neutrinos. (But I bet you already knew that!) ;)

[Dudley_DUright]

38. But of course

the famous solar neutrino problem discovered by 2002 Nobel Prize winner Ray Davis using his giant vat of cleaning fluid. :-)

http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/2002/davis-autobio.html

[SmileyBoy]

5. Is this the so-called "Dark Matter"???

The particle that's the base for everything that exists???

[Dudley_DUright]

8. No, dark matter needs to be a stable particle with mass

The Higgs particle is unstable but it is needed by the standard particle of physics to provide a mechanism in order to give all other particles mass (otherwise they would be massless like a photon). See the following article:

Physicists from all over the world are racing to prove the existence of a particle that's surmised to be at the heart of the matter. Literally.

Dubbed the "God particle" by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, the Higgs boson is a controversial particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles.

Scientists are hoping to discover traces of its presence in Fermilab's Tevatron, a 7-mile-long circumference particle accelerator that smashes opposing beams of protons and antiprotons around a circular track, sifting through the debris with two immense detectors called CDF and D0

Because it plays a key role in the standard model of physics (the theory on which physicists base their whole understanding of matter), proving the existence or absence of the Higgs boson could rock the entire foundation of physics, indicating the existence of particles and forces not yet imagined and paving the way for an entirely new set of laws.

The Higgs boson is interesting because it is the only reasonable explanation we have for the origin of mass," says Dave Rainwater, a researcher at FermiLab. "Without the Higgs, all fundamental particles would be massless, and the universe would be very different. The weak nuclear forces wouldn't be weak at all, for instance, so the elemental composition of the cosmos would be radically different, stars would shine differently, and we probably wouldn't exist."


more...

http://www.globaltechnoscan.com/22ndAug-28thAug02/Higgs_boson.htm

[TXlib]

18. What dark matter is

'Dark matter' simply refers to nonluminous matter. It may not be exotic.

It was originally inferred when astrophysicists realised that the observed rotational rates of galaxies implied much more mass was present in them (about a factor of 10 more) than could be inferred from the collective luminosity of the stars in that galaxy.

Dark matter consists, in part, of mundane matter -- cold gas and dust, and things made up of cold gas and dust (rocks and planets).

It may also include compact stellar remnants - black holes, white dwarfs and neutron stars, assuming that they are not announcing their presence via jets from accretion disks, etc.

It may also be that neutrinos -- usually assumed massless -- may, in fact, possess some small amount of mass. No experiment yet performed has managed to detect nonzero neutrino mass, but we have been able to measure the upper boundary of neutrino mass through increasingly sensitive experiments. Here is a fairly recent (1999) article which summarizes an experiment that put this upper limit at 0.2 eV for an electron neutrino (about 2.6 million times lighter than an electron!).

Such massive neutrinos are one example of what are called WIMPs -- weakly interacting massive particles, which is a fancy way of saying that they have mass (which we infer gravitationally), but that they rarely interact with the quarks and leptons that make up normal matter. How weakly do they interact? Well, it would take a column of lead about 15 lightyears long or so (I worked this problem in grad school, and the number was somewhere between 11 and 18) to cut the intensity of a neutrino beam by half.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

24. galaxies spin faster than their observed mass allows for because

God is messing with you...there is no dark matter.

theProdigal

</couldn't resist>

[TXlib]

25. Ummm

:eyes:

[ProdigalJunkMail]

26. don't you roll your eyes at me

I'll roll that little head of yours down on the floor (name that quote)

:-) Come on...just a little fun? please...all these religion threads I post on are too intense...

Ok, i'll stop...you win
theProdigal

[TXlib]

28. Bill Cosby, doing one of his standup routines

That, or Eddy Murphy, but I'm pretty sure it was Cosby.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

34. go with the first one!

from 'Himself'.

Sorry to jump into your physics nit-picking (your word, not mine) :-)

Thanks for the interesting reading...
theProdigal

[TXlib]

35. Sokay

I knew you were just messing with me.

[pmbryant]

6. Sounds very much up in the air still

From the BBC article:

"There's certainly evidence for something, whether it's the Higgs boson is questionable," Dr Renton, a particle physicist at Oxford, told BBC News Online.

"It's compatible with the Higgs boson certainly, but only a direct observation would show that."

(snip)

However, there is a 9% probability that the signal could be background "noise".

(snip)

"It's controversial. The data is possibly indicative, but it needs confirmation," said Bryan Webber, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge.

So I don't think they've really found it yet. A 9% probability that this could be merely noise is huge. And even if it's something real, they don't sound exactly positive that it's the particle they're looking for.

--Peter

[papau]

12. a 9% probability that the signal could be background "noise" - & mass too

low!

but it is interesting.

Now how do strings make a Higgs?

and not by "unknown vibrating in 10 dimensions"

no really - how does String theory blend into particle theory and the Higgs field?

[ClintonTyree]

9. Will Mel Gibson.................

make a movie about this now?

[Dudley_DUright]

10. LOL

Now that is a movie I would love to see.

[cprise]

11. Yes

Gibson will himself portray the second coming,
and we shall see him crucified on a super-collider with God Particles coming out of his butt.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

13. Still a slight problem with the entire "atom-smashing" paradigm

which very few ever mention.... are we seeing reality in an atom smasher? Can mankind truly generate the randomness needed to achieve the real particles?

I think not.

I doubt we have the depth of understanding to even know what we are seeing.

[Dudley_DUright]

15. I am not sure what you mean by

"randomness needed to achieve the real particles". We create real particles in particle accelerators all the time via E=mc^2. While there are still lots of open questions, we do have a pretty good model of particle physics that explains what we are seeing quite well (the so called "standard model"). One problem is that theorists are way ahead of experimentalists since to directly probe string theory requires high energies and small length scales that are unattainable with current technology (you would need a particle accelerator the diameter of the milky way galaxy, which congress probably would not fund :-) ).

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

21. that is what I mean exactly.... we do not KNOW that the particles

we are seeing are the ones which occur in unobserved atoms, do we?

Heisenberg, I think was the guy behind this thought burp.

[TXlib]

22. well...

The higher-energy particles created (charm/strange quarks, top/bottom quarks, mu and tau leptons, and vector bosons W+/- and Z) are all short-lived and decay into other things. They don't exist in any atoms at the current universe's temperature.

They can get produced in high-energy events (neutron stars, supernovae, cosmic rays hitting scattering off other particles), but are otherwise quite rare in the universe; the vector bosons usually exist as 'virtual' particles.

Perhaps your point is whether the models we devise in physics are descibing "reality", or merely useful tools for measuring and predicting.

The bit about Heisenburg... you aren't referring to the uncertainty principle, are you (that is something altogether different, if so).

[northzax]

33. I think the problem lies

in a confusion about the Uncertainty Principle and the value of experimental data in this sort of circumstance. Because modern supercolliders (are there non-modern supercolliders?) allow us to experimentally test what had once been only theoretical, we
can potentially fall into the trap of creating experiments that replicate our theoretical models, not neccesarilty what actually occurs outside the experiemental field. Obviously, we cannot, at this time, venture into a neutron star and confirm that our experiemtnal data is a replica of what actually happens there. Could it be poccilbe that we are creating phenomenon in our supercolliders that does not actually happen anywhere in nature? we do it in biology, chemistry, why not physics?

[Squeegee]

41. But does it provide useful results?

I mean, even if what we see in experiments isn't correct or even remotely close to "reality", the fact of the matter is: If it describes observation 99.999% of the time and provides some of useful results that are applicable, then it's good enough until some better theory or experiment comes along to displace the currently held beliefs or results. For instance, Quantum Mechanics may not completely or accurately describe what 'really' goes on at the subatomic level, but the theories and investigations based on those theories lead scientist to create better and faster microchips, violet color LEDs, unbreakable encryption, photoic circuits, HD-DVD players, solid state video cameras, etc., etc., etc. At some later date, QM may be displaced by some better theory that more accurately describes the nature of reality at the quamtum level that leads scientists to discover interstellar warp drive, teleportation, or anti-gravity. It may still not be totally correct (or even close), but the results speak for themselves.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

43. Well, yes it seems, now talking THEORRETICALLY... that we

cannot observe anything within the atom without possibly disrupting it, right?

I know this stuff is most likely right, and right in 99.9999999% of all cases, but...

what if the 0.00000001% chance happens to be putting someone into prolonged sleep for a trip to, oh, say Alpha Centauri or something? Is that an acceptable risk?
Is that close enough?

See what I am getting at?

[central scrutinizer]

29. this site may help

<>

<>

more at

http://www.besse.at/sms/matter.html

[TXlib]

31. That's from the book _Science Made Stupid_

I got that book when I was in HS. Funny book.

[northzax]

30. you people are just making this shit up, aren't you?

I just scenned my bible and found no reference to quarks, either up or down quarks. (and "strange" what kind of name is that?) and just to be safe, I doulbe checked the Baghavad gita, the Torah and the Koran, nothing. Heck, there isn't even anything in the Book of Mormon or even Dianetics, so I'm pretty sure y'all are making this stuff up to help 'scientists' keep sucking at the government teat, aren't you? admit it.

[TXlib]

32. What's really scary

is I know people who honest-to-god believe that.

Except they only consulted the bible, since the others are bunk anyway. :eyes:

[toddzilla]

does this have any implications on string theory?

EOM.

[TXlib]

39. Huh?

I may be able to answer, if you're more specific.

[qb]

37. Will someone please tell me where this particle is located?

I need to know where to direct my prayers.

[northzax]

40. question: since the Hobbs Bosun

apparently represents the source of mass, will we now see Dr. Atkin's Even News Diet Revouktion instructing us to cut all Hobbs Bosuns out of our diet?

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

42. Probably just as useful as cutting out carbs....

ducks... runs for cover and concealment.... checks magazine, clears action.... standing by to repel boarders.