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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/s...ggs-boson-is-shrouded-in-secrecy-at-cern.html
This may be bigger news than Obamacare, but won't get as much reporting. I don't know if the date was chosen on purpose, but on July 4th there will be a press conference from two teams at CERN, and it is widely expected (or doubted) that they will proclaim to have confirmed the existence of the Higg's Boson, the particle in the Standard Model of physics that give every other particle mass.
Now, “everyone” knows that the Higg's boson is likely to exist because the Standard Model has been pretty much confirmed by many other experiments and measurements (apart from the blip earlier when everyone panicked over faster than light Neutrinos). The exciting thing is not finding the boson itself. The exciting this is what hints can be found beyond the boson.
Depending on the data presented on the 4th of July, we may get the first indication about where to direct the physics efforts in the decades to come, and where we should look for clues about the real essence of the universe.
Like one of my scientists friends tried to explain to me: the collider is like a crash test for cars. “You accelerate the particles to the speed of light, and then smash them into something. The wreck you find is often not the interesting thing, but rather the tyre tracks in the concrete and the break patterns of the steel, and that. That's what interesting, and that's sort of what everyone is looking for.”
So, if the scientists at CERN confirm the existence of the Higg's boson, they'll be presenting data that details the particle breakage and tyre tracks and that, and that information can hint as to what type of universe we live in. Is is a superstring one, or a many worlds one? This is exciting, and this is big.
Maybe even bigger than Obamacare.
This may be bigger news than Obamacare, but won't get as much reporting. I don't know if the date was chosen on purpose, but on July 4th there will be a press conference from two teams at CERN, and it is widely expected (or doubted) that they will proclaim to have confirmed the existence of the Higg's Boson, the particle in the Standard Model of physics that give every other particle mass.
Now, “everyone” knows that the Higg's boson is likely to exist because the Standard Model has been pretty much confirmed by many other experiments and measurements (apart from the blip earlier when everyone panicked over faster than light Neutrinos). The exciting thing is not finding the boson itself. The exciting this is what hints can be found beyond the boson.
Depending on the data presented on the 4th of July, we may get the first indication about where to direct the physics efforts in the decades to come, and where we should look for clues about the real essence of the universe.
Like one of my scientists friends tried to explain to me: the collider is like a crash test for cars. “You accelerate the particles to the speed of light, and then smash them into something. The wreck you find is often not the interesting thing, but rather the tyre tracks in the concrete and the break patterns of the steel, and that. That's what interesting, and that's sort of what everyone is looking for.”
So, if the scientists at CERN confirm the existence of the Higg's boson, they'll be presenting data that details the particle breakage and tyre tracks and that, and that information can hint as to what type of universe we live in. Is is a superstring one, or a many worlds one? This is exciting, and this is big.
Maybe even bigger than Obamacare.
