Juud

Fermilab and CERN in a race to find it.
Momentous science.

What is it and why is its discovery so important?

Anybody?

Maxbert

I think it all relates to dark matter, and to this mysterious "missing mass" which those in the know keep talking about- A major mystery for physicists studying the universe.

On a related note, some folk predicted the end of the world when the CERN machine was (briefly) switched on, hollering about black holes being created and released into the centre of the planet

Importance to us mere mortals? Questionable...

Maxbert

airfoilmod

not much. The Graviton used to be the accepted "particle" counterpart of Gravity. Now, not so much. The Higg's boson is predicted with "lie Algebra-" (Lee...). The boson is supposed to "appear after" some protonesque collision at CERN, accompanied by clusters of unit solid matter, a "singularity" (very small). that may oscillate through the Earth, gobbling matter at a prodigious rate, eventually "unitizing Earth" unto our utter doom. (We may have about ten years or so.....)

Second attempt.........
Ummm.. The more energy you pack into a place, the more wonderful stuff you can make without having the slightest idea what it is?

K?...............

James 1077

The Higgs bosun is a theoretical particle which, if it is discovered, would explain how things have mass.

At the moment mass (and therefore weight) is simply an illusion with no basis in physics (at least that is what I tell myself when I stand on the bathroom scales).

It is known as the God Particle as that is the name of a book that popularised the theory of its existance; also it is the only particle of the Standard Model of particle physics which has not yet been discovered - if it were to be discovered then we would have a better understanding of how the universe was created, how it evolved and how (and if) it will eventually destruct.

At least that is what the plan is!

SMT Member

Am presently reading Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything" which has, as you might imagine, an answer to almost everything. It's all very complicated, but I'll the best I can, as shortly as possible.

Ahem.

We're dealing with the sub-atomic world, in other words with bits that are very much smaller than, well, very small bits. Exceedingly small actually, smaller than it's possible to imagine. And they act in a way that's fundamentally different from how bigger things act; the atomic (and sub-atomic) worlds are like nothing we're used to.

The sub-atomic world, also known as quarks, are arranged into 6 categories, referred to as flavours by those who know what they're talking about, and further divided into the colours red, green and blue. This is called the Standard Model, and consists of six quarks, sex leptons, five known bosons and a postulated sixth, the Higgs boson (named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs), plus three or four physical forces: the strong and week nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. The arrangement essentially is that among the basic building blocks of matter are quarks.; these are held together by particles called gluons; and together quarks and gluons form protons and neutrons, the stuff of the atom's nucleus.

Leptons are the source of of electrons and neutrinos. Quarks and leptons together are called fermions. Bosons (named after the Indian physicist S. N. Bose) are particles that producd and carry forces, and include photons and gluons.

The Higgs boson may or may not actually exist; it was invented simply as of way of endowing particles with mass. This is because the Standard Model does not allow for gravity, and therefore cannot explain mass.

In an attempt to draw everything together, physicist have come up with something called superstring theory. This postulates that all those little tings like quarks and leptons that we had previously thought of as particles are actually "strings" - vibrating strands of energy that oscillate in eleven (!) dimension, consisting of the three we know alredy plus time and seven other dimensions that are, well, unknowable to us. The strings are very tiny - tine enough to pass for point particles.

The physicists Michio Kaku explains the structure of the universe from as superstring perspective as such: "The heterotic string consists of a closed string that has two types of vibrations, clockwise and counter-cclockwise, which are treated differently. The clockwise vibrations live in a ten-dimensional space. The counter-clockwise line in a twenty-six-dimensional space, of which sixteen dimensions have been compactified .... etc ad nausem for 350 pages.

Phew!

In other words, if they find the Higgs boson, they'll have proved that particles have mass. Which is very significant, but please don't ask me why!

ampclamp

[QUOTE]plus three or four physical forces: the strong and week nuclear forces, and electromagnetism[/QUOTE]

I hear the week nuclear force is only good for 7 days?!

Crosshair

Is it the God particle, or a God particle?

A lot depends on the particle's article.

Definitely.

Buster Hyman

Or, is the God Particle a Male or a Female?

Crosshair

Depends on the flavor.

That's quarks, I guess.

Scrubbed

The God Particle is just above the banjo string.

Loose rivets

Glad you asked that Juud.


Now, as I was saying earlier....

It was some years ago that Leon Lederman wrote the God Particle. It was a smashing book that described well, the Standard Model - as it was understood in the 80s. The heavy end of Pop Science, I would say.

Written with humor, including the joke about a skinny bloke that had to clean the inside of a huge gun barrel that was to be used to...I forget, some scientific thing. Anyway, he resigned, and Lederman comes out with the "Where are we going to get another man of that caliber?" joke. Boom boom.

He, (Leon, not the skinny bloke,) was director of Fermi Lab at a time when the Americans were intending to build the SuperColider, a vast atom-smasher in the NW Panhandle of Texas, and indeed beyond. It was so huge that it went past budget before they'd really started the tunneling bit. Never has there been such a huge man-made hole. In fact, it's so huge, the some Senators wanted it filled with concrete - to stop any future bright sparks thinking that they could reinstate the project. They had it explained to them that there was not that much concrete available in the entire US at that time.

Now you may think I'm topped up with me usual bottle of plonk...and you'd be right, but the above story is true...as I lean on my shovel.

The professor had the president's ear, and it seems the the man in the top-job was very well versed in the sciences, and really wanted to know what we were made of. But, towards the end of the book, the dark clouds were forming and the project was eventually canceled.

So, what is the Higgs all about? Well, I think SMT has towed the party line...no room for lateral thinkers when each experiment costs 4.7 billion dollars. But just to confuse the issue, Google Higgs field.

To me, it's all about accepting the fact that space is made of something. One can't get much further with any modern theory if you don't accept that. Don't worry about Dark Matter...think of the reason for Dark Energy.

Why is there a reason for an Increasing rate of Expansion? I would have it that the universe is unpacking simply because it wants to. Nothing we don't see every day in material objects, altering much in the way the atomic structure of a steel spring 'wants' to be returned to a certain form.

Not too hard to see, but it requires this 'fabric of space' thing to be real.

Some would have us believe that the Cosmological Constant is equivalent to the energy of empty space. Dark Energy: a repulsive gravity. I'm not happy with this, but it doesn't matter what I think for now. Again, just believing that space, or Spacetime, is something, not a void, is what we have to do.

Now the thing is that the standard model has a very serious problem. Something is missing. All of the little bits get stuck together well enough, and their conglomerations have a certain attraction to each other...but that's where the problem starts. Gravity is totally unexplained. Sure, Einstein enabled us to map it out...to be able to set our watches when we go fast, but he didn't really explain why one lump of something, attracts another......not only for trillions of miles, but forever. Mind you, diminishing on the inverse square-law, makes the power of gravity a teenzy bit weak after our lump is taken to Wiggan, but the fact is, it is theoretically 'felt' 'tother side of the universe. Why?

Dunno.

Sorry, but I don't. And nor does anyone else. Spacetime distorts when matter is present, and the way it does this can be calculated by Einstein's rules. But the way in which that blob of matte causes that distortion - or conversely, why the distortion presents itself as matter - is what we need to know.

This is the tough bit. I don't believe in a particle being the answer...anymore than I believe in gravitons. What I do think is...well, I've said a dozen times on PPRuNe, Something like the fabric of space flowing into matter, will be the answer. I would also have it that matter is changing scale to cause this, but that's just me. I'm probably way off the mark, but what the Higgs might be doing is causing that distortion at the point that spacetime converts to matter.

A point and a time when the energy in spacetime suddenly transmutes into matter and attains the property of mass. A change that is felt across the universe. This energy was in the fabric of space, but now lies in a new form, but containing unimaginable energy - until something triggers another change of state.

The Higgs just could be the mechanism that causes virtual particles to 'boil' out of space, and disappear again before having a chance to say hello. Something has to hold spacetime in this new form for billions of years - I've long wondered what held a minute curvature of spacetime into the atoms of a diamond, for example. Put it down, and as long as no one nicks it, it won't change much for a million years. All that sub-atomic activity going on, yet the gem will appear much as is did when it was cut.

Then of course, this stability could be due to the fact that the entire structure of reality is a plethora of waves on our expanding universe. The consistency just a stable wave on the structure of dark matter Edit...Er, energy. Shoot, that was a nice bottle of plonk...and I don't think anyone noticed my deliberate mistake in the last word. Hic!


Loose rivets is a writer for the Merlot appreciation society.



Leon M. Lederman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.







.

henry crun

To sum up then.

Scientists postulate that there is a particle out there which they call the Higgs boson, but because it has yet to be discovered no one* knows for certain if it exists.

Have I got that right ?

* note, it is not noone, it is two words which can be, but are not usually, separated by a hyphen.

GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU

SMT Member. That’s reminiscent of the Book of Genesis; but without the begattings.

blue up

Wasn't there a Higgs Boson on E-bay last week? Could've saved all that money if the scientists had bothered to use Google.

Rollingthunder

We haven't solved this one yet....

Fermat's Last Theorem

is the name of the statement in number theory that states that:

It is impossible to separate any power higher than the second into two like powers,
or, more precisely:

If an integer n is greater than 2, then the equation an + bn = cn has no solutions in non-zero integers a, b, and c.

Caution: Will cause brain burn-out.

Oops, I think it was solved but drove the solver mad.

Although it is a theorem now that it has been proved, the status of Fermat's Last Theorem before then, in spite of the name, was that of a conjecture, a mathematical statement whose status (true or false) had not been conclusively settled.

Captain Stable

No, that's the Higg's BOSON.

The Higgs bosun is someone Able Seaman Draper met on his voyages around the fleshpots of Port Said, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Montevideo, etc.

Tyres O'Flaherty

Thought some clever chaps had sorted it ?!?


http://fermatslasttheorem.**********...of-for-n3.html


Fermat's Last Theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia





Rivets - was lucky enough to buy a copy of the Leiderman book from the library for 50p. He's a very funny man.

I'd recommend it to anyone

Rollingthunder

OK, forget Fermat.

Explain Stonehenge.

Who could be convinced they had to carve and transport tons of stones from far away to there for a good reason?

ArthurR

Rollingthunder, easy to explain, the global alarmists have been here before, and this was an answer to global cooling as it was then, this would trap the sun light and prevent a second ice age, this idea was proclaimed by the great arch druid Alumini Gore, who just so happened to own a stone quarry.

Scrubbed

Apparently the Jesus Nut is the one that holds the rotors on top of the rotor mast on a HelioCopter. If it cums loose, all you hear is, "JESUS!!!!!!"