Higgs Boson a/k/a "God" Particle Likely Confirmed

In the greater scheme of things, what does this mean?  Damned if I know!  I do wonder, though, afterr reading this article, whether this particle actually exists or is it just something that's being mashed together by Mother Nature as a result of our "experiments" to try and figure out the nature of matter.  I mean, in the absence of killing kabillions of protons in these giant accelerators, does something like Higgs Boson really exist?  And if we can imagine it, how do we know that we'll ever find all the particles out there that comprise atoms and protons and -- whatever it is that actually comprises a Higgs Boson?  Won't the particles just keep getting tinier and tinier and tinier...

New Particle at World's Largest Atom Smasher is Likely Higgs Boson

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer | LiveScience.com – 4 hrs ago

Physicists are more than 99 percent sure that they've found a new elementary particle that is likely the long-sought Higgs boson.

Evidence for the new particle was reported today (July 4) by scientists from the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Researchers reported they'd seen a particle weighing roughly 125 times the mass of the proton, with a level of certainty that all but seals the deal it's the Higgs boson.

"This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for LHC's CMS experiment, said in a statement. "The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."

The Higgs, nicknamed the "God particle" (to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name), is thought to hold the key to one of the mysteries of the universe: Why do things have mass?

Its discovery represents a major step forward in our understanding of why the universe exists as it does, with matter clumping together to form galaxies, stars, planets and us, scientists say. [Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson]

To be absolutely sure they've made a true new discovery, rather than simply seen a fluke, physicists wait for enough data so that their statistics reach a level called 5 sigma, meaning that there is only a one in 3.5 million chance the signal isn't real.

"We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson of LHC's ATLAS experiment. (GeV stands for gigaelecton volts, a unit of mass roughly equivalent to the weight of a proton.) Gianotti presented the findings to loud applause from physicists gathered at CERN (LHC's home facility) to hear the LHC's results.

The LHC's CMS experiment saw signs of a new particle with a mass of 125.3 GeV at a certainty level of 4.9 sigma.

"As a layman I would now say, I think we have it," CERN director general Rolf Heuer said during a presentation at the Geneva, Switzerland lab reporting the results today. "Do you agree?" he asked the gathered physicists, who responded with loud applause.

The Higgs boson is the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the reigning theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model. Yet the model does not predict what its mass is, so physicists have to search through a wide territory to find it. The researchers can't yet be absolutely sure that the new particle they've found actually is the Higgs.

"The work now is to actually measure its quantum identity (all its quantum properties)," Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, who was in the audience at the LHC announcement, told LiveScience in an email. "Then we can say if it THE minimal standard model Higgs or a Higgs look-alike. We have been propelled to the future of particle physics towards the understanding of the fundamental properties of our universe in its entirety."

The LHC is the most powerful machine on Earth, capable of smashing protons together to produce huge explosions of energy that transform into new and exotic particles inside its 17-mile (27 kilometer) underground loop. Yet the Higgs boson is so rare only one out of a trillion of the collisions inside the accelerator are likely to produce it, and even then, it decays almost immediately into other particles.

"This is not a needle in a haystack — it's much worse than a needle in a haystack," said Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill.

Over the past few years, researchers have been able to exclude certain possible masses for the Higgs, narrowing the possible window for Higgs further and further. Just this week, Fermi scientists announced that data from the largest U.S. particle accelerator, the Tevatron (which shut down last year), show the Higgs, if it exists at all, must have a mass between 115 and 135 GeV.

In December 2011, the LHC teams announced their latest findings, which restricted the Higgs to a mass between115 and 130 GeV, though with less certainty than the new Tevatron results.

"This is a really special time," said Fermilab physicist Dan Green, a member of LHC's CMS experiment, said Monday (July 2). "I remember when the top [quark] was discovered 20 years ago. This is one of the most exciting weeks I've had for a very long time."

Today's findings come from the two general-purpose experiments at LHC, ATLAS and CMS. Both observed particle collisions independently and analyzed their observations separately. In fact, scientists from each team were not allowed to tell each other what they found until today, for fear their results would bias the other experiment's researchers toward looking for the same results.

Fascinating Interview with Roger Penrose

Check out this article of Roger Penrose at Discover Magazine online. There is some fascinating discussion on quantum physics - oh, I know I know, sounds horridly boring. But it's not! Great stuff. Penrose has the bullocks to say that current quantum theory is all wrong because, as I understand what he's saying, it cannot account for what humans actually see and experience as existence. He expects it is some mechanism that is elegantly simple, and that the universe and the human brain run on the same principles. Wow! Penrose comes from a tremendously accomplished and achieving family. His younger brother, Jonathan Penrose (a psychiatrist), was British Chess Champion 10 times, between 1958 and 1969. From Discover Magazine online

Discover Interview

Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics One of the greatest thinkers in physics says the human brain—and the universe itself—must function according to some theory we haven't yet discovered. by Susan Kruglinski; photography by Oliver Chanarin From the September 2009 issue, published online October 6, 2009 Here are some parts of the interview: So I assume your father helped spark your discovery of Penrose tiles, repeating shapes that fit together to form a solid surface with pentagonal symmetry. It was silly in a way. I remember asking him—I was around 9 years old—about whether you could fit regular hexagons together and make it round like a sphere. And he said, “No, no, you can’t do that, but you can do it with pentagons,” which was a surprise to me. He showed me how to make polyhedra, and so I got started on that. Are Penrose tiles useful or just beautiful? My interest in the tiles has to do with the idea of a universe controlled by very simple forces, even though we see complications all over the place. The tilings follow conventional rules to make complicated patterns. It was an attempt to see how the complicated could be satisfied by very simple rules that reflect what we see in the world. The artist M. C. Escher was influenced by your geometric inventions. What was the story there? In my second year as a graduate student at Cambridge, I attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. I remember seeing one of the lecturers there I knew quite well, and he had this catalog. On the front of it was the Escher picture Day and Night, the one with birds going in opposite directions. The scenery is nighttime on one side and daytime on the other. I remember being intrigued by this, and I asked him where he got it. He said, “Oh, well, there’s an exhibition you might be interested in of some artist called Escher.” So I went and was very taken by these very weird and wonderful things that I’d never seen anything like. I decided to try and draw some impossible scenes myself and came up with this thing that’s referred to as a tri-bar. It’s a triangle that looks like a three-dimensional object, but actually it’s impossible for it to be three-dimensional. I showed it to my father and he worked out some impossible buildings and things. Then we published an article in the British Journal of Psychology on this stuff and acknowledged Escher. Escher saw the article and was inspired by it? He used two things from the article. One was the tri-bar, used in his lithograph called Waterfall. Another was the impossible staircase, which my father had worked on and designed. Escher used it in Ascending and Descending, with monks going round and round the stairs. I met Escher once, and I gave him some tiles that will make a repeating pattern, but not until you’ve got 12 of them fitted together. He did this, and then he wrote to me and asked me how it was done—what was it based on? So I showed him a kind of bird shape that did this, and he incorporated it into what I believe is the last picture he ever produced, called Ghosts.

I left out the real meat of the article so you can enjoy reading it for yourself!

Further information on tessellations (and image from) Totally Tessellated (a Thinkquest project). Ironically, the image above shows a superimposed hexagon (six-sided figure of equal sides) as being the basis for Escher's tessellated pattern.

Of course, those famous Las Vegas Showgirls, Bambi and Candi, wrote quite an article on tessellations and chess and Escher back in 2003, oooohhh!

Quantum Physics - Blow Your Mind!

I cannot comprehend how a particle can be in two places at the same time, but since that's been proven by the physicists, I have to accept that it's true. It must mean that some form of "thought travel" or "time travel" is possible, we just have to figure out how to do it - or maybe we already do it, in our dreams for instance? Anyway, here's an interesting article from the July 30 edition of Newsweek magazine that talks about the mind-boggling implications of some of the things we have learned from physics: Putting Time in a (Leaky) Bottle By Sharon Begley Newsweek July 30, 2007 issue - You can tell a lot about a subject by who its muses and mascots are. Neuroscience has philosophers who wax profound about the mind, geology has intrepid explorers and subatomic physics has ... Alice in Wonderland. "Curiouser and curiouser," as Alice said, also describes the subatomic, or quantum, world. With age, this centenarian (quantum physics is 107 years old) has gotten more bizarre. "The surprises keep coming," says physicist David Albert of Columbia University. None is greater than finding loopholes in the hallowed uncertainty principle—and, even more outlandishly, seeing hints that the future may leak into the present. Since experiments keep proving quantum ideas right, physicists are forced to take them seriously. It isn't easy. They have to admit that a particle can be in two places at once. They have to accept that subatomic systems can become so "entangled" that measuring one affects the other even if the two are light-years apart, which Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." But even as quantum weirdness provides fodder for such drivel as the best-selling book "The Secret," it also fuels debate on subjects as lofty as the nature of reality. Last week a conference at Oxford University explored the idea that every time a subatomic system reaches a decision point—to undergo radioactive decay or not, say—it chooses both possibilities: in this world the particle decays, while in a parallel world it does not. Some physicists buy this "many worlds" interpretation because the alternative is even more unpalatable: that quantum systems choose one possibility or another only when an observer looks. Einstein loathed the idea that reality is created by observers. New studies suggest, however, that it is possible to measure something without affecting it. The key is doing the experiments, well, gently. Anyone with a vague memory of Physics 101 knows that if you shine a light on what you want to measure, or stick a thermometer in it, you alter it. Taking the temperature of a steak with a cold thermometer, for instance, cools it as heat is transferred from meat to glass. You don't know what the temperature "really" was before you jabbed in the thermometer—a notion enshrined as the uncertainty principle. To circumvent this rule, Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov got the idea of making "weak measurements," akin to waving your hand over the steak to feel its heat. That's not very precise with meat, but it works with quantum measurements: if you make enough weak measurements, the average comes impressively close to the actual value, experiments are showing. "Weak measurements let you lift the veil of secrecy imposed by the uncertainty principle," says Paul Davies of Arizona State University.In one use of weak measurements, particles of light (photons) fly toward a screen, one at a time. The screen has two slits. If each photon goes through one slit, they form two bright spots on Venetian blinds beyond the screen. If each photon somehow goes through both slits, however, they form black-and-white stripes when they land on the blinds. Physicists have long known that if a device observes the slits, no zebra pattern forms; it's as if quantum phenomena are too shy to display their magic—one particle going through two slits—when watched. Weak measurements might be able to get around this by being less obtrusive; studies to try are in the works. In the meantime, experiments have put detectors on the far side of the blinds. If the blinds are open and the detectors peek at the slits, photons fly through only one slit and no zebra stripes form. If the blinds are closed so the detectors cannot see the slits, photons fly through both and form the stripes. Here's the twist: if the blinds open only after photons have passed the slits but before they reach the blinds, the stripes fail to form even though the photons have seemingly done what they must to form stripes—namely, fly through two slits, as they always do when unobserved. The act of observing alters what the photons did earlier, somehow changing things so they passed through one slit and not two. There are "many histories" a photon could have, such as passing through one slit or two, Davies writes in his new book, "Cosmic Jackpot." Making a measurement "chooses which [history] existed." That interpretation remains speculative, but weak measurements may indeed show that "something that happens now is affected by something that happens in the future," says physicist Jeff Tollaksen of George Mason University. "It suggests that the universe has a destiny—a destiny that is out there and coming back to us from the future." Maybe physicists should replace Alice with a new muse: Trafalmadorians, who in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" saw past, present and future all at once like a landscape, each moment ever present. © 2007 Newsweek, Inc.