Higgs Boson Finally Found?

[ByFaithAlone]

http://www.usatoday....cern/55981840/1

Very cool development in science. Don't know why they call it the "God particle" other than it supposedly could be a clue for a TOE. Next step, proving string theory lol

[Leonard]

Who the heck is Higgs Boson, and when did he go missing?

[ByFaithAlone]

Who the heck is Higgs Boson, and when did he go missing?

The Higgs Boson is supposedly the particle that interacts with other particles as to give each particle a mass. As I've heard it explained, a proton interacts more readily with the Higgs Boson then does the electron, therefore, the proton appears to us to have more mass.

The Particle was not found, will never be found. Just evidence that makes them think it's there.

..............

Technically they haven't found it but the evidence indicates that the Higgs does in fact exist but if you want to get technical we don't know the electron exists either but the evidence points clearly that way. The scientific evidence points in that direction with a 1 in 16000 chance of error according to the AP.

[Denise37]

To be honest.. I don't understand y scientists keep trying to find God in science.. Throw away billions of dollars, when they have the answer clear as day.. The Bible! But, everything happens the way it does bc God wants it to..

They keep trying to prove things, when they've already been proven.. God, help us find ur glory & mercy!

[Leonard]

Higgs Boson? Wasn't he that kid on the milk carton.........?

[Sevenseas]

Higgs Boson? Wasn't he that kid on the milk carton.........?

No, that was actually a Charles Darwin who disappeared years ago. When last seen, he was reportedly on an Island somewhere trying

to fit bones together from several different animals while mumbling something about a ? Lucy? I think it was?

[ByFaithAlone]

Technically they haven't found it but the evidence indicates that the Higgs does in fact exist but if you want to get technical we don't know the electron exists either but the evidence points clearly that way. The scientific evidence points in that direction with a 1 in 16000 chance of error according to the AP.

The Particle they are looking for is the one that holds the universe together, the glue so to speak. The Word says God upholds everything by the Word of his power. It's upheld by the Word. By faith we know that by the word of God he framed these worlds. Faith is unseen, it's evidence of things not seen.

So they can look all they want, their God particle can't be found. They only evidence of what they have pointing is that something is there, that they are sure of 1-1600 chance for error. They are right, but they won't find it. If they would just open their Bible, then BAM, Mystery solved.

Blessings.

I don't know where you are getting this idea that the discovery of the Higgs eliminates God from the equation. The Higgs field only explains the mass of particles not why the universe is held together or anything like that. The entire God "particle" phrasing is disliked by most scientist and was only used by one author because the editor told him it would sound better than what he originally put.

[nebula]

The Higgs boson

First, who is Higgs? Peter Higgs is the British physicist who first theorized the existence of this "thing" as a means of filling in an unknown part to an equation. If you understand the the imaginary number in mathematics (solution for the need to take the square root of a negative number - this is useful for electronics, BTW, as the site I linked to indicates), then you can understand in part what the theory of the particle is about.

Second, what is a boson? OK, I'm still working on this, as particle physics isn't my field, but here are some definitions:

Any of a class of particles, such as the photon, pion, or alpha particle, that have zero or integral spin and obey statistical rules permitting any number of identical particles to occupy the same quantum state.

any of a group of elementary particles, such as a photon or pion, that has zero or integral spin and obeys the rules of Bose-Einstein statistics

Any of a class of elementary or composite particles, including the photon, pion, and gluon, that are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle (that is, any two bosons can potentially be in the same

quantum state

). The value of the spin of a boson is always an integer. Mesons are bosons, as are the gauge bosons (the particles that mediate the fundamental forces). They are named after the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.

Source

OK, so unless you know what a "pion," a "gluon," an "alpha particle," "zero spin," "integral spin," "Bose-Einstein statistics," "mesons," "fundamental forces," and the "quantum state" are, these definitions from the dictionary don't help much!

OK, as best I understand it, when you split a molecule, you find it made of atoms. And when you split the atom, you find protons, neutrons, and electrons. First principle: the model images we have of atoms isn't actually what they look like, rather they are the best visualizations people can come up with to represent the concepts discovered with atoms. Understand that electrons are in constant motion, thus electrons are showed following a circular path - I'm not sure they are locked to that orbit though?

So hopefully you get an idea for how and why it is complicated to explain, visualize, and conceptualize the particles that protons, etc. are made of. If we can't accurately visualize an atom, how can we accurately visualize what makes up the atom?

So moving along, when you split the particles of the atom, you find what are called subatomic particles. These they called fermions and bosons. Fermions are considered the building blocks of matter and are subdivided into things they called quarks and leptons. Quarks and leptons are also sub-categorized. The electron is actually a lepton! Protons and neutrons are composite fermions (a proton for example is 3 quarks).

Bosons are what carry force (i.e. electromagnetic, nuclear, gravitational) and are subdivided into things called photons (light energy), gluons (association: gluons are what hold together the 3 quarks that make the proton), W boson, and Z boson (I'm a bit confused on these 2, something to do with the nuclear force, what holds and atom's nucleus together?), the infamous Higgs boson, and graviton (the latter two being unconfirmed - the evidence is there for "something" to exist, but they haven't been pinned down). The whole "spin" thing has something to do with how these particles behave.

So what "force" does the Higgs boson create? The Higgs boson is the force that gives something mass. Photons do not have mass, but the W and Z bosons do. Why? It has something to do with the Higgs boson. They (Higgs boson) can either be thought of as particles that give resistance to the movement of other particles, which locks their movement into a confined field. I am guessing this is why atoms in a molecule don't leave the molecule? Think of the balls in a ball pit little kids play in; each ball is a Higgs boson that keeps the child (electron) from falling to the bottom of the pit (an analogy I paraphrased from this amusing explanation on Higgs). Or for a more accurate explanation:

One of the best-known

was proposed in 1993 by David Miller

, a physicist at University College London. Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity ... shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and [the celebrity] is like a massive Z boson.

The Higgs boson made simple

*If you want to have a better understanding of the HIggs boson, read the rest of this ^ article* - and/or watch the videos at the end of the article.

But hopefully the above analogy can explain why it is difficult to find this Higgs boson-thingy. From what I can tell, they don't mean anything until are are actually giving resisistance to the particle, which is what creates the mass.

Disclaimer: I'm still figuring this stuff out myself. If someone who has it figured out better than me has noticed an error in my explanation, please correct me on it. Thanks!

[nebula]

The Particle was not found, will never be found. Just evidence that makes them think it's there.

..............

It was found to 5 sigma of significance. That's golden, so to speak.

A good explanation of this was written here:

Mass effect: Maybe Higgs, maybe not

Highlights:

Rolling loaded dice

An article on Ars technica gave a great analogy, which I’ll paraphrase: imagine you have a pair of dice. One of them is not normal: instead of the numbers 1 – 6, it replaces the 6 with a 5. If you roll the dice once, you might get 2-3, or 1-5, or 6-4. It’s random. But because one of the die is missing a 6 and has an extra 5, if you roll them enough times that starts to become apparent. After a bunch of rolls, you see too many 5s and not enough 6s. If you roll them, say, three times you might not see anything, but roll them 10,000 times and you’ll definitely know something is up. The more you roll, the more confident you’ll be.

It’s the same thing at CERN. Every run in the collider is a roll of the dice. Do it once and you might see something, but your confidence is low. Do it again and you get better statistics. Do it thousands or millions or billions of times, and you get more confident. In fact, you can calculate your confidence level. For one experiment, the bump at 125 times the energy of the proton has a confidence level of about 94%, the other experiment sees it at about 98%.

<snip>

Exuding confidence

That sounds good, and it is, but in physics we want even better confidence than that. After all, a 94% confidence means there’s a 6% chance of being wrong (as the CERN press release notes, there’s a 3% chance of rolling two sixes with a pair of normal dice on the first try, so you have to be careful here). So while these confidence levels are

good

, they’re not

great

. Physicists start getting excited around the 99.99% (4 sigma) confidence level, and start celebrating at 99.9999% (5 sigma). Seriously. After all, at that point the odds of being wrong are literally one in a million!

Some good news too is that this works the other way as well: looking at higher energies, they

don’t

see any evidence for the Higgs particle. So while they can’t be sure they see it at 125 GeV, they are in fact very confident they

don’t

see it at energies higher than 125 GeV or so. That’s good: it’s always nice to eliminate possibilities when you’re looking for something.

OK, so what does this mean?

So the grand conclusion here is:

Scientists at CERN cannot claim with enough confidence they have found the Higgs particle, but neither can they rule it out. There’s a good chance they

have

have found something, and it very well may be real, but they cannot say with complete confidence that it’s the Higgs.

They will continue to run more experiments and try to bump up that confidence level a few more notches. In other words, they have to keep rolling those dice, building up the numbers, and get better statistics. As they do, those confidence levels will change, and hopefully move into the “5-sigma-we-have-a-winner” stage. But that takes time, and it’ll be 2012 at least before we know more one way or another.

[nebula]

By the way, in case you are wondering why this matters, one of the articles I posted about provides examples of what subatomic research has given us.

What good is it?

Particle physicists try to avoid forecasting the applications of an experimental advance before the actual advance is confirmed, but in the past, advances on a par with the discovery of the Higgs boson have had lots of beneficial applications, and some that are more questionable. The rise of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry is a prime example of that double-edged sword.

The discovery of antimatter is what made medical PET scanning possible, and antimatter propulsion could eventually play a part in interstellar travel, just like on "Star Trek." Particle accelerators have opened the way to medical treatments such as proton eye therapy — as well as advances in materials science, thanks to neutron scattering.

It's conceivable that the discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider will eventually point to new sources of energy, Michio Kaku, a physicist at City College of New York, told me during a discussion of the LHC's promise and peril. And if the discovery of the Higgs leads to fresh insights into the fabric of the universe, it's conceivable that we could take advantage of the as-yet-unknown weave of that fabric for communication or transportation. Who knows? Maybe this is how "Star Trek" gets its start.

The Higgs boson made simple