Thursday, July 5, 2012

God Particle or Goddamn Particle?

Where does this leaves us? I think after discovery or let us say certain statistical validation or statistical certainty that Higs boson exist.. we are going for another round.. Scientific community is cheering as this was one of the most important milestone what human brain could think off.. and after all, billions of dollars were invested to find it out. So.. there has to be celebration..  

In general I am happy for this great scientific victory.. We do need to continue research in fundamental physics so we can overcome fear of God from human brain. 
Question is what next.. do we understand how mass is created? I don't know if we have final answer to that or no. It seems that this discovery was suppose to achieve that.. I am way too illiterate to understand exact interactions of mass and energy or energy fields.. But if they can find out or more accurately guess for our reason of existence.. that would be great.. there are so many fundamental questions about nature still unanswered.. 

MILESTONE’ DISCOVERY

Physicists eye elusive particle


By Dennis Overbye


New York Times


ASPEN, Colo. — Signaling a likely end to one of the longest, most expensive searches in the history of science, physicists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a key to understanding why there is diversity and life in the universe. The elusive boson has been coming slowly into view since this past winter, as the first signals of its existence grew until they practically jumped off the chart.

“I think we have it,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, the multinational
 research center headquartered in Geneva. The agency is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator that produced the new data by colliding protons. The findings were announced by two separate teams. Heuer called the discovery “a historic milestone.” 




CERN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

In this image, two high-energy photons collide in the search for the Higgs boson particle.




He and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, however, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the past half-century. The particle is predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass. It may be an impostor as yet unknown to physics, perhaps the first of many particles yet to be discovered. 

That possibility is particularly exciting to physicists, as it could point the way to new, deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality. 

For now, some physicists are simply calling it a “Higgslike” particle. 

“It’s something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years,” said Joe Incandela, a physicist at UC Santa Barbara and a spokesman for one of the two groups reporting new data Wednesday. 

At the Aspen Center for Physics, a retreat for scientists, bleary-eyed physicists drank champagne in the wee hours as word arrived via webcast from CERN. It was a scene duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, where physicists had gathered for a major conference, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, Princeton, N.J., New York, London and beyond — everywhere that members of a curious species have dedicated their lives and fortunes to the search for their origins in a dark universe. 

In Geneva, 1,000 people stood in line all night to get into an auditorium at CERN, where some attendees noted a rock-concert ambience. Peter Higgs, the University of Edinburgh theorist for whom the boson is named, entered the meeting to a sustained ovation. 

Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it would constitute a rendezvous with destiny for a generation of physicists who have believed in the boson for half a century without ever seeing it. The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws — but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry. 

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous. 

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life. 

Physicists said that they would probably be studying the new particle for years. 

The results announced Wednesday capped two weeks of feverish speculation and Internet buzz as the phys-icists, who had been sworn to secrecy, did a breakneck analysis of about 800 trillion proton-proton collisions over the past two years. 

The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws — but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry. 

2 comments:

Anand Srivastava said...

What next, search for WIMPs and Axions and other Dark Matter particles. I am pretty sure that physicists know that those will never be found. They would have been found by now if they existed. After all Neutrinos that are similar to WIMPs but much smaller were detected so long ago.

Shai said...

Thanks Anand... I think next research should be in the area of mutual interaction of Energy and Matter.. Convert matter to energy ( we do it little bit now) but see if we can figure out way to convert energy back to matter or in a sense, create matter from pure energy.. even incremental increase in matter from energy could be great next milestone..
In particles.. I think we are almost reaching to level where we should be looking at matter which doesn't even have mass.. just energy..
That would be really great.. isn't it.. convert energy to matter (from dangerous to inert form) as if matter is equivalent to our regular battery. and then transport where ever it is needed and simply extract it out by converting it back to energy.. Similarly... convert matter (or humans) into energy and then transport them some what similar to electricity and then re-assemble them back in matter (or what ever is left of humans..)..