"God Particle" Further Confirmed to Have Been Found

Rhykker

Level 16 Scallywag
Feb 28, 2010
814
0
0
"God Particle" Further Confirmed to Have Been Found



The particle found by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 has been confirmed to be the Higgs Boson.

It had already been established that the particle discovered in 2012 matched the Higgs Boson with respect to its mass, its lack of spin, and its rapid decay into pairs of photons. However, one key attribute remained unconfirmed: whether it gave mass to fermions, a group of particles that includes quarks and leptons.

Analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider, MIT physics professor Marcus Klute and a team of colleagues confirmed with a strong degree of confidence that the 2012 particle meets the final criteria.

"We made this big discovery back in 2012-we confirmed the particle, its [lack of] spin, everything was consistent," says Klute. "What was missing were the fermions." 

But they are missing no more, thanks to the work of his team. "Our findings confirm the presence of the Standard Model Boson," Klute says. "Establishing a property of the Standard Model is big news itself."

The Higgs Boson was first theorized in 1964, and its monumental discovery was announced at CERN in 2012. The importance of the Higgs Boson to our understanding of particle physics is so great that it launched a 40 year search to prove its existence, which culminated in the construction of the LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator. Mainstream media refer to the boson as the "God particle," a name disliked by many physicists, including Higgs himself.


Source: Popular Mechanics [http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3005.html]

Permalink
 

Slegiar Dryke

New member
Dec 10, 2013
124
0
0
Firstly on topic, awesome news that it has further been confirmed as being the true deal. what this means, I dunno. I'm an IT guy, not physics.

nit-pickingly though, if they dislike it being called quote "God Particle", than WHY use that in the freaking title!? *throws a rolled up newspaper* bad escapist! no on the click-baiting!
 

iseko

New member
Dec 4, 2008
727
0
0
Slegiar Dryke said:
nit-pickingly though, if they dislike it being called quote "God Particle", than WHY use that in the freaking title!? *throws a rolled up newspaper* bad escapist! no on the click-baiting!
Because if they just called it the higgs-boson particle then nobody would care. Except for scientists ofcourse. Most people still don't know what it does. And Im not talking specifics. Just a general idea.

OT: nice. I wonder if it will translate into real world applications.
 

Queen Michael

has read 4,010 manga books
Jun 9, 2009
10,400
0
0
There is no such thing as a "God particle." That's the distorted version for people who want to understand this without actually understanding it.
 

geldonyetich

New member
Aug 2, 2006
3,715
0
0
It seems to me that the biggest enemy they're facing here is the overwhelming forces of confirmation bias.

They built this massively expensive facility because they're pretty sure the particle existed.
They were pretty sure the particle existed because they've derived it from abstract concepts of particle physics that were, in many ways, tenuous.

So it's not just confirmation they've fighting against, but confirmation bias within existing confirmation bias. How do you get away from that much drive to confirm what you already believe to see anything else?
 

Nimcha

New member
Dec 6, 2010
2,383
0
0
iseko said:
Slegiar Dryke said:
nit-pickingly though, if they dislike it being called quote "God Particle", than WHY use that in the freaking title!? *throws a rolled up newspaper* bad escapist! no on the click-baiting!
Because if they just called it the higgs-boson particle then nobody would care.
I find that hard to believe. I think they've done a great job getting the name Higgs-boson out there. It even features on comedy shows on tv! Almost everybody I know has some idea about what it is and know the name.
 

MasterBetty

New member
May 21, 2009
10
0
0
geldonyetich said:
It seems to me that the biggest enemy they're facing here is the overwhelming forces of confirmation bias.

They built this massively expensive facility because they're pretty sure the particle existed.
They were pretty sure the particle existed because they've derived it from abstract concepts of particle physics that were, in many ways, tenuous.

So it's not just confirmation they've fighting against, but confirmation bias within existing confirmation bias. How do you get away from that much drive to confirm what you already believe to see anything else?
It's not confirmation bias. It's the scientific method.

Testing a sound theory that can be demonstrably repeated with the exact same results.

Are you seriously accusing these scientists on just saying, "This idea sounds about right. Let's pour a ton of money and time into a project we have no strong belief in the potential results of."
 

alj

Master of Unlocking
Nov 20, 2009
335
0
0
Good new its confirmed but can we please get away from this "god particle" nonsense. Using this term implies that god exists and we cannot confirm this ether way (however there is no evidence for gods existence)we can confirm the higgs boson exists and this is good news for advancing humanities understanding of the universe, it has added to the sum of human knowledge that can be passed on to future generations, i consider that far more heartwarming than any story about a imaginary magical man written down by some desert folk 2000 years ago. So please don't ruin that by referring to it as a "god" particle.
 

QuadFish

God Damn Sorcerer
Dec 25, 2010
302
0
0
So I know three people have already said it, but it is kind of a big deal that a site like this (that does a pretty respectable job of reporting science findings compared to most) has to resort to using that phrase. It's an unhelpful buzz term invented by a book publisher that doesn't actually make the topic easier to understand by the layperson. By all means give the snappy terms to important simpler concepts. "Global warming" is a lot easier to digest at first glance than "enhanced greenhouse effect", but no one's going to google "god particle" and suddenly have a good understanding of bosons and gravity fields. It benefits no one.

EDIT: Clarification. I don't dislike the term just because it's misleading. Some buzz terms have some use introducing people to new ideas. This one fails to do that. There's just no point to its existence.

Glad to see so many other people disagreeing with it. Gives me hope that some day we might hold mainstream science journalism to a better standard than we do right now.
 

ExtraDebit

New member
Jul 16, 2011
533
0
0
I wish the article would focus more on things that actually mean something to the layman. E.G. Why do they call it "god" particle? What is the significance of having no spin? What the fuck is a fermions? Why is "Establishing a property of the Standard Model is big news itself."?
 

Aaron Sylvester

New member
Jul 1, 2012
786
0
0
ExtraDebit said:
I wish the article would focus more on things that actually mean something to the layman. E.G. Why do they call it "god" particle? What is the significance of having no spin? What the fuck is a fermions? Why is "Establishing a property of the Standard Model is big news itself."?
As someone who knows jack-all about particle physics yet is quite fascinated by it...all the stuff about spin and fermions doesn't make sense to me either.

But from whatever little I've read/heard, the Higgs Boson is supposedly the particle that gives every other particle mass which is a pretty huge deal. In high-level physics "mass" isn't really a defining property since it's interchangeable with energy and nobody knows what mass even is, or where it comes from. The Standard Model is a rather chaotic and confusing set of rules which governs how the elementary particles behave, but it's not complete and the Higgs is one of the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Completing the standard model in turn is one of the big keys to figuring out the Theory Of Everything. The Theory Of Everything is basically something that can explain everything from huge galaxy clusters (General Relativity) to the small elementary particles (Quantum Mechanics) using ONE complete set of consistent rules/theories.
Currently there's a big fat divide between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, both of them work fine using their own sets of rules...but they are incompatible with each other, sometimes even contradicting each other.

Though I might be horribly wrong about all this :S
 

hazydawn

New member
Jan 11, 2013
237
0
0
MasterBetty said:
Are you seriously accusing these scientists on just saying, "This idea sounds about right. Let's pour a ton of money and time into a project we have no strong belief in the potential results of."
To me, he seems to imply that the scientist could have, consciously or unconscioulsy, gave into their desire to find something. Pretty preposterous idea. Probably has no idea of the scientific method and the academic world these people are working in.
 

-Dragmire-

King over my mind
Mar 29, 2011
2,821
0
0
Why does mainstream media refer to it as the "God" particle. I'm not seeing the connection.
 

Caffiene

New member
Jul 21, 2010
283
0
0
ExtraDebit said:
E.G. Why do they call it "god" particle?
-Dragmire- said:
Why does mainstream media refer to it as the "God" particle. I'm not seeing the connection.
The term was started in the title of a 1993 book by physicist Leon Lederman, because his publisher wouldnt let him call it "the goddamn particle". He wanted to call it that due to the trouble and expense it was causing physicists to track it down.
 

OldNewNewOld

New member
Mar 2, 2011
1,494
0
0
As several people already said, I dislike the name "god particle" as well. It's misleading. I have already argued with several people that science did not prove the existence of God.
Seriously, they read "Scientists have found the God particle" and that's all. God exists.
And I should stop being gay because now I know God exists and it's a sin, but that's not related to the topic at hand.
 

elvor0

New member
Sep 8, 2008
2,320
0
0
iseko said:
Slegiar Dryke said:
nit-pickingly though, if they dislike it being called quote "God Particle", than WHY use that in the freaking title!? *throws a rolled up newspaper* bad escapist! no on the click-baiting!
Because if they just called it the higgs-boson particle then nobody would care. Except for scientists ofcourse. Most people still don't know what it does. And Im not talking specifics. Just a general idea.

OT: nice. I wonder if it will translate into real world applications.
I dunno, Higgs Boson is a widely enough known name for it. God Particle is the one I barely hear. And on this site I say it was safe enough to assume most people have /heard/ of the Higgs Boson, with a lot of us likley excited. Granted I don't really know much of the physics about it, beyond it being important in the Standard Model of physics in regards to certain mass, but I don't actually understand what knockon effect it'll have in the world of physics.

BiH-Kira said:
As several people already said, I dislike the name "god particle" as well. It's misleading. I have already argued with several people that science did not prove the existence of God.
Seriously, they read "Scientists have found the God particle" and that's all. God exists.
And I should stop being gay because now I know God exists and it's a sin, but that's not related to the topic at hand.
Sweet shit? That's an argument you've had?! That's painful. However, if Science had just discovered God:

 

David Damgaard

New member
Jun 27, 2012
1
0
0
I did some work on the tau-lepton decay path of the Higgs boson in Uni this spring, so i thought i might give my two cents:
The standard model of particle physics is the current theory of describing high energy physics (high energy as in really hot and dense, like moments after the big bang), despite its problems incorporating gravity, it is insanely accurate in its predictions. Now, the standard model predicts certian kinds of elemental particles of which everything is made from: The fermions and the bosons.
The fermion group consists of quarks (makes up the elements) and the leptons (like the aforementioned tau and the electron).
The Boson group is the force carriers: The photon (responsible for light) , W^+/ W^- and Z^0 (responsible for nuclear decay) and gluons (responsible for "gluing" the quarks together).
The standard model predicts, that in order to obtain mass, some particle interfere with an underlying field, called the higgs field, giving the particle mass, others, that does not interfere with the field does not obtain mass and thus are massless (like the photon).

Now the higgs boson is supposed to be an exitation of the underlying field, producing a particle (like an exitation of the electron field is the same as an electron), so it is not the higgs boson that gives mass, but the underlying field, that it represents.

What we physicits really were hoping for were some unpredicted result (like when J.J. Thompson found the electron), something that we did not expect, that would force us to rethink everything we knew, however it seemed that even on the very high energy levels of the expirement our model (the standard model) worked flawlessly, which was acutelly surprising for many of us. So after the one year break of the LHC we're planning to run on even higher energy levels in our search for new physics.



Sorry for the long post (and bad english).
 

wizzy555

New member
Oct 14, 2010
637
0
0
geldonyetich said:
It seems to me that the biggest enemy they're facing here is the overwhelming forces of confirmation bias.

They built this massively expensive facility because they're pretty sure the particle existed.
They were pretty sure the particle existed because they've derived it from abstract concepts of particle physics that were, in many ways, tenuous.

So it's not just confirmation they've fighting against, but confirmation bias within existing confirmation bias. How do you get away from that much drive to confirm what you already believe to see anything else?
Confirmation bias is typically when you perceive what you want to perceive because it meets with your pre-existing ideas.

The higgs boson is not identified by human perception, it is mechanically and mathematically identified - mostly by computers.

This is actually a poor outcome for physicists as if your ideas are always confirmed to be correct there is the likelihood they will declare your field complete and shut down funding and you are now an expert in nothing at all useful.

If the higgs boson didn't couple to fermions it would mean there was far more investigation to be done.