Search for God Particle is nearly over, as CERN prepares to announce findings

Search for God Particle is nearly over, as CERN prepares to announce findings

The search for the 'God particle' could be nearing a resolution as physicists prepare to announce the latest evidence from the Large Hadron Collider.

At a special meeting at the Cern laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, scientists from the two main experiments targeting the Higgs boson will disclose their latest findings.


While researchers from the ATLAS and CMS teams regularly present batches of their most recent data, there is particular excitement surrounding the seminar on December 13.


Although scientists are unlikely to announce conclusive evidence of whether or not the particle exists, their data could be strong enough to make a confident guess one way or the other.


There is added excitement within the scientific community because the two teams, both of which include British experts, will not be comparing their results beforehand to avoid biasing their interpretation of their own data.


This means even the researchers involved will not know until the seminar what their findings mean in the context of the results from the other group.

Finally the white smoke...

I am very curious to see what direction science is going to go based on these results? If a God particle is found what exactly could we do with it? What about if we dont find the particle? Will these results slow down our pace of advancement or speed it up?

Anyone want to guess?

Originally posted by Xcathdra
Finally the white smoke...

I am very curious to see what direction science is going to go based on these results? If a God particle is found what exactly could we do with it? What about if we dont find the particle? Will these results slow down our pace of advancement or speed it up?

Anyone want to guess?

I have to presume that one of the things that would evolve from this would be a greater understanding of the make-up of the universe and space itself, which in turn hopefully would lead to efficient space faring as in moving towards the ability to fold space and time up and travel vast distances instantaneously. Or maybe if that knowledge only leads to some sort of "limitless" power supply of some sort, that could be a huge step in advancement.

If we don't find the particle, then we keep trying and looking in other ways to find out the truth of our universe and existence...

Well they may have slowed down our advancement if that time travelling kook didn't get captured and thrown in the loony-bin before he was able to complete his mission of the alteration of our timeline by destroying CERN. Sorry can't locate that thread atm...

Certainly it would speed up our advancement just as any bits of knowledge do. Even the bits of knowledge that get used for negative purposes are mostly good for the advancement of our society (many maybe, I know there are arguments against that certainly).

reply to post by Xcathdra

I predict a disappointing announcement, and then they will ask for more cash for an even more wasteful and pointless facility to be built. CERN can burn money like almost no other, no?

ETA Religion in science? The "God" particle? No thanks!

I think they will announce that they found something, not the higgs boson, but something entirely different according to their math, and need more funding to check out this new finding properly, and the higgs will be forgotten about entirely.

If the Higgs Boson particle is proven to exist, would this disprove string theory?

Or would further, even smaller experiments, need to be done to determine the composition of the Higgs particle?

Will they eventually reach a sub-sub-atomic size point where no further detection of properties is possible?

Originally posted by Xcathdra
Anyone want to guess?

The last I heard the list of places (energy levels) where the "god particle" wasn't found, was getting longer and longer.

So I'm pretty sure they didn't find it where they expected to; now the question is, if they will find it where they didn't expect to find it. If they do, it wouldn't be the first experiment with a surprise, but I kind of suspect we would have heard about it by now if they found it?

That's why my guess is, they didn't find it. If they did, they've done a good job keeping it a secret.

billions for an inconclusive conclusion. Super awesome. This higgs guy must be some genius, as he garnered billions just to see if he was right about a guess, a theory. This device is the greatest "can I have money just to see if I'm right" in the history of civilization.

Originally posted by crankyoldman
billions for an inconclusive conclusion. Super awesome. This higgs guy must be some genius, as he garnered billions just to see if he was right about a guess, a theory. This device is the greatest "can I have money just to see if I'm right" in the history of civilization.

I don't know why someone would complain about the spending on LHC. Plenty more is spent on wars that do nothing but destroy lives throughout the world.

So a few billion is put into a project that gives people jobs and creates data that can be studied for the next hundred years.... Is it the worst thing to spend money on? No.

Just a quick thought: Perhaps, this alleged "God particle" is no smaller than the size of a regular marble. But that's just by "educated guess". I give the CERN folks a letter grade of "B positive" for trying.

Originally posted by twinmommy38
If the Higgs Boson particle is proven to exist, would this disprove string theory?

Or would further, even smaller experiments, need to be done to determine the composition of the Higgs particle?

My understanding of string theory is limited but I can say this much about it; it needs to be proven, and it never has been.

Moreover, while there may be a few predictions of string theory which can be tested in the LHC, I believe there are others which require a version of the LHC which is mind-bogglingly larger than the LHC, one that is probably too large to build even if we could get the obscenely large amount of funding needed to build it.

en.wikipedia.org...

A unique prediction of string theory is the existence of string harmonics: at sufficiently high energies—probably near the quantum gravity scale—the string-like nature of particles would become obvious. ... But it is not clear how high these energies are. In the most likely case, they would be 10^14 times higher than those accessible in the newest particle accelerator, the LHC, making this prediction impossible to test with any particle accelerator in the foreseeable future.

10^14 is 100 trillion times more powerful than the LHC.

Here's an interesting thought. The emergency beam dump of the LHC has an output power equal to roughly 80 pounds of TNT. If we could build an accelerator 100 trillion times more powerful, 80 pounds times 100 trillion is 8000 trillion pounds, or 4 trillion tons of TNT. That's 4 million megatons of TNT.

Compare that to the total global nuclear arsenal of 30,000 weapons which is "only" 5000 megatons of TNT. People claim 5000 megatons is enough to destroy the Earth many times over, so what do you think 4 million megatons would do?

For this reason, I doubt string theory will be proven in the foreseeable future. I'm not even sure if string theory is science. Peter Woit claims it's not and I find it hard to argue with him:

Others such Peter Woit state that string theory isn’t even science as it makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and thus cannot be falsified.

For now at least, that seems to be true, though I suppose that could change in the future. But for now I've stopped worrying about string theory as it's currently not within the realm of science for those reasons.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Well you have certainly cleared that up for me Thanks Again!

I have watched every one of the applicable shows on Science Channel, H2, Discovery ect. and I have read articles until staring at the monitor gave me a headache, or maybe that was the physics...lol

Through the Wormhole and several other shows touch on string theory, and place it easily within the possible explanations on how to describe matter. And then jump into the implied ramifications of 9 to 11 extra dimensions which are contained on a 2 dimensional "membrane" which ripples and creates universe's.

So how can I get a job where I can get paid to make stuff up, that you cannot prove wrong, but I cannot conclusively prove right?

I think that they skipped the part about the size and power of the collider which would be needed to determine the existance of "strings" to support the theory, would need to be the diameter of the moons orbit and capable of atomizing the earth. (imo)

It no longer suprises me that there is so much heated argument, confusion, and debate about CERN specifically and particle science in general.

When basically the "best information" shows on television and "laymans terms" physics disertations on the web are like a cheap commercial at a matinee festival.

And should be labled as such:
*Entertainment purposes only, with all the accuracy of a bubble blower at a shooting match.*

Originally posted by twinmommy38
So how can I get a job where I can get paid to make stuff up, that you cannot prove wrong, but I cannot conclusively prove right?

I think you answered your own question, you can become a string theorist. That's about the only vocation I know of where you can do that! But that's often in the math department now, instead of in the physics department. Maybe people are waking up to the fact it's not physics without experiment.

I think that they skipped the part about the size and power of the collider which would be needed to determine the existance of "strings" to support the theory, would need to be the diameter of the moons orbit and capable of atomizing the earth. (imo)

To be fair, there are some other alternatives to a collider 100 trillion times more powerful than the LHC, like this one:

Scientists Propose Test Of String Theory Based On Neutral Hydrogen Absorption

Wandelt and graduate student Rishi Khatri describe their proposed test in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters....

To precisely measure perturbations in the spectra would require an array of radio telescopes with a collective area of more than 1,000 square kilometers. Such an array could be built using current technology, Wandelt said, but would be prohibitively expensive.

At least that experiment won't destroy the Earth, and we do have the technology to build it, as he says. But we can't afford that one either.

When basically the "best information" shows on television and "laymans terms" physics disertations on the web are like a cheap commercial at a matinee festival.

And should be labled as such:
*Entertainment purposes only, with all the accuracy of a bubble blower at a shooting match.*

Your critique of entertainment TV such as "through the wormhole" is accurate, it's meant to be entertainment, not serious physics.

Even the articles describing papers by physicists often misrepresent them. The solution is to read the paper itself which now thankfully you can usually find on arXiv for free.

Simply speaking, if this Higgs Boson / God Particle exists... what would that imply? How would that change our view of the universe in any way?

reply to post by arpgme

If we had found it where we had expected to, the finding would confirm our view of the universe.

We are already something like 95% confident it didn't exist where we thought it probably did, which means it's probably back to the drawing board to revise our theories to explain why it wasn't found where we expected.

And if it's not found at all, that will require probably even more extensive revisions to our current thinking but we do have other ideas to explore:

Failure to find ‘god particle’ hints at fundamentally new physics

“Although the Standard Model Higgs is the most accepted one, there really is no good reason to prefer it over many other theories that address the origin of mass except for the fact that it is the simplest,” said Sheldon.

If the LHC cannot find the Higgs particle, there are many alternative theories that have been proposed that can explain mass without invoking the “God particle,” but they require completely different physical interpretations, Gurrola explained, adding, “This might be even more exciting.”

reply to post by arpgme


because having a particle "at the bottom" of reality would establish once and for all that the universe really is just a mechanical bashing around of tiny billiard balls.

you see, quantum strangeness and relational interactivity do not form a MANIPULABLE basis for scientific development....no matter how much intuitive sense it makes to us lay-folk.

they are just DESPERATE to find that lowest-level billiard ball!

then they can kill god dead, for reals.

they should rename it from "God particle", to the "no-such-thing-as-god-and-i-can-prove-it-you-idiot particle".


(p.s. I am not a religious believer.)

reply to post by tgidkp


So in order words, the universe is like the static that you see on TV with the little gray balls and when you turn to a working channel, they arrange to create a picture (well in this case life and other things)...

reply to post by tgidkp


So in order words, the universe is like the static that you see on TV with the little gray balls and when you turn to a working channel, they arrange to create a picture (well in this case life and other things)...

reply to post by Xcathdra

My favorite scenario guess would be if they didn't find it, but keep looking, and in addition observed an unexpected and yet entirely unexplainable phenomenon.

The Higgs boson is a bistable quantum singularity. It is a seed point from which an alternative universe can form if it is fed energy from an external source while still in the bistable (particle) state.

If they are successful in creating a higgs by brute force, it would be as likely as trying to dump a pile of airplane parts to earth from 1,000ft than during this time the plane self assembles and flies by itself. Not impossible, but very, very unlikely. I do think something created a higgs particle near the earth recently though- the Norway spiral is classic for the effects of the particle and expansion.

The ET's use a directed energy field to create a Higgs boson, then accelerate the expansion domain into a controlled section of hyperspace linking to another virtual higgs particle of similar spin polarity using entanglement in the desired target of space or time. The problem is you can get very accurate destinations as to where OR when, but not as to when AND where at the same time. This problem can be solved by using two moves- using the tortion field to dictate where the craft is to appear, and then allowing the quantum membrane to enclose the craft moving it -1/4 turn out of phase with local space time than using the torsion field to focus the energy as the craft's IMAGE to the correct destination in local time.