CERN’s Higgs boson discovery passes peer review, becomes actual science!!

ok so now the big question...

how do we turn it into a weapon?

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

You know that feeling when you send a really long text and you get a one-word answer back?

I do. I typically think that I should have sent a text that is better thought out.

reply to post by buddhasystem


Now that's a clever response. But what if it's not really a dull text, it's just ill-comprehended?

Ponder that while I steer this conversation back on course. If the Higgs Boson has finally been verified, what particle are we hunting next?

reply to post by AfterInfinity


I'm going fishing. Never know what particular things I will catch.

Very interesting. I know many people will be mad now that their theories which were based on Higgs not existing - is debunked!

"The Higgs Field" - that sounds very interesting. The Higgs particles create mass, but what exactly is this "Field" and what does it do?

reply to post by arpgme

Very interesting. I know many people will be mad now that their theories which were based on Higgs not existing - is debunked!

I'm not so quick to hit the "I believe" button.

They believe they've found a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson as it was predicted.

It's easy to see what you want to see. They really haven't had much time for proper peer review, and the results will likely need to be analyzed by other teams.

The true tests will come when they begin trying to perform more specific experiments to try and test other theories regarding how the Higgs is expected to behave. They may or may not find it to behave as expected.

Further, there is a laundry list of other particles that have been 'discovered' (hinted at within data analysis) over the past several years by various accelerators and teams that were not predicted by our models and will be awaiting experiments to verify their existence. Each of which could radically change our models and upset the interpretation of existing data.

"The Higgs Field" - that sounds very interesting. The Higgs particles create mass, but what exactly is this "Field" and what does it do?

Much the same thing. To be accurate - "particles" do not exist. All that we -can- know to exist is a discrete exchange of energy quanta (or "packet"). What we refer to as particles is the process by which energy is exchanged and absorbed - which is always done in quantized packets based off of the Planck Constants.

Which is why it gets a little dangerous in quantum mechanics to talk about physical things. Various experiments show the inherent reality-defying phenomena of QM.

Let's say, for instance, we take a laser beam emitting a single-file line of photons. We can split the wave function of these photons - so that half of each photon goes through one chamber while the other half passes through another. Something strange happens, however, when you place a reflective screen to see how your laser light behaves. You see an interference pattern - waves, if you will. Moving the chambers farther apart alters the 'frequency' of your interference pattern. This illustrates that each photon (we can do this one photon at a time over the course of several hours, days, months, etc to make sure only one photon is involved - I'm giving you the expedient version) passed through both chambers.

So light's a wave... right?

Well, let's say you place a polarizing plate in one of those chambers - you want to know what the polarity of the light is that passes through that chamber (thus, you require a photon to give up its polarity). Now, your interference pattern disappears as the photon can be in either one chamber of the other. Not both.

You can add and remove your polarizing plate at will - removing it restores the interference pattern, replacing it destroys it and you get two 'beams' of light - half the photons going through one chamber, half going through the other.

Yet your other experiment clearly showed that each photon traveled through both chambers.

Which is why the concept of particles as real entities is a little tricky. They arise as concepts because of their convenience in explaining energy exchange. However, experiments have pretty much established that the particle - if it exists at all - comes into existence for brief moments to facilitate energy/information exchange.

It's something of a skeleton in the closet for physics - while we work with QM and can describe it very accurately and well.... actually putting it into the context of reality is something that's almost intentionally buried beneath equations (see the Copenhagen Interpretation).

The field generally refers to the wave-function of a force carrier while the particle is used to refer to the quanta exchanged (or in instances where it's more convenient to think of energy quanta as physical particles as it better describes their mechanics). The wave-function is an expression of where the particle is likely to be when you look for it.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

Now that's a clever response. But what if it's not really a dull text, it's just ill-comprehended?

You didn't do too badly, it's just the bandwidth that you project is impossible to achieve due to the small probability of neutrino interaction with matter, and you built a very precise clock into your proposed system, which is a b!tch to maintain, as we all know from the recent Opera events.

Ponder that while I steer this conversation back on course. If the Higgs Boson has finally been verified, what particle are we hunting next?

It's not clear how many Higgs particles there are to begin with. If you read a primer on particle physics, there are families, or clusters of particles differing by some quantum number.

And, of course, there is hunt for supersymmetry still.

Since we had a discussion in this thread on how much the now canceled Superconducting Super Collider would cost (starting with a $4B estimate, then going to $10B), here's a piece of trivia:

CNN

New York City spends an estimated $4 billion each year on medical care for overweight people

...and there goes our science.

Originally posted by PhoenixOD

So i will ask the questions :

A big day for Physics? The biggest?

Are they jumping the gun?

Will this make any difference for us as humans (what use is it)?

edit on 10-9-2012 by PhoenixOD because: (no reason given)

Well first off i disagree that this is the last Elementary Particle, There may be dozens more or 1 or 2 i am reading the Peer Review things and have been since they were published. I just feel that that is a Large assumption.

I hope they have but have not read anything that leads me to say that they have completely. Waiting for more data from other sensors second test repeatability etc.

Are they Jumping the Gun ? NO they are proceeding correctly cautiously.

Yes it will, for example turning gravity on and off like an electric light for example. Or Holodecks or Replicators.
Many things can fall out from the Math least of all the Unified Theory. But we are a bit off from all that.
but if true and no longer a theory but a fact then many things roll out from there.

it no longer is what if, but How do we use it to "fill in the blank".