CERN is where the World Wide Web was conceived. Think that made a difference?
really ? Al Gore lived in Switzerland ?
CERN is where the World Wide Web was conceived. Think that made a difference?
A counter-counter point: is the money spent on the LHC really wasted? Didn't it provide smart people with useful jobs? Won't that money just be quickly recycled back into the community to flow into other perhaps more tangible activities -- supermarkets, retailers, equipment manufacturers, etc?C'mon, airplanes and rockets had practical value from the get-go. I am not saying that basic science has no place in the world. I am a scientist. Most scientists have learned to justify what they do by how it benefits mankind even if only in a peripheral way. They would not get the money to do what they if they could not write a justification. These Higgs boson folks have not done that at all.
NPR has a Q&A with this:
Yes, I alluded to this already: "(I realize there is a trickle-down jobs effect: construction workers, administrateive assistants, journalists, advertising agencies, etc)."A counter-counter point: is the money spent on the LHC really wasted? Didn't it provide smart people with useful jobs? Won't that money just be quickly recycled back into the community to flow into other perhaps more tangible activities -- supermarkets, retailers, equipment manufacturers, etc?
I suspect that the people being paid from this project are spending a high percentage of their salaries as opposed to just investing.
Perhaps our economic models are even murkier then the physics models.
with absolutely no support for such a statement. C'mon, if this stuff is really important they should be able to come up with something. So far though: Nothing.Scientists have discovered a new subatomic particle with profound implications for understanding our universe.
Oh, look! If they ignore some data, they get 5 sigma. If they include all the data, "back to 4.9 sigma". What's up with that?The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the protons that lie at the heart of every atom.
The BBC's George Alagiah explains the Higgs boson
They claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.
However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-two million chance.
I have to rant.
Let's face it, this particle is a big jobs project for physicists (full disclosure: I am a member of the American Institute of Physics)....
That Bloomberg article linked is more of the "It's important because it's important" genre. Such an argument would result in loss-of-funding for the projects I am involved in.)
It's looking like there's a field that permeates the entire universe, and this special field gives everything the property of mass....and, as a physicist, you don't understand the potential significance? Would you have the same opinion today of a fundamental, universal field that controls how particles with certain charges behave and interact with things in the universe?(from the aforementioned linked article, emphasis mine)
Physicist Peter Higgs proposed what we now call the Higgs field, and hypothesized that it spreads through the universe. All particles would acquire mass by interacting with this field. As is the case with the other interactions, at a quantum level this Higgs interaction predicts that we should be able to produce and detect the boson associated with it, or the Higgs boson.
Mass of the particles would be the result of interaction with the Higgs field, and this interaction produces a Higgs boson. Because the boson is predicted by the field, finding the Higgs boson would be evidence that the Higgs field exists.
Imagine if we could somehow alter an object's mass through its interaction with the Higgs field? Or interact with the Higgs field in some other way, just as thousands of technologies interact and utilize the properties of electromagnetic waves/light?[FONT=arial, helvetica, geneva][SIZE=-1]Much of modern technology has been developed from the basic principles of electromagnetism formulated by Maxwell. The field of electronics, including the telephone, radio, television, and radar, stem from his discoveries and formulations. While Maxwell relied heavily on previous discoveries about electricity and magnetism, he also made a significant leap in unifying the theories of magnetism, electricity, and light. His revolutionary work lead to the development of quantum physics in the early 1900's and to Einstein's theory of relativity.[/SIZE][/FONT]
I enjoyed this 7 minute video. Thanks!