Greetings, and welcome to the World Affairs Board!
The World Affairs Board is the premier forum for the discussion of the pressing geopolitical issues of our time. Topics include military and defense developments, international terrorism, insurgency & COIN doctrine, international security and policing, weapons proliferation, and military technological development.
Our membership includes many from military, defense, academic, and government backgrounds with expert knowledge on a wide range of topics. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so why not register a World Affairs Board account and join our community today?
I read up on the "5 sigma" tag, and it read as "1 in 1,000,000" chance of being real, i.e. NOT noise or other malfunction. But is the detected particle consistent with the Higgs? The next few days will be very interesting, indeed.
it is either the Higgs Boson particle OR it is something else that just happen to have exactly the same mass as it. That is much more unlikely and if the case, might even be more amazing (due being completely unexpected).
Guys, what does this mean for science?...I have to expalin this to my 12 yr old.
Take something small and drop it on the table and ask why does it fall ? gravity.
What is gravity ? An attraction
Why is there attraction ? Mass.
Bodies that have mass attract others with mass. In this particular case the large earth attracts everything to it. Just like the Sun attracts the planets and keeps them in orbit.
So what is mass or why do things have mass ? We don't know.
We think that is where the Higgs Boson particle comes in. It is thought to give matter mass.
But how to tell if there even is such a thing as the Higgs Boson.
BTW, I had to tell my wife that "God particle" has nothing to do with the church..."it's about physics baby".
Why is mass important ?
Without mass, particles cannot become atoms and matter cannot be created, clump together and become something. There would be no earth, sun or material universe. So this is about creation of what we see & know.
Up to now we could not explain why any material in the universe exists. Without that nothing else matters.
What are the practical applications of the discovery?
In the immediate term it means that the below table means something and isn't an elaborate fairy tale. That all the work on the standard model since the 70s has something to tie it together. That until recently unanswered question of how does mass come about has an answer. This was an important point because otherwise the model could have been wrong.
The scientists are getting off on the fact that they've been on the right track for the last 3 decades and did not have to start again from scratch. We avoided entering some dark age and the scientists know the funds will keep coming in as the billions spent on the LHC was not a collosal waste of money or the world's most expensive sling shot.
In the midst of all this high tech wizardry, for the last century we have been discovering how matter was made in a caveman like fashion. Breaking stuff by hurling other stuff at it and then marveling at the fragments
Whether this is a 3 year old's way of discovering the world or worse, it is indicative of the level we are at in comprehending what makes up the universe.
Hey thanks for the help guys....
Also feel proud that the father of this theory was an Indian, Sathyendra Nath Bose...hence the name "boson".
Little correction there, the father of the mass theory is Peter Higgs an Englishman, and he came up with this theory in the 60s. He was very happy to be proved right when he was still alive.
The bose part refers to a number of particles as the table above shows that impart force, electro-magnetic, strong /weak nuclear force & now mass. We just discovered the mass boson, the other bosons are already known.
Tweet
Comment