Update on the search for the Higgs boson at CERN
- Thread starter CiSTM
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That is my assumption. The webcast is live now if you're interested.
http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs_alternative.html
Great, thanks.
The standard model is a bit of a kludge. It is not elegant.
Himynameischris
Member
Oh I wish I wasn't so tired from work I would love to watch this, I normallyi wouldn't understand half of what they say, no chance I understand anything right now 
A theory doesn't have to be elegant. It just has to be right.
krameriffic
Member
There's so much stuff beyond the standard model, so much that it doesn't include, and so many efforts have been made to try to tweak it, change it and include these phenomena within it. The reason why I say we're on the brink of a conceptual shift is because many physicists don't think the standard model is "fixable" in a traditional sense. It's an effective low energy field theory, in the parlance of the field, for something bigger and better, much like how Newtonian mechanics is an effective theory for low velocity relativity or large distance and time scale quantum mechanics.
When I say the last hundred years, I mean the past century. I mean the transition from "classical" to "modern" physics. What we've figured out since that shift is details. All of the wonderful details that arise from the fundamental conceptual shifts of quantum mechanics and relativity. The strides we have made are within that particular theoretic framework. What I'm talking about is not a stride, but a change of the framework entirely that ushers in things that absolutely could not exist within the standard model.
Lol, for a second I was wondering if I had a replay of WWDC playing.
This is true. The standard model is also incomplete. I am very weak on cosmology though, so all I can do is parrot books I have read.
krameriffic
Member
And when you think about what it sets out to explain and the fact that it does it in just a few lines of a Lagrangian based pretty much entirely around symmetries, it's pretty damn elegant.
ashbash159
Member
That dude is having a fit at the bottom row there.
krameriffic
Member
It's an academic colloquium that is probably closed off to media and solely being presented to people who work at CERN on high energy physics. It's a live academic presentation, not a press release by professional PR people.
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
There's a much much larger room on site with a video feed of it.
krameriffic
Member
Yeah, they're talking about how they've progressed in both the theoretical modeling of the interactions as well as the quality of data collection and data processing (of which they have an absolutely ridiculous amount to do).
From putting together various sources it seems to be that they hit 5 sigma for detecting a particle which means they are 99.999% sure that they have discovered something. A higgs like particle, but they haven't specified what it is yet?
krameriffic
Member
Most of the (what sounds like jibber-jabber to average people) was explaining how they try to exclude "other things" from the data in addition to removing background noise and other crap from the data.
StopMakingSense
Member
comic sans and all.
hmm
Hoooly shiet! ATLAS gamma-gamma results will more likely be well over sigma 5. Higgs has been discovered, tho it won't be presented like that until further proof but we all know what's going on ;D
PR: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2012/PR17.12E.html
CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson.
CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson.
I hated the projectors though, stupid misaligned, burning boxes of doom.
EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Depends on whether or not they confirm the Hitler particle.
Both.
Loud fan too. My math teacher had a calculator attachment that displayed it on the projector. That was pretty cool.
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