I got to join in on a great conversation this morning on Minnesota Public Radio's "The Daily Circuit", all about the Higgs Boson and what it means for the future of physics.

This is a fascinating issue. Finding the Higgs Boson (if that is, indeed, what scientists have done) means that all the particles predicted by the Standard Model of physics have now been found. But that's not necessarily good news for physicists. For one thing, it would have been a lot more interesting to break the Standard Model than to uphold it. For another, we're now left with a model for the Universe that mostly works but still has some awkward holes — holes that it might be hard to get the funding to fill.

Daily Circuit host Kerry Miller, Harvard physics chair Melissa Franklin, and I spent 45 minutes talking about what is simultaneously a beautiful dream and a waking nightmare for the physics world. And I got to make a "Half Baked" reference in a conversation about particle physics, so you know it's a good time, too.

Listen to the whole conversation at Minnesota Public Radio's website.

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on Twitter. Further: Support Tom the Dancing Bug by JOINING its proud and mighty INNER HIVE and receive untold BENEFITS and PRIVILEGES! Fun! ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/18/tom-the-dancing-bug-super-fu-5.html/feed 22 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/09/oh-the-leptons-connected-to-t.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/09/oh-the-leptons-connected-to-t.html#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 17:41:28 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=170081 Garance Franke-Ruta has a great explainer that will help you more easily make sense of Higgs-related news and commentary. What's the difference between a fermion and a boson? Is Higgs the only boson? And where to quarks fit into all of this. Read it, and all will become clearer. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/09/oh-the-leptons-connected-to-t.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/06/higgs-on-higgs.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/06/higgs-on-higgs.html#comments Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:16:18 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=169700 Peter Higgs (of the Higgs Boson Higgses) would like to correct a couple of misconceptions. First off, the discovery of the Higgs Boson (if that is, indeed, what has been discovered) neither proves nor disproves the existence of a deity.]]>

Peter Higgs (of the Higgs Boson Higgses) would like to correct a couple of misconceptions.

First off, the discovery of the Higgs Boson (if that is, indeed, what has been discovered) neither proves nor disproves the existence of a deity. In fact, the Higgs Boson has nothing to do with God at all. It's important to physicists, sure. As we've talked about here before, Higgs Bosons are thought to be a key part of explaining why some sub-atomic particles have more mass than others. But that does not really overlap with religious significance. In fact, according to Higgs, the name "God Particle" is actually a politeness-corrupted version of "Goddam Particle"—so called because the goddam particle was so difficult to find.

Second: Over the last couple of days, you may have been wondering what practical applications could come out of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Peter Higgs has a response for that. To paraphrase: "Damned if I know."

“It’s around for a very short time. It’s probably about a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. I don’t know how you apply that to anything useful," Higgs said.

“It’s hard enough with particles which have longer life times for decay to make them useful. Some of the ones which have life times of only maybe a millionth of a second or so are used in medical applications. How you could have an application of this thing which is very short lived, I have no idea.”

But Alan Walker, a colleague from the university’s school of physics and astronomy, said there had been the same uncertainty when the electron was discovered.

Read the rest of The Telegraph's story on Peter Higgs' reaction to CERN's latest Higgs Boson news.

Typography enthusiasts "moved by Dr Fabiola Gianotti's incredibly strange choice of font in announcing the recent results of Cern's ATLAS collaboration" are petitioning Microsoft to rename Comic Sans to "Comic Cerns." Cosmic Sans might work, too!]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/05/petition-to-rename-font-comi.html/feed 70 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/05/its-no-coincidence-that-higg.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/05/its-no-coincidence-that-higg.html#comments Thu, 05 Jul 2012 16:03:41 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=169466 In light of recent images released by CERN, reader Snark^ reports that the Higgs Boson particle has been given a new nickname by Redditors.]]>

In light of recent images released by CERN, reader Snark^ reports that the Higgs Boson particle has been given a new nickname by Redditors. Behold: The FSM Particle.

RAMEN!

Back in December, I told you that physicists at CERN thought that by this summer they might be able to say, once and for all, whether the Higgs Boson particle exists. As a quick reminder, here's how I described that particle in a post from last year:

You know that reality is like a Lego model, it's made up of smaller parts. We are pieced together out of atoms. Atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. (Quarks and electrons, as far as we know, are elementary particles, with nothing smaller inside.) When you're talking about the Higgs Boson, you're talking about the mass of these particles. Here's an imperfect analogy: A top quark, the most massive particle we know of, is like an elephant. An electron, on the other hand, is more like a mouse. And nobody knows for certain why those differences exist.

There is a theory, though. Back in the 1960s, a guy named Peter Higgs came up with the idea that all these particles exist in a field, and their mass is a reflection of how much they interact with that field. Heavy particles have a lot of interaction. Lighter particles are relatively standoffish. If this field exists, the Higgs Boson is the tiny thing it's made of.

So that's the Higgs Boson—what it (theoretically) is and why that matters. And now, scientists at CERN are saying that they might have found it. What's that mean? Basically, they found a new sub-atomic particle that seems to fit the theoretical description of what a Higgs Boson should be like. The New York Times reports that scientists are calling it the "Higgslike" particle for now.

Meanwhile, all across the Internet, science journalists and bloggers are alternately celebrating the discovery, skepticizing the details, and cringing at the overuse of the obnoxious moniker "God particle". Want to know more? Here are some great places to start:

• "We've observed a new particle. ... We have quite strong evidence that there's something there," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the LHC's CMS experiment, said in the video, which was discovered by Science News on CERN's website. "So, to ascertain its properties is still going to take us a little bit of time." — Yesterday, MSNBC's Cosmic Blog wrote about a leaked video from CERN that presaged the announcement today.

• "The Higgs has long been a mixed blessing for particle physics. In the early 1990s, when physicists were pleading—ultimately in vain–with Congress not to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider, which was sucking up tax dollars faster than a black hole, the Nobel laureate Leon Lederman christened the Higgs “the God particle.” This is scientific hype at its most outrageous. If the Higgs is the “God Particle,” what should we call an even more fundamental particle, like a string? The Godhead Particle? The Mother of God Particle?" — At Scientific American blogs, John Horgan explains how the Higgs could screw physics funding. It's been spun as THE fundamental particle, but it's not really. And now, how do we convince governments to keep research going?

• "Is it the Higgs boson? That’s a surprisingly complicated question! The difficulty lies with our theories of fundamental particles: the Standard Model and its modifications (including supersymmetry). None of these theories provides a clear, precise prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson, and the mass ranges may overlap between different models. Some models predict the existence of more than one Higgs particle, so if any of those are true, then we have at best found a Higgs boson. And that doesn’t rule out the (slim) possibility that this discovery is a Higgs-mimic, a particle that acts kind of like the Higgs, but doesn’t play the same role. In other words, the work isn’t done." — Physicist and blogger Matthew Francis talks about whether this discovery is a big deal, how big a deal it might be, and why Higgs Bosons are so damn confusing.

• "Physicists said that they would probably be studying the new Higgs particle for years. Any deviations from the simplest version of the boson — and there are hints of some already — could open a gateway to new phenomena and deeper theories that answer questions left hanging by the Standard Model: What, for example, is the dark matter that provides the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies? And why is the universe made of matter instead of antimatter?" — The New York Times covers the basics and what happens next.

• "...Other physicists are preparing for disappointment. That’s because scientists have been secretly hoping all along that, when they finally found the Higgs, it would be an interesting particle with unexpected behaviors — even somewhat unruly. A perfectly well-behaved Higgs leaves less room for new, exciting physics — the kind that theorists have been wishing would show up at the LHC." — Wired Science explains why finding a Higgs Boson isn't the end of the story.

• "Seminars proper start at 9am Geneva time (3am Eastern time, midnight Pacific time, 5pm Melbourne time). One from ATLAS, by Fabiola Giannoti, and one from CMS, by Joe Incandela. Then a press conference after. Remember what we’re looking for: how significant is the signal, do the two experiments agree with each other, does the rate agree with the Standard Model prediction, are different channels mutually consistent with each other." — Way early this morning, while most of us slept, physicist and blogger Sean Carroll was live-blogging the Higgs Boson announcement from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. His live-blog offers a lot of great analysis and research detail.

• "For many of us, the most shocking revelation to come out of CERN's Higgs boson announcement today was quite unrelated to the science itself. Rather, we were blown away by the fact that a team made up of some of the most undoubtedly brilliant people in the world believe that Comic Sans is an appropriate font for such a historic occasion." — The Verge on CERN's ongoing love affair with the much-reviled font Comic Sans. (They used the same font back in December.)

• "But for cosmologists, one of the most exciting things about the Higgs is that it seems to exist at all. The Higgs is a boson, which means that you can pack many of them into a single state, and therefore can be thought of as a field pervading all of space — photons, which make up the electromagnetic field, are also bosons. (This is in contrast to fermions, which cannot be brought into the same state and are thus more usefully thought of as individual particles of matter.) An even more precise categorisation of particles is via their spin: bosons can take on integer values (0, 1, 2, …) , and fermions half-integer values (1/2, 3/2, …). The known bosons, like the photons, have spin 1 and are known as vector particles. The Higgs, however, has spin 0, and is called a scalar." — Astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe talks about what a real-life Higgs Boson might mean for other branches of physics.

• Finally, Ph.D. Comics explains the Higgs Boson for those of you who are already too drunk on 4th of July beer to read a long article.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Got more Higgs Boson links you think people should be reading? Share 'em in the comments!

[Video Link] By Vi Hart, about today's big physics news. (thanks, Kathleen McGivney!).]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/04/sonnet-on-a-higgs-like-particl.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/04/gettin-higgy-with-it-a-roun.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/04/gettin-higgy-with-it-a-roun.html#comments Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:12:08 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=169208 On the day we reserve to tell ourselves America is great - July 4 - Europe reminds us that we suck at science.]]>

On the day we reserve to tell ourselves America is great - July 4 - Europe reminds us that we suck at science. #HiggsBoson

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) July 4, 2012

Big science news today: Scientists at Europe's CERN research center have discovered a new subatomic particle believed to be a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the "boson" imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. And Stephen Hawking loses a $100 bet. Many of us on Twitter know that we should be excited by all of this, but have no idea what it really means, having dope-smoked our way through Physics class in high school. This animation helps. Still: If you can't join 'em, LOL at 'em. Here are some of the better #higgsjokes I faved on Twitter after the news broke. Did I miss any good ones? Let me know in the comments. And read Maggie's post.

Whoa whoa whoa! We’re cross-breeding hogs and bison now? Thanks a lot Obamacare!

— ed casey (@edcasey) July 4, 2012

Update from CERN:It turns out the thing they found in the Large Haldron Collider was just a GIF.

— Dave Pell (@davepell) July 4, 2012

The #Higgs #Boson walks into a catholic church. Priest says "What are you doing here?" HB says "You can't have mass without me" #higgsjokes

— Kallee (@Kallee) July 4, 2012

"Are You There God Particle? It's Me, Average Person That Doesn't Understand You"

— Steve Murray (@NPsteve) July 4, 2012

Where is your god now, particles?

— Daniel Werneck (@empire_of_dust) July 4, 2012

Overheard on the newsdesk: "I don't care what the Higgs boson headline is, just make sure we spell Hadron correctly."

— Guardian style guide (@guardianstyle) July 4, 2012

I've got 99.9999% problems, but a Higgs ain't one.

— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) July 4, 2012

I hope Higgs-Boson isn't an Old Testament God particle.

— John Moe (@johnmoe) July 4, 2012

Higgs Boson Explainer: It's like, a particle, man.

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) July 4, 2012

Turned down opportunity to go on 1-hour radio programme to discuss the religious significance of the Higgs particle since there isn't any.

— Marcus Chown (@marcuschown) July 4, 2012

The Higgs discovery makes me feel heavier already. What we need instead is the anti-Higgs. A particle that takes mass away.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) July 4, 2012

Yup. HIggs boson. Right where I left it.

— Adam Rogers (@jetjocko) July 2, 2012

If I discovered the Higgs boson, I'd also do my presentation in ComicSans just to watch the outrage on Twitter ;-)

— Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) July 4, 2012

Ricky Gervais collapses after yelling at 2 strangers discussing the God particle.

— Andy Kindler (@AndyKindler) July 4, 2012

There's an easy-to-understand video online that explains Higgs boson & creation of the universe, but it's like four minutes long.Pass.

— Mike Scully (@scullymike) July 4, 2012

Why didn't they let Danny Glover announce the "Higgs" part of the whole Higgs boson thing? #toooldforthissigma

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) July 4, 2012

Can't believe they've already lost the Higgs Boson.

— Peter Serafinowicz (@serafinowicz) July 4, 2012

The Higgs boston is the theoretical particle that accounts for heaviness of accents.

— John Rennie (@tvjrennie) July 4, 2012

A Higgs boson walks into a bar. The barman doesn't understand.

— Ed Yong(@edyong209) July 4, 2012

An FTL neutrino walks into a bar. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... A confused Higgs Boson walks into a bar.

— Martin Robbins (@mjrobbins) July 4, 2012

A neutrino goes into a bar. "What would you.." says the barman, but the neutrino is already thousands of miles away.

— Martin Robbins (@mjrobbins) July 4, 2012

A Higgs Boson walks into a bar. "Want a drink?" asks the barman. The Higgs Boson doesn't reply. Because it's a Higgs Boson. Not a person.

— Martin Robbins (@mjrobbins) July 4, 2012

Discovery of Higgs boson a blow to Bravo's upcoming reality show America's Next Top Standard Model.

— Adam Rogers (@jetjocko) July 4, 2012

Hey I wrote this awesome post and... No, no its not about the Higgs but you... Wait, where are you going? Hey, come back.

— Ed Yong(@edyong209) July 4, 2012

The Higgs Boson is a popular, but confusing, bit of physics. You know that reality is like a Lego model, it's made up of smaller parts. We are pieced together out of atoms. Atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. (Quarks and electrons, as far as we know, are elementary particles, with nothing smaller inside.) When you're talking about the Higgs Boson, you're talking about the mass of these particles. Here's an imperfect analogy: A top quark, the most massive particle we know of, is like an elephant. An electron, on the other hand, is more like a mouse. And nobody knows for certain why those differences exist.

There is a theory, though. Back in the 1960s, a guy named Peter Higgs came up with the idea that all these particles exist in a field, and their mass is a reflection of how much they interact with that field. Heavy particles have a lot of interaction. Lighter particles are relatively standoffish. If this field exists, the Higgs Boson is the tiny thing it's made of. Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln has a really great video explaining this, where he compares the Higgs field to water, and Higgs Bosons to the molecules that make up water. Everything that exists swims in an ocean of Higgses.

Tuesday morning, we learned a little more about the hunt for the Higgs Boson. But the point of the presentation wasn't really to say, "Yes, we found it" or "No, we haven't." In fact, if all you're paying attention to is that simple yes-or-no answer, you're going to miss a lot of interesting information—information that can help you better understand how science works and why the Higgs Boson is so important.

In the presentations, CERN researchers told us two big things:

First: Looking for the Higgs Boson used to be a lot harder because nobody knew its mass. Think of it like trying to find a single Lego piece, in a giant box of Legos, when you don't know what the piece you're looking for looks like. That's changed. Researchers now believe that the Higgs Boson, if it exists, probably has a mass somewhere between 115 and 131 gigaelectronvolts.

Second: Two different detectors on the Large Hadron Collider have found signals, consistent with what you'd expect to see from a Higgs Boson particle, within that mass range—at 126 and 124 gigaelectronvolts.

So why was the un-announcement so non-committal? Simple: Physicists don't like to be wrong.

You can't actually see a Higgs Boson. This isn't like sitting in the jungle and waiting for a rare species of panther to come along so you can photograph it. Instead, scientists are looking for the particles they've predicted that a Higgs Boson would leave behind as it decays. Say you have a hypothesis that a new species of panther exists, but it's invisible as long as it's alive. The only way to figure out whether or not it's actually there is to look for panther poop, or maybe some bits of bone and fur. Trouble is, there are lots of things in the jungle that could leave behind poop, bone, and fur. How do you know what you've found is actually evidence for the existence of the hypothetical panther?

That's essentially the problem physicists are faced with. Those intriguing signals could be decaying Higgs Bosons. They could also be normal things you'd expect to find in the aftermath of proton collisions. The only way to tell the difference is to look for an excess of those signals in the mass range where you'd expect the Higgs Boson to be. But, even if you see that, it could still be a coincidence. This is especially true of the hunt for the Higgs Boson, because it started out looking at a huge range of masses, says Greg Landsberg, professor of physics at Brown University.

"When you look at many, many places what is unlikely in a given place becomes more likely in one of many, many places," he says. "Ask an astronomer what is the probability of a particular star having a planet orbiting it. He’d say the probability is extremely small. However if you asked that differently, 'What the probability of any star having a planet,' the probability would be much closer to 1."

To make sure that the promising signals they're seeing aren't just flukes, the physicists at CERN will need to run their experiments, in that much-more-specific mass range, many more times. Right now, says Don Lincoln, there's a 1 in a 1000 chance that what they're seeing is a coincidence. But, in the past, particle physicists have found that 1-in-1000 chances aren't a very good bet. "That's equivalent to tossing a coin 10 times and having it always come up heads. To be comfortable saying we've found something we'd have to have the equivalent of tossing a coin 20 times and having that all come up heads—a 1 in a million chance," he says. The more coin tosses, the more you rule out coincidence. The physicists I spoke with said we're likely to have enough data to do that by next summer.

If the Higgs Boson is actually there, around 124 or 126 gigaelectronvolts, that means it's a lighter particle than many people had guessed. In fact, originally, people were looking for the Higgs Boson at masses as high as 600 gigaelectronvolts. This is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, there's the "d'oh" factor. A big selling point on the Large Hadron Collider was the fact that it had the power necessary to study very high energies. That's what makes it different from particle accelerators that have come before, like the recently closed Tevatron. But 124-126 gigaelectronvolts is well within the range of what the Tevatron could study.

In fact, the Tevatron looked at that range. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet have enough data to make any definitive statements. That could change. Don Lincoln says that when the Tevatron researchers are finished analyzing their data, they might be able to back up the CERN findings. That's because the Tevatron noticed a small signal around 125 gigaelectronvolts. However, Lincoln also says it's a smaller signal than you'd expect if the CERN results really were correct. This could mean the Tevatron saw the Higgs Boson signal first, but couldn't verify its results before CERN got better data. It could also mean the signal from CERN is just a coincidence. Right now, it's too early to tell.*

Second, if the Higgs Boson exists and if it is light in mass, that opens up a way more awesome world for future physics research than would exist with a heavy Higgs. Physics operates on the Standard Model—a mathematical theory aimed at explaining the forces at work in the Universe and how particles interact with one another. The Standard Model requires the existence of a Higgs Boson, but a light Higgs Boson would mean that we'd have to make some changes to the way the Model works, possibly incorporating ideas like supersymmetry, says Frank Close, particle physicist at the University of Oxford.

A light Higgs also means the Large Hadron Collider has enough power to find lots of other previously unseen particles. "Strategically, if this thing turns out to be real, the fact that it is at low mass end is good news," Close says. "If it was at the high end you’d have that fear that the interesting physics was out of the LHC's reach. This suggests lots of interesting things are still available for us to find using the LHC."

Everybody is all excited about the prospect of finding the Higgs Boson particle. This is kind of the wrong way of thinking about it.

I told you before that the existence of the Higgs Boson is part of the Standard Model—finding it is a key part of verifying that the Universe works the way we think it does.

"If we don’t find it, it’s extremely weird," says Jeremiah Mans, associate professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. "We know from other measurements that properties of regular particles aren’t quite right unless there’s a Higgs around to pull them just a bit. If you take it out, then the theory, that otherwise works well, breaks down and doesn’t make the right predictions. That points to something being there."

Verifying that your big, important theory is correct is a big deal. But that outcome is also just a little boring. It would be a lot more exciting if everything we thought we knew turned out to be wrong.

And there is more than one way that the Higgs Boson could throw off the Standard Model. It could, of course, flagrantly refuse to exist. But it could also be quite a bit weirder. We could find the Higgs Boson, and it could turn out to be different than what we've been predicting. See, all this time, physicists have only really been looking for what's known as "the minimal Higgs." You can think of it as the simple version. In the minimal Higgs theory, there's only one type of Higgs Boson and it has no electrical charge, among other characteristics.

What happens if the Higgs we find turns out to have a charge? What happens if the Higgs turns out to actually be five different types of Higgses, as some versions of supersymmetry predict? If that's the case, the Standard Model could end up having to dramatically change, just like if the Higgs Boson didn't exist at all.

If, in six months, the physicists at CERN are able to say definitively that they've found the Higgs Boson, particle physicists will be gratified. They will understand the Universe in a way they didn't before and they will be able to work on some new questions. But if CERN is wrong, particle physicists won't hang their heads in shame. Instead, it could well be the most exciting day of their lives.

"If we don't find it, that would be a huge discovery," says Fermilab's Don Lincoln. "The Standard Model does work very well. We’re talking on a phone, after all, and that’s done through electricity, and how that works is part of the Standard Model. A new theory would make have to make some similar predictions, but it would rewrite textbooks."

• • • •

For more information on the Higgs Boson and particle physics, I recommend checking out a couple of books:

Frank Close has a book called The Infinity Puzzle, about the history of Peter Higgs, the Higgs field, and the hunt for the Higgs Boson.

Don Lincoln, who, over the last couple days, has become one of my favorite explainers of physics, has a book called The Quantum Frontier. It's about the Large Hadron Collider—how it works, what we can do with it, and what it might teach us about the Universe.

*This part of the story has been changed from its original version. The previous version was incorrect and read, "First, there's the "d'oh" factor. A big selling point on the Large Hadron Collider was the fact that it had the power necessary to study very high energies. That's what makes it different from particle accelerators that have come before, like the recently closed Tevatron. But 124-126 gigaelectronvolts is well within the range of what the Tevatron could study. In fact, the Tevatron looked at that range. It didn't see anything. This could mean that the signal CERN saw is just a coincidence. It could also mean that the Tevatron was in the right place, but missed seeing something really important." Thanks to Don Lincoln for helping me get this fixed, and to Joe Haley and Peter for pointing out the problem.

Image: A rendering of one of the events, captured by the Large Hadron Collider's CMS detector, that could be evidence of a decaying Higgs Boson particle. Or, it could just be stuff that happens when protons collide. Either way, it's kind of pretty.

I just finished watching particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti on CERN's live webcast, talking about the hunt for the Higgs Boson. I'll be writing more about this later today or tomorrow, but I know a lot of you are really curious to find out what this public announcement was all about. Shorter version: The public announcement wasn't really an announcement of anything. Instead, it was more like a year-in-review presentation. CERN has made some good progress in the hunt for the Higgs Boson, they've been able to narrow their search to small field, and they have seen some potentially interesting things happening within that field. But there's not really enough here to say, one way or the other, whether the Higgs Boson is there. What they can say: 2012 is likely to be a really exciting year for particle physics, as researchers dive into experiments that will help them figure out what those "interesting things" really are.