There are several things to keep in mind when reading things like this piece:
1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger friends roughly what they saw.
2) The most familiar exclusion plots are showing the line at which the cross section is excluded at 95% along with the 2-sigma uncertainty on the expected location of this curve. Since the people spreading rumors are not very familiar with the analysis, they do not realize that n-sigma deviations between the observed and expected lines are not the same thing as n-sigma observations. The actual significance of observation will usually be lower.
3) Again because the people spreading rumors are not familiar with the analysis, they are not able to add appropriate caveats about systematic uncertainties, which can substantially reduce significance. Because these rumors started last week, I guarantee the plots on which they were based do not include all systematic effects. And because the bloggers are predominantly theorists, they don't have the experience to add that information themselves either.
So I hope you will take rumors for what they are: rumors.
1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger friends roughly what they saw.
Are you saying that you do have actual knowledge, or are you just guessing this stuff just like the others? I'm not trtying to be snarky, I really want to know if you have good hard info or not.
Let's just say that regardless of whether I have any actual knowledge about this specific situation, I know that what I outlined is what happens from other, similar situations where I definitely have actual knowledge. Let's also say that if I did have any actual knowledge, I would know better than to confirm it and I would definitely know better than to say what I know to a blogger.
I do know that knowledgeable people will probably be more open-mouthed around this time tomorrow.
Ahh the good ole' pre-publication information embargo :)
You're right though... somebody (i.e. one of the thousands of collaborators, from undergrads to PIs) probably got the email that said something to the effect "we'll be releasing results on the search for the Higgs tomorrow, and until those results are released you aren't allowed to talk/tweet/email/post/facebook any information about the experiment. Of course, this doesn't mean they know anything about the paper, only that they know there's going to be a paper that discusses something. The people who really know are going to be the ones with the tightest lips.
When the LHC was built - one of the biggest reasons used to justify its massive cost was that it would lead to new physics. Th Higgs sighting is sort of the Good News/Bad News scenario.
At the energies predicted, it falls in nicely with mostly established physics (Standard model). So yes that is the good news part.
The seriously bad news part is that it does not lead us in any new directions at all. Theoretical Physicists usually feed off of Observations from experiments like the LHC and new strange results to expand their frontiers.
For a while now unfortunately they have been going down the Warren of String theory without any falsifiable predictions emerging. Instead people have more or less stumbled in the Anthropic principle as the new be-all and end-all. I was really hoping that there was no Higgs to be found at all OR Super symmetry to be found OR Fine structure constant Variations OR some clue abut dark matter :(
Yes certainly there is much room to find new and exciting stuff - but "not" finding the Higgs was the lowest hanging fruit. If the LHC were not able to find the Higgs at any energy level, the Standard model wold be rendered incomplete and a lot of "new" new Physics would follow. They would have had to explian how Mass is introduced into the model without relying on the Higgs Field.
Now (if this is confirmed to the 5 sigma needed) the experimenters have to actually go looking for new stuff - a harder proposition, fraught with interpretations and Agendas.
New for the sake of "new" doesn't make much sense to me. Quoting Einstein "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." If indeed Higgs boson is spotted, it will be indeed a exemplary triumph of this thought, since the core premise of standard model is symmetry and simplicity.
I consider LHC as the best microscope we humans ever build. Our exploratory quest and adventure will remain ever more interesting and baffling when we start to probe in higher energy levels. This will be irrespective of whether the presence of Higgs boson is established or not. And there is no reason to think otherwise, since in the past the deeper and in finer scales we probed, strange phenomena had popped out, requiring more new theorems and scientific understanding to explain them.
I may be in the minority, but I'll be slightly disappointed (although extremely impressed) if CERN actually does announce they've sighted the Higgs.
I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.
On the other hand, that our great minds were able to see a problem, come up with a solution, test it and then say "Yes, we accurately predicted an unobservable, and yet fundamental principal of our universe" would be damn impressive.
"A few pages of equations" is pretty damn good for the software the universe runs on. Imagine saying "iirc, Portal's physics engine is a few pages of code. Not concise at all".
(In fairness, we can be fairly sure that the Standard Model isn't the whole deal; it doesn't do gravity properly, for instance. And you need more than just the bare equations to explain what's going on -- though I think a lot of that is just impedance matching for the benefit of our not-very-mathematics-tolerant brains. But, still. "A few pages" isn't so bad.)
A couple of issues with your comparison: math is much more succinct than most code--it's more like a few pages of APL than a few pages of C++; also, code has to deal with performance so elegant solutions tend to give way to complicated messes in the face of finite hardware and imperfect optimizing compilers.
That said, you do have a good point. However, extreme complexity arising from a simple input is not that surprising--just look to the r pentomino in the game of life or the Mandelbrot set.
CERN apparently said the following in a press release, which puts some substantial limits on what's actually going to be announced:
"A seminar will be held at CERN on 13 December at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs."
I got that from Matt Strassler's blog entry below (which is worth reading):
Here's the link to the seminar. It is titled "Update on the Standard Model Higgs searches in ATLAS and CMS". There, you can find a link to the webcast, since it will be broadcasted live at 14h CET tomorrow, Dec 13: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890.
From CERN's general director: "ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson [...] based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs."
So there's a "Higgs field" that all objects move through and those objects which have inertial mass are affected by this field? And inertial mass is the result of interchanges of the force carriers (higgs particle) between objects with inertial mass?
Inertial mass is ubiquitous. Why does it take so much power to make the Higgs boson detectable? How _do_ you detect it?
Is the Higgs boson one of the hypotheses of Newton's famous phrase "Hypotheses non fingo."?
To make the Higgs detectable means making a sufficiently high concentration of energy to make a Higgs particle. That concentration of energy is dependent on the mass of the particle (and hence energy by e=mc^2). The Higgs boson is theorized to exist at relatively high mass, hence making it difficult to create. This higgs particle will decay into a shower of other particles and these particles will decay, and all these remnant are detected and analyzed to recreate the original event. So no, Higgs is quite well understood and we expect to find it for strong reasons.
But mass is everywhere, so aren't there Higgs bosons everywhere too?
If so, what is the difference between detecting the Higgs boson via the presence of mass (i.e., "These particles have mass so there must be one or more Higgs boson nearby) versus detecting the Higgs boson as a separate particle?
The excitation of the higgs field corresponding to higgs boson's like we are looking for at LHC are 'manifested' so to speak. The higgs that cause mass are virtual carrier particles that exist in a state of quantum in betweenness. Photons, for example are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. They are not the same, however, as the photons transmitted to your eye. So you don't see photons being traded between magnets when you hold them together, but can see the photons bouncing off the magnets from the sun. In the same way we can't see the higgs carrier particles, but can see (hopefully) the higgs bosons at LHC.
Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.
When a drunk smelly hobo enters the room the members engage a cloaking device, so the hobo is able to accelerate to max speed immediately. The hobo has no higgs boson to attract the members, the prime minister does. The higgs field is the members, the hobo is the photons, the minister is the neutron. The LHC is finds out why the members gather around the minister.
I believe that explanation was created to help William Waldegrave, the UK Science Minister at the time, understand the point of spending money on CERN:
Aside from the good explanations of what the Higgs is below, can someone explain why discovering the Higgs would be significant? I.e. what problems does it help illuminate.
1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger friends roughly what they saw.
2) The most familiar exclusion plots are showing the line at which the cross section is excluded at 95% along with the 2-sigma uncertainty on the expected location of this curve. Since the people spreading rumors are not very familiar with the analysis, they do not realize that n-sigma deviations between the observed and expected lines are not the same thing as n-sigma observations. The actual significance of observation will usually be lower.
3) Again because the people spreading rumors are not familiar with the analysis, they are not able to add appropriate caveats about systematic uncertainties, which can substantially reduce significance. Because these rumors started last week, I guarantee the plots on which they were based do not include all systematic effects. And because the bloggers are predominantly theorists, they don't have the experience to add that information themselves either.
So I hope you will take rumors for what they are: rumors.