Governing through Reason
Mass Celebration
It’s now official: the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherché Nucléaire (CERN) announced on July 4, 2012, that the much-searched-for Higgs Boson, the centerpiece of what has come to be called the “Standard Model”, has been found.
I don’t think any other subatomic particle has inspired so much joyous creative output, from Kate McAlpine’s (Alpinekat’s) rap video featured in an earlier column all the way to a brand-new “Sonnet on a Higgs-Like Particle” shown in the embedded video here.
Now Alpinekat’s rap chorus has become an earworm for me:
LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions.
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind:
They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
Now that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC in the rap lyrics above) has made a few of these, you can even buy one, but the 27 km particle collider is sold separately. (This is a spoof. Don’t try to purchase one, it won’t last very long and you’ll be left with nothing but beauty quarks.)
Collision events. Source: C|NET UK.
There are two kinds of elementary particle. The fermions are the ones we’re most familiar with: electrons, protons, neutrons, and the like. Bosons are energy. The photon is a boson: a particle-wave of light, with properties of both particles and waves. Fermions give us chemistry. Bosons give us light and mass.
As fermions pass through the “cosmic molasses” of bosons, they acquire mass. The Higgs boson gives mass to those particles. Mass — like the pull of the Earth because it’s so massive — is so familiar to us that it’s difficult to imagine a universe without it. That’s why physicists wanted so badly to find the Higgs boson.
Higgs bosons live an extremely short life, so the only way to find one is to look for the disruption left behind it. A Higgs boson decays rapidly to two Z bosons a b quark and an anti-b quark, which then decay to an electron-positron other particle pairs that can be detected.
Because they come from a place where energy and mass are the same thing (good ol’ E=mc2, which relates energy E to mass m with the speed of light c), scientists measure the mass of Higgs bosons in electron volts (eV).
The Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN, an earlier, smaller, experiment, told physicists that the mass of the Higgs boson would be greater than 114 giga electron volts (GeV). For comparison, a proton in the nucleus of an atom is about 1 GeV. (“Giga-” is a prefix which means billions; “Tera-” is a prefix meaning trillions, or times 1,000,000,000,000.)
What the Tevatron saw.
The Tevatron at Batavia, Illinois, which was just recently abandoned, ran experiments at 2 TeV. From those experiments, physicists knew that if they found the Higgs, it would be between 118 GeV and 158 GeV.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN runs at 7 TeV. Two experiments, A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (ATLAS) and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), are aimed at finding the Higgs boson. ATLAS found a Higgs boson mass of 126 GeV while CMS gets a mass of 125.3 GeV, exactly where we would expect to find it and close to the same value. Both experiments reached the five sigma (i.e. five standard deviation) level, meaning that there’s a one in 3.5 million chance they’re wrong. Together, they analyzed 800 trillion collisions, a feat that would be impossible without advances in computer processing design.
Next, physicists will continue to examine more collision events to see if there is just one Higgs boson (as predicted by the Standard Model) or whether there are multiple Higgs bosons.
I can’t help but wonder how this finding might have been different if it were made in Waxahatchie instead of Geneva.
Related articles
- Official News from CERN Conference On The Higgs Boson: Higgs DISCOVERED! (techie-buzz.com)
- CERN announces discovery of Higgs boson (theverge.com)
- Higgs Boson Discovered: What Today’s CERN Conference Really Meant (techie-buzz.com)
- Particle ‘Consistent’ With Higgs Boson Discovered (news.discovery.com)
- New baby boson is born, weighing in at about 126 GeV (quantumdiaries.org)
- Physicists Have Found the Higgs Boson (Updating) [Science] (gizmodo.com)
- CERN discovers Higgs-like boson (physicsworld.com)
- New Particle at World’s Largest Atom Smasher is Likely Higgs Boson (livescience.com)
- LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson (science.slashdot.org)
- What Finding the Higgs-Boson Means (wired.com)
- New Particle Resembling Long-Sought Higgs Boson Uncovered at Large Hadron Collider (scientificamerican.com)
- Higgs boson up for spoof sale as retailer opens subatomic shop (slashgear.com)
- Truimph at Cern as Large Hadron Collider scientists announce discovery of Higgs boson ‘God particle’ (independent.co.uk)
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Gosh, filistro, I am as perplexed as anyone.
Or as Dr. McCoy would say, “I’m a biologist, Jim, not a nuclear physicist!”
Over on my FB page, a real-live working physicist told me that the decay to two Z bosons is wrong. It’s a decay to a b quark and an anti-b quark.
See http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/physics/new/hdg/Plain_English.html
As a non-physicist, here’s how I think of it. I stand in the sunshine. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face, and see the bright light through squinty eyes. Those are the bosons known as photons that are flung from the sun, and eight minutes later interact with my body’s atoms. Photons give my body light and heat.
Higgs bosons, the way I figure it, are doing the same sort of thing, but they give my body mass. That’s a good thing, because then I don’t float away and fly off of the planet Earth.
Maybe my physicist friend will come around and explain things better. He’s a much better explainer than I.
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@Treme…the decay to two Z bosons is wrong. It’s a decay to a b quark and an anti-b quark.
Well, there you go. NOW it’s all clear to me…
Seriously, I can’t even begin to understand how an invisible particle can create mass where there was none before. More importantly… before this little critter imparted mass to my body, what was I? Just pure spirit? In which case the Higgs boson is an affirmation of the existence of the soul?
I really like that idea
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#4 written by Rose 10 months ago
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Here’s one way to look at it. I’ll do a digression then come back to Higgs.
We want to find the origin of the properties things have. For instance, we want to know why a brick is hard. We want to know where its hardness comes from. We can say that a brick is hard because it is made up of smaller things (molecules? atoms?) that are hard, but that doesn’t really tell us where hardness comes from — why are the “smaller things” hard?
In order to understand where “hardness” comes from, we have to get down to a level where “hardness” doesn’t exist. “Hardness” comes about through interactions. How it works is this: subatomic particles interact through magnetic forces that attract or repel each other. Every atom is surrounded by electrons. Electrons are all negatively charged — they create magnetic fields around them that have a negative charge. As you know when you played with magnets as a kid, two charges of the same kind repeal each other. So all electrons repeal each other, because they are all negatively charged.
Your hand is made up of atoms that are surrounded by electrons. The hard brick is also made up of atoms that are surrounded by electrons. The atoms in your hand cannot pass through the atoms in the brick, because the electrons surrounding them repeal each other too strongly. Therefore, your hand stops when it gets too close to the brick, and cannot move any farther. You perceive this stoppage as “hardness” because you can’t force past it.
Therefore, “hardness” emerges as a quality that results from the interactions of smaller things — electrons — which are not hard themselves.
So, getting back to Higgs. We want to understand where “mass” comes from. “Mass” is the quality that gives things weight (actually, inertia — or, Einstein would say, “mass” is what warps spacetime and creates “gravity wells” — but ignore that, I’m getting too into the weeds). The simple way to look at the Higgs is that it creates a field, similar to the electron’s magnetic field. This field creates mass, the way (in my example above) the magnetic field creates “hardness”.
Basically, the Higgs field makes it difficult to push things around (i.e., a one-ton boulder is “heavy”) just as in my example, the magnetic field makes it difficult to push your hand through a brick.
Does that help?
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@Rose:
My geology professor would rant “People justify their disbelief in evolution because it’s called a theory, but they believe in gravity and no one can explain how that works.“
Perhaps. The funny part is that even “the way gravity works” is called “a theory”, for exactly the same reasons as evolution. That is, the scientific definition of the word “theory” is not the same as the usual layman’s idea of “theory.”
In any case, I don’t think many non-physicists will understand how gravity works, any more than they understand why the sky is blue. There is a scientific explanation for the color of the sky, yet in common conversation, “Why is the sky blue?” is often used as an examplar of Thing We Do Not Know.
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Does that help?
Well… we’re sort of getting there. Thanks, DC.
So the importance of this particle lies not so much in what it IS but more in what it DOES. And what it does is emit a field of some kind that acts on other larger particles and causes them to acquire mass because they are interacting strongly with each other in some (as yet undetermined) way?
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#9 written by shortchain 10 months ago
The mistake people are making here is equating concepts which are simply mathematical abstractions, quantities in equations, required to make the equations fit the observable data (which they do with, shall we say, disconcerting accuracy?) — with real things. Down at the quantum level there aren’t really any “things” — it’s all just probability densities.
Which is no more sensible than “it’s elephants all the way down”, except that, unlike the elephant theory, this one explains a lot more and can be used for predictive purposes. Which is how the Higgs boson came to “be” in the first place.
But trying to explain things in deep physical waters without mathematics (and the deeper you go, the more strange the mathematics) is not going to satisfy people with a desire to really understand.
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@shortchain… But trying to explain things in deep physical waters without
mathematics (and the deeper you go, the more strange the
mathematics) is not going to satisfy people with a desire to really
understand.I think this is really getting to the root of the problem. We don’t necessarily lack the intelligence to understand, we lack the vocabulary. It’s like trying to explain the operation of a computer to somebody who has absolutely no technical knowledge of any kind. (If you’ve ever tried to get an older relative online, you’ll understand the analogy
But in this instance, it’s greatly compounded by our almost total vocabulary deficit. It’s not just telling your grandma to “push the little buttons with the arrows if you want the picture on the TV-sort-of– thing to move somewhere.” It’s telling her that in Russian... and she’s an Anglophone.
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So the importance of this particle lies not so much in what it IS but more in what it DOES. And what it does is emit a field of some kind that acts on other larger particles and causes them to acquire mass because they are interacting strongly with each other in some (as yet undetermined) way?
That’s very very close, yes — at least, as far as I understand it myself. You can think of the “field” that Higgs generates as being sort of like moleasses. Other particles find it difficult to move through this field, just like moleasses slows down something trying to move through it. This drag-on-motion is interpreted as “mass” — the more massive something is, the harder it is to shove through the Higgs field. That’s sort of the definition of “mass”.
shortchain’s comment #9 is important too, though rather obscure. As I said, if you want to understand the true source of any property, you have to get down to a level of reality that doesn’t have that propery. If you want to know what “red” is, you have do deal with “smaller things” where “red” doesn’t exist, and learn to understand “red” as the interactions of things (“red” is actually a wavelength of light — our eyes interpret different light wavelengths as being different colors. Light actually doesn’t have “color” — it has wavelength.)
So — We want to understand the Ultimate Source of All Properties. To understand where “properties” come from, we have to get down to the most basic level of reality, where “properties” don’t exist at all. At the most fundamental level of Reality that underlies Everything, there can be no properties whatever — or else we’d have to ask where those properties “come from.”
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@DC… At the most fundamental level of Reality that underlies
Everything, there can be no properties whatever — or else we’d have
to ask where those properties “come from.”Which, interestingly, is a paraphrase of the very first words in the Bible, which tell us that “in the Beginning, the world was without form, and void…”
Increasingly I think the ancients knew more than we suspect.
Also, I understand why Einstein felt that the deeper he got into physics, the nearer he came to discerning the face of God.
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#13 written by shortchain 10 months ago
Folks, obscure is what I do best. Ask anyone.
But what you said, DC, is just a bit beyond the pale. We do have “properties” that we can touch, taste, smell, see, and feel. And we do have “units” which we can use to measure these properties. Now, other people might have different units. The ones we use are “feet”, “pounds”, and “seconds”, measuring, respectively, length, force, and time. All other things can ultimately be related to these units. (As an example, a “hard” surface is one where an applied force over a small area will result in little or no deformation.)
The trick is that these units are pretty good for things at the level even of bacteria (through a microscope, for example), but when you get down to the atomic level, holding up a tape-measure, even a very tiny one, against an electron — well, it doesn’t work so well.
And at the further subatomic level, even worse, because a lot of these “things” flicker in and out of existence in very brief times. So physicists use proxies, and proxies of proxies. What I said earlier about these things being concepts is accurate. But let me add that concepts can be very distinctive, in the right circumstances, and useful too.
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shortchain,
You’re discussing the distinction betwen “measurement” and “properties,” between “perception” and “reality,” and other things like that. I’m not asking why a thing is a foot long — I’m asking why it has “length” at all. I’m not asking whether we should measure the weight of a thing in pounds — I’m asking why it has weight.
As you say, “a “hard” surface is one where an applied force over a small area will result in little or no deformation” — but the question is, why does something deform (or not)? and the answer to that has to do with electromagnetic interations between atoms, and not with whether atoms can “deform”.
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Increasingly I think the ancients knew more than we suspect.
Also, I understand why Einstein felt that the deeper he got into physics, the nearer he came to discerning the face of God.
Yes. That’s why I’m a spiritual person, and why I consider the symbolism of religion to be of interest — and “true” religion to never be in contradiciton with science. (I did an article on that a while back, likening the streamers of supergalactic clusters to neural networks…)
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#16 written by shortchain 10 months ago
DC,
Well, sooner or later any sequence of attempts to define everything is going to start to resemble a game of “rock, paper, scissors” — but for myself, “length” exists because we can measure it. To put it another way, a property is something we can observe, either directly or indirectly. To put it still another way, length is what keeps things apart, time is what prevents everything from happening at once, and force — ah, force — is what you feel when you try to make things go faster.Add mathematics to these measurable quantities, and it seems to me you get physics. No need to go all meta.
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#17 written by Max 10 months ago
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#19 written by WA7th 10 months ago
I have a hard time trying to grasp the significance of their proof, beyond it being a great “celebrate and move-on” moment of validation. If they were 90-something percent sure Higgs was correct before this, and 100% sure now, what is gained by the added confidence? Did they learn anything new or discover anything they were wrong about?
Maybe once I have a chance to misinterpret what “Scientific American” will have to say about all this, I’ll gain a whole new level of misunderstanding!
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@Max Huh! You ought to have to sit through a long winded Baptist preacher’s sermon, you wanna know about “warped spacetime”.
Didn’t you know Martin Luther hammered his thumb into a big purple blood blister for your right to summarize and sermonize ANY gospel verse into: “For God so loved the world that the Cowboys pre-game starts in 30 minutes, Amen”? -
#21 written by shortchain 10 months ago
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If they were 90-something percent sure Higgs was correct before this, and 100% sure now, what is gained by the added confidence?
WA7th, the point is that 90% is not sufficient for scientists, particularly because they had only mathematical prediction beforehand rather than observational validation.
(This is why, by the way, theories like evolution and global warming should be accepted by the general public. Scientists need to be on the order of 98%+ certain before they publish. Evolution and human-influenced global climate change have a great deal of observational evidence behind them, in addition to the mathematical modelling. They have odds on the order of a few thousandsths of a percent of being wrong.)
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#23 written by Max 10 months ago
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Jeez, Treme. You’re so intimidatingly brilliant.
I know this is important, but even with quasi-diligent effort, I simply can’t wrap my mind around it. I’m not sure if this is because I’m too dim, too lazy or just too perverse.
I know you’re a great teacher, so If I promise to try really hard to pay attention and not let my eyes glaze over, can you tell me in simple laymen’s terms a.) what this thing is and b.)what it does?
I wonder if it was this hard for people in the Middle Ages to grasp the import of what Galileo and Copernicus were trying to tell them about heliocentrism? I suspect it would have been harder to grasp what Lister and others were saying about germs. Teeny-tiny invisible creatures that can’t be seen but can still affect our lives in vitally important ways… not easy for simple ordinary folks to get a handle on.