Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
So then is the Higgs Boson it'self massless from its ''inception'' (proper term ?) or is it massless because of it being ''eaten'' by the W and Z Bosons as one of the posted link articles was postulating?
That's interesting Brian. Alan Boyle's blog had this to say about the findings in 2011: "Last year, the best that the LHC teams could do was 3.6 sigma for ATLAS, and 2.6 for CMS." As I understand, they're combining those results with data mined this year. While 2.6 sigma is lower than Tevetron's findings, 3.6 sigma is a bit higher. Will they report 5 sigma, or close to it, at the conference? I don't know, but the press is already jumping on the bandwagon.
Associated Press has this to say:
"But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.
Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson - all but proving it exists - but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed." News from The Associated Press
There's certainly a lot of expectations, but we'll still have to wait and see what's revealed at the conference.
So then is the Higgs Boson it'self massless from its ''inception'' (proper term ?) or is it massless because of it being ''eaten'' by the W and Z Bosons as one of the posted link articles was postulating?
The Higgs boson is expected to have mass. As I understand it, they help enable particles that would otherwise be massless to obtain their mass. Some particles remain massless though, such as photons. To me, the Higgs seems very complicated to understand because it's not just about the particle; it also involves the Higgs field (or fields?) and Higgs Mechanism, which taken together, its behavior has an influence and effect on particles. If proven to exist, it would be regarded as a very fundamental particle, if not the most fundamental, as predicted by particle physics. It kind of explains why there's stuff in the universe.
From Scientific American:
"We can even take all our data on particle physics data and interpret them in terms of the mass of a hypothetical Higgs boson. In other words, if we assume that the Higgs boson exists, we can infer its mass based on the effect it would have on the properties of other particles and fields." What exactly is the Higgs boson? Have physicists proved that it really exists? : Scientific American
So if they do announce this week that the Higgs Boson does indeed exist then i'm assuming that the only remaining elusive particle is the String particle although i believe that it's theorized to be 100 times smaller than the Higgs and so i'm guessing that we'll never be able to proove of it's existence or at least during our lifetime?
So if they do announce this week that the Higgs Boson does indeed exist then i'm assuming that the only remaining elusive particle is the String particle although i believe that it's theorized to be 100 times smaller than the Higgs and so i'm guessing that we'll never be able to proove of it's existence or at least during our lifetime?
In relation to the above article are a few vids that may help illustrate and may provide a better basic understanding of the Higgs boson, the Higgs field, and the search for it.
I'm guessing as to what they call the ''particles'' theorized in String Theory ? Or maybe they are called Branes if memory serves me correctly here?
You're mixing up a couple of things. I'm assuming you watched "Fabric of the Cosmos". It was a pretty good special on PBS.
That particular theory is that particles are made of loops or strings of vibrating energy.
Branes come from M-Theory, which is a subset of string theory. I'm not quite sure how to distill down what branes are since I'm not quite sure I understand it myself, but it has to do with those strings alternately creating and residing on various extra dimensions.
There are all kinds of "particles" left to find. There might be gravitons, there might be dark matter. Who knows what we might find.
Many of the bigwigs in the physics world are predicting that at next weeks International Conference on High Energy Physics (Melbourne, Australia july 4 - july 11) that the LHC scientists there will announce that they have indeed discovered proof of the Higgs Boson existence.
Can someone fast forward to this time frame already. I was really excited to hear about this possibility. I'm more giddy then a kid in a candy store! Do we get pay per view access to this conference?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
