Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can't read because it doesn't display properly in Firefox, but I'm sure is very interesting.
Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:
There's a 99.7% probability that this poll is completely meaningless. That doesn't mean it's not entertaining, though.
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"`It's quite hard to destroy the Earth.'
Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?"
-from the comments on the LHC at slashdot
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"Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it -- and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvelous discovery and an artist making a painting." -Carlo Rubbia, famous and infamous…
"By early 2011, [Fermilab's Tevatron] will have recorded enough data to either find the Higgs or rule it out. -New Scientist, August 2009
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So, the news of the moment in high-energy physics is the latest results being reported from a conference in Europe. The major experimental collaborations are presenting their newest analyses, sifting through terabyte-size haystacks of data looking for the metaphorical needle that is the Higgs boson…
You completely miss the theological implications of this discovery. It proves the existence of God at the same time as disproving his omniscience. He disabled the LHC to prevent the Higgs from being found, while at the same time missing the little old tevatron.
Completely out of keeping from the tone of the poll, I'm going to give a serious answer....
It would be cool if the Tevatron discovered the Higgs. We would learn things. And we wouldn't stop hearing about it. It also wouldn't mean that the LHC was suddenly an expensive boondoggle, although sadly the media would likely latch on to that angle. There's lots of other stuff the LHC is going to look for -- supersymmetry, for example. When you explore new phase space, you are likely to find new things. My greatest hope for the LHC is that it discovers something we completely weren't expecting.
To be pedantic the rumor is 3 sigma evidence, not discovery ;)
Also your browser troubles are odd, I have no problem viewing it in FF 3.6.6
None of the above. It would be wonderful, but the statistics would be marginal. The LHC would be a nice complement. And anyway, the point of the LHC isn't to discover the Higgs. No one in their right minds would build a 14 TeV pp collider if their only goal was to discover the Higgs. The point of the LHC is to find supersymmetry, or something else beyond the Standard Model.
But... But what about our Glorious European particle accelerator (which was actually partly funded by filthy amerikan pigs)? Surely you people are not suggesting that our superior civilization could lose to some ramshackle bunch of colonials on an irrelevant frontier?
Joking aside, I thought it was actually agreed upon (by PHYSICS) that the Fermilab practically couldn't discover Higgs due to just having too little firepower in its railgun.
Are you sure? For me, the page as a whole looks fine in FF 3.6.6, but the crucial graph is not displayed. (I am not sure why.)
Strange. I could see the article including the graph in FF 3.0.19 running on Crunchbang Linux.
Besides, fermions belong to CERN. Fermi was Italian.
My wife, born and brought up in Edinburgh, might want me to post this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7608342…
The Edinburgh scientist who gave his name to the Higgs Boson particle said it was "pretty likely" it would be found by the Big Bang experiment.
Professor Peter Higgs, 79, expressed confidence he would be proved right, 44 years after he proposed his theory.
Scientists hope the Large Hadron Collider operated by Cern will uncover the sought after particle, which is sometimes called the God Particle.
It is a theoretical explanation for the origin of mass in the Universe
It is also thought without the particle there would be no gravity.
But the particle - nicknamed the God Particle because it is thought to be so fundamental to the evolution of the universe - has not been discovered and to this day it remains a theory.
Asked whether he believed the God Particle would be uncovered, Prof Higgs said: "I think it's pretty likely.
"The way I put it is that if there isn't anything there, then it means I and a lot of other people no longer understand all the things we understand about these weak and electromagnetic interactions."
It was in 1964 that the scientist, now aged 79, carried out the work that eventually made his name. His theory has dominated the world of particle physics ever since.
Retired Prof Higgs returned to his working roots at Edinburgh University on Wednesday to give a briefing in the same street where he formulated his scientific theory 44 years ago.
Speaking in an office on Roxburgh Street, he said the idea gradually dawned on him over the course of a weekend.
"It wasn't a 'eureka' moment," he said.
"It was a gradual realisation that stored in a different part of my memory was something which helped me to understand how to solve what I was worrying about at that time.
"When I came back on the Monday to work here the first thing I did was go and check various other papers to see if my recollection was correct and it would help me....
LHC lead physicist: Halt! Hallo! Hallo!
tevatron security guard: 'Allo! Who is zis?
LHC lead physicist: It is the LHC lead physicist, and these are the Seekers of the Higgs boson. Who's accelerator is this?
tevatron security guard: This is the accelerator of Our Master Fermilab de lu la TEVATRON
LHC lead physicist: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by the God particle with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night he can join us in our quest for the Higg's Boson.
tevatron security guard: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen...Uh, he's already discovered one, you see?
LHC lead physicist: What?
Peter Higgs: He says they've already got one!
LHC lead physicist: Are you sure he's got one better than 3 sigma?
tevatron security guard: Oh, yes, it's very nice [To Other tevatron security guards] I told him we already got one.
OTHER tevatron security guardS: [Laughing]
LHC lead physicist: Well, um, can we come up and have a look?
tevatron security guard: Of course not! You are European types!
LHC lead physicist: Well, what are you then?
tevatron security guard: I'm from Illinois! Why do think I have this outrageous accent, you silly physicist!
Peter Higgs: What are you doing in England?
tevatron security guard: Mind your own business!
LHC lead physicist: If you will not show us the Boson, we shall take your accelerator by force!
tevatron security guard: You don't frighten us, LHC pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom quarks, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called LHC lead physicist, you and all your silly European phhhhyyysssicistsss. Thppppt!
Peter Higgs: What a strange person.
The rumor is false as there is no Higgs boson, the idea of a "scalar particle" giving mass to other particles is patently absurd.
1) Precision work with high statistics can beat the Giant Hammer approach. The best example of this is the discovery of weak mixing, which provided a precise prediction of the mass of the W and Z. Why they gave a prize for finding something when everyone knew where to look was always beyond me, although it did make sense to give one for the stochastic cooling techniques van der Meer came up with.
2) Several bosons have been discovered in the US, most notably the J/psi (charmonium) at SLAC and BNL ... although BNL didn't know what it was until they heard what SLAC had found. ;-)