Have they found the "God Particle"?

We’ll wait with anticipation, maybe they just found the meaning to life ( not 42 ).

May have made a mini-black hole.

Nature has this article that puts a smart spin on the story.

It doesn’t sound like it, given that the story quotes the team saying, “One thing we know for sure—it is not the Higgs boson. That is the only thing we know for sure.”

It sounds like they found something anomalous that might, or might not, turn out to be an important discovery. Is it relevant that Fermilab is scheduled to be defunded and shut down in the near future?

@gasman I guess it would be if you consider the press this “discovery” or anomaly might bring could re-generate enough interest to convince Congress to throw more money at them and give the workers there a reprieve from having to find new jobs. I toured there last year and it is a quite cool place. It would be a shame to lose that kind of science and technology.

@Cruiser That’s what I was thinking. I “toured” the site with a physicist in 1971, in early planning & construction days (the bison were already grazing in what would be the center of the ring). I was at Argonne Nat’l Lab that summer. Btw it’s not all of Fermilab that’s shutting down (as I erroneously said) but just their main machine, the Tevatron.

Is it weird that I hope they haven’t?

Didn’t know they were looking. Waste of resources?

@gasman Ooops I knew that! A couple of my customers work on the Tevatron and gave me a behind the glass tour! It was super cool to see the guts of that thing!

I don’t know about any God particles floating around. But…Time Magazine’s October 25, 2004 has a good article “The God Gene” in which it implies that religion may be a product of evolution. In some cases throughout human evolution the ability to blindly follow our leaders (and what our leaders tell us to believe) could have yielded greater survivability. If so then gene is still alive and well but so many of us seem to be lacking it.

@gondwanalon Of course, the name “God particle” has nothing to do with religion.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Very probably, though we might get some useful side-effects. Weren’t you around for the controversy surrounding the LHC activation, since there was a chance that it would generate a black hole that could consume the world? It was another one of those times when a bunch of scientists figured, “heck, if this blows up, nobody will be around to blame us.”

@Nullo there’s a chance that a black hole will spontaneously materialize at anytime and anyplace anyways (it’s just infinitesimally small). The odds with the LHC were on a similarly minute scale.

As a religious person, I’m surprised to hear how disinterested you are in understanding the nature of our reality. Someone who believes the universe is the creation of God can pursue no more holy a venture than to study what his creation is and how it fits together. Similarly, for a non-religious person, understanding how our universe is put together has the potential to answer some of the most important questions humanity has ever asked, the answers to which have the potential to underly every other Scientific discipline.

Live presentation by Fermilab here

Archive will be here

@gorillapaws What are you talking about? I’m all for having a look under the hood. I just don’t like it when people come up with elaborate reasons to not give credit to the designer/manufacturer. I am not wholly convinced that they will find what they are looking for, hence “possible waste of resources.” I do not doubt that they’ll come up with other things, rather like how CERN’s most practical achievement was the hypertext transfer protocol.

@Nullo apologies, I misinterpreted your agreement with the “possible waste of resources” comment.

Wow, I just heard of this! Via Bill Nye, too, lol…

I found this comment interesting on physorg page:
“they found the send more money particle? ”

No, not yet, as far as I can tell. All they say is they found a particle of unknown energy.
Here is the paper if anybody can make hide nor hair of it
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0699

As far as I can tell, calling the Higgs boson the “God particle” got started due to the title of Leon Lederman’s book. It was probably suggested by the publisher.

I’ve got ambivalent feelings when physicists invent names like the Theory of Everything or the God particle. On the one hand it might get more people interested in science which is a very good thing. On the other hand it also reflects human hubris and it reminds me a bit of the late 19th century when a professor told Max Planck not to study physics because practically “everything” had already been discovered.

The article is very interesting especially the part about a potential fifth elementary force. I wonder if such a force might also lead to an explanation of how dark energy works. But the more we know, the more we will also realize what we don’t know.

Every answer of a question leads to at least two more new questions we don’t know the answers for. “Everything” is infinite so to speak. Countably infinite probably. So a ToE is rather a Uowwk. A unification of what we know.

OK, I’ve learned to take New Scientist with a big heaping of salt, but they are the first to quote a theorist who feels they have an angle on this (possible) new particle other than it just being “not Higgs”. Techincolor Force?

If this is indeed a new particle and it isn’t Higgs, then it is actually really good news for physics. Since the Standard Model came together in the mid to late 1970’s all the major discoveries have simply been those bits of the model that hadn’t been observed yet. They came as no surprise. Theorists have had nothing really new to go on and they took off into the outer realms of speculation for a whole generation. We might finally be in for a reality check!

@hiphiphopflipflapflop – Do you think this “technicolor elementary force” could help explain dark matter and dark energy? Could one of the particles in this zoo of new particles be stable and very heavy?

@mattbrowne According to Wikipedia: “Technicolor theories naturally contain dark matter candidates.”

Most of the article is way beyond my level. The part that stands out to me is that Technicolor is a way around the “fine-tuning” problems lurking behind the mass of the Higgs boson itself.

”An internal note leaked on the web reveals that a group of researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has detected a signal compatible with the sought-after particle.”

“A spokesman for Cern, which runs the LHC, confirmed the note was authentic.”

“But he told the BBC it had not been held up to proper scientific scrutiny and could turn out to be a false alarm.”

CERN feeling challenged by Fermilab? Could be about egos too…

Now up to 4.8 sigma?

D0 doesn’t see it.

Closing in on Higgs at 125 GeV?