"God Particle" discovery due within MONTHS

[food for thought]

God particle discovery due within months
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Judging mood of nation: experiment to see if Irish still look on bright side of life


A WEST Belfast-born engineer who is director of accelerators and technology at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva has predicted that one of the key secrets of the universe will be discovered in a matter of months.

Dr Stephen Myers told an engineers’ conference in Belfast yesterday that evidence for the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson – the so-called God particle – could be discovered as early as August and by October at the latest.

The Higgs boson was the remaining “big building block” to be discovered in terms of how to explain mass, said Dr Myers, during the course of his keynote lecture to the Engineers Ireland conference at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, and in an interview with The Irish Times. “It completes the standard model for mass,” he said.

During the course of his lecture on the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Dr Myers told the engineers that ongoing experiments at the collider should provide the answer as to whether the Higgs boson does or does not exist. He believed evidence would be found for its existence and this in turn would provide further important insights into the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, that scientists say happened about 13.7 billion years ago.

“If it does not exist there will be enough data to show that the Higgs is excluded and that there must be another mechanism for mass. I am confident that we will find the Higgs by August or September of this year,” he said.

Dr Myers said a very high standard of proof was required. “You only declare a discovery when you can say there is only a one in a million chance that you are wrong,” he said.

He believed that Cern would establish proof for the Higgs boson to a standard of a “one in two million chance of being wrong”.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...315234548.html

[food for thought]

lmao i suspect robbie, soul and style are about the only ones interested in this haha

maybe a handful of cats

[food for thought]

If you watched the Through the Wormhole series, they were talking about this god particle in great detail and where even talking about this "discovery" that was going to come before the end of 2012

chea

[IrOnMaN]

lmao i suspect robbie, soul and style are about the only ones interested in this haha

maybe a handful of cats

You forgot to mention me. LOL.

[check two]

haha

[']

No physicist would ever refer to this as "the god particle"

Only the media came up with that term to draw people in who would otherwise ignore news related to something called the Higgs Boson

[IrOnMaN]

No physicist would ever refer to this as "the god particle"

Only the media came up with that term to draw people in who would otherwise ignore news related to something called the Higgs Boson

In early 2011, I attended a talk regarding the Highs Boson. Interesting stuff!

[MASTER PAI MEI]

Its all about Quantum Physics.

Then having a beer at Moe's.

[diggy]

In early 2011, I attended a talk regarding the Highs Boson. Interesting stuff!

did u get robbed after?

[']

Lmao

[food for thought]

No physicist would ever refer to this as "the god particle"

Only the media came up with that term to draw people in who would otherwise ignore news related to something called the Higgs Boson

(Reuters) - "We don't call it the 'God particle', it's just the media that do that," a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday.

"Well, I am the from the media and I'm going to continue calling it that," said the journalist - and continued to do so.

The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix.

"I hate that 'God particle' term," said Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN's ATLAS team of so-called "Higgs hunters" - an epithet they do not reject.

"The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning. It is ridiculous to call it that," she told Reuters at a news conference after her colleagues revealed growing evidence, albeit not yet proof, of the particle's existence.

Oliver Buchmueller, from the rival research team CMS, was a little less trenchant.

"Calling it the 'God particle' is completely inappropriate," said the German physicist, who divides his time between CERN and teaching at London's Imperial College.

"It's not doing justice to the Higgs and what we think its role in the universe is. It has nothing to do with God."

The Higgs boson is being hunted so determinedly because it would be the manifestation of an invisible field - the Higgs field - thought to permeate the entire universe.

The field was posited in the 1960s by British scientist Peter Higgs as the way that matter obtained mass after the universe was created in the Big Bang.

As such, according to the theory, it was the agent that made the stars, planets - and life - possible by giving mass to most elementary particles, the building blocks of the universe; hence the nickname "God particle."

"Without it, or something like it, particles would just have remained whizzing around the universe at the speed of light," said Pippa Wells, another Atlas researcher.

But Wells also has no time for theological terminology in describing it.

"Hearing it called the 'God particle' makes me angry. It confuses people about what we are trying to do here at CERN."

According to people who have investigated the subject, the term originated with a 1993 history of particle physics by U.S. Nobel prize winner Leon M Lederman.

The book was titled: "The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?"

Physicists say Lederman, who over the years has been the target of much opprobrium from his scientific colleagues, tells friends he wanted to call the book "The Goddamned Particle" to reflect frustration at the failure to find it.

But, according to that account, his publisher rejected the epithet - possibly because of its potential to upset a strongly religious U.S. public - and convinced Lederman to accept the alternative he proposed.

"Lederman has a lot to answer for," said Higgs himself, now 82, on a visit to Geneva some six years ago.

But James Gillies, spokesman for CERN and himself a physicist, is slightly more equivocal.

"Of course it has nothing to do with God whatsoever," he says. "But I can understand why people go that way because the Higgs is so important to our understanding of nature."

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Kevin Liffey)


they were definately using the term interchangeably with higgs boson first time i heard it

[food for thought]

more on the higgs boson god particle in this episode of Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman

27:00

[CEITEDMOFO]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...315234548.html

(Reuters) - "We don't call it the 'God particle', it's just the media that do that," a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday.


"The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning. It is ridiculous to call it that," she told Reuters at a news conference after her colleagues revealed growing evidence, albeit not yet proof, of the particle's existence.

Oliver Buchmueller, from the rival research team CMS, was a little less trenchant.

"Calling it the 'God particle' is completely inappropriate," said the German physicist, who divides his time between CERN and teaching at London's Imperial College.

[Squidgy McGubbins]

This shoulda been posted in the nerd news thread.