Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head Famous retired physics prof Peter Higgs - of boson renown - has stingingly counter-poohpoohed the theories of his equally well known Nobel Prize rival, Stephen Hawking, who has already poohpoohed Higgs' particle concept. The clash of intellects is expected to be settled by particle-punishment results at the Large Hadron Collider …
I was explaining to the missus that, in a sense, it's more exciting if they *don't* find the Higgs boson, because then they'll have to re-draft the standard model.
So... she says, does that mean they'll have to spend another fifty billion?
No, says I, because all those years of data from CERN and Fermilab could be re-examined.
But hang on. There must have been monstrous amounts of data collected over the years. How much of it has been kept, and how much discarded because it was deemed not to show anything interesting?
Of course, there is the possibility that neither of these two "boffins" are correct. Scientists who treat theory like fact are no better than anyone who believes in a religion. It's not a fact if it's based on faith and flimsy rationalisation.
The last thing science needs is "My God's better than your God" type arguements.
Have been discovered when people were looking for something else/ accident.
I'm looking forward to my anti-gravity, zero-point powered, flying car with my sat-nav able to negotiate all 14(?) dimensions.
Hmm - time for a lie-down now..
hmm Paris, lie down
ttfn
To try and answer your question...
CERN have a very strange data retention policy. Basically they back up data using in-house software to tape and hope it gets saved. As they collect so much data the loss of one, or more, sample(s) isn't considered significant (unless it's the one with the Higg's Boson in it!!). Recovery is a word and nothing more...
They try and keep the data for many years so that as new data theories are developed they can re-analyse their data against the new theory.
One big problem is that tape technology is rapidly changing and they may not have the ability to recover all of the data they want. Also tapes deterioriate and CRC errors can occur effectively destroying a data stream. But, as mentioned, the loss of some data isn't considered significant so they don't really care...
If only life was so easy in the real world.
The Higgs Boson is supposed to be the "thing" that gives other particles their mass, begging the question... where does it get its mass from? Some other particle?
The standard model seems flawed to me for this reason alone, the idea that you need some special "particle" to give mass to thing just strikes me as an attempt to fill a hole in the model. A "god particle" of the gaps, you might say.
You know if they don't find it there'll be about half of them saying the thing is obviously even more elusive than we thought and that they need to build an even bigger accelerator to see it.
it seems to me far too trite and trivial that the Grand Theory Of Life The Universe And Everything is all tied up and a done-dusted deal by discovering but 1 particle. What would we do with the hordes of redundant beardie-weirdie particle physicists?? We need two more desktop PC maintenance techs here, but that's about it...
As I recall the torrent of data is so great that the detectors (or ancillary equipment) do event selection in hardware; only the tiny fraction of interesting looking events are logged. Presumably "interesting" is not too closely tied to any particular existing or proposed model, so there'd be a reasonable hope that the recorded data is still useful.
Disclaimer: I'm not a particle physicist.
I mean... some people think it exists... others not. So proton 1 hits proton 2, smaller particles go everywhere... assuming 'new' undiscoverd particle(s) pop up on the scanner... how will they know it is the one their looking for ? Will god vanish in a puff of logic ? will man be able to prove black is indeed white ? Just curious.
The anti-gravity invisible one...
True story: I once went for an interview (*) where the very first question I was asked was
"Do you find the Higgs mechanism esthetically pleasing?"
After a bit of fumbling around I basically said "no", and failed the interview. I've kinda resented it's potential existence ever since So imagine my delight to find that, albeit 20 years late, Prof Hawking has come out in public to back my point of view :-)
BTW, there is an icon here ( <-- ), it's just that you haven't yet got a monitor big enough to see it.
(*) The interview was for a a Particle Physics Phd place, so it was probably fair game although most people opened with the more friendly "so you found us alright?" :-)
Before the "big bang" there was nothing, not a single electron. Yesterday, the worlds best super-scientists "pretended" they were looking for a "god-particle". Unfortunately those super-scientists started with matter in this "so-called" experiment. RETARDED! It's ridiculous to think you can duplicate the big bang with matter, when in the beginning, there was no matter; I repeat: "not even a single electron".
Some scientists have no idea what they are looking for, because they don't know how to ask the 1st question. SAD REALLY!
This post has been deleted by its author
"Before the "big bang" there was nothing, not a single electron. Yesterday, the worlds best super-scientists "pretended" they were looking for a "god-particle". Unfortunately those super-scientists started with matter in this "so-called" experiment. RETARDED! It's ridiculous to think you can duplicate the big bang with matter, when in the beginning, there was no matter; I repeat: "not even a single electron".
Some scientists have no idea what they are looking for, because they don't know how to ask the 1st question. SAD REALLY!"
OK, yeah, whatever. I don't really know where to start...
In the past (when LHC was just LEP), all the data from recorded "events" was backed up on two copies of Cipher tape (3600 bpi). Each truck load of backup sets was stored in two off-site locations, one in the US and one in Gloucestershire, UK.
With the advent of the LHC plans were afoot to pick a different backup technology, but retain the same off-site storage locations; the chosen backup storage method was Toshiba’s HD-DVD technology and the two-off site storage locations were SecureVault Corp, floor 42 in World Trade Center Building No.2 and the underground storage facility at Tewkesbury.
These plan are now under revision.
Bill 'cause his head's so big, the LHC can just about fit on it!
"Before the "big bang" there was nothing, not a single electron. Yesterday, the worlds best super-scientists "pretended" they were looking for a "god-particle". Unfortunately those super-scientists started with matter in this "so-called" experiment. RETARDED! It's ridiculous to think you can duplicate the big bang with matter, when in the beginning, there was no matter; I repeat: "not even a single electron".
Some scientists have no idea what they are looking for, because they don't know how to ask the 1st question. SAD REALLY!"
You must have been reading the Vulture Central abridged description of the LHC. I'm pretty sure the unabridged version said the LHC is trying to simulate energy densities a short time AFTER the big bang. I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure the term AFTER is significant to the concepts involved.
Sarcasm warning: Do I need to define "after" verses "before"?
"The Higgs Boson is supposed to be the "thing" that gives other particles their mass, begging the question... where does it get its mass from? Some other particle?"
Simple:
http://www.phy.uct.ac.za/courses/phy400w/particle/higgs1.htm
Complex:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0703280
Can't remember whether the neutrino masses are included in there or not. Also, most of the mass of hadrons (protons, neutrons, mesons) comes from their bound energy, namely the supposedly massless gluons gluing the quarks.
Ahem, the event under inspection is not big bang but the period shortly after; i.e. fractionally after big bang.
"The Universe started with a Big Bang – but we don’t fully understand how or why it developed the way it did. The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang."
http://www.lhc.ac.uk/
The distinction matters.
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