Proof of God Particle?

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Reviews of the discovery last July, of a "Higgs-like" particle, confirm that it is a Higgs boson.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data year and announced the results in a statement and at a physics conference in the Italian Alps.

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN that each involve about 3,000 scientists.

Its existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.

But, it remains an "open question," CERN said in a statement, whether this is the Higgs boson that was expected in the original formulation, or possibly the lightest of several predicted in some theories that go beyond that model.

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CERN Strikes Boson

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Those magnificent bastards at CERN may well have discovered the God Particle... and cost Stephen Hawking a hundred bucks. It seems the renowned physicist had bet against the Higgs Boson ever being found. It is still not entirely clear that the particle found by the Large Hadron Collider experiments is the Higgs. It may be a different boson but they are pretty darned sure that it's a boson.

“I think we have it,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, the multinational research center headquartered in Geneva. The agency is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator that produced the new data by colliding protons. The findings were announced by two separate teams. Dr. Heuer called the discovery “a historic milestone.”

He and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, however, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half-century. The particle is predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass. It may be an impostor as yet unknown to physics, perhaps the first of many particles yet to be discovered.

That possibility is particularly exciting to physicists, as it could point the way to new, deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality.

For now, some physicists are simply calling it a “Higgslike” particle.

Physicists seem very excited. Laypeople less so. All those caveats, maybes, and promises of further analysis, make people nervous. Personally, I would find certitude more concerning. There is more than enough arrogance coming out of CERN already. But the folks at Salon are wondering if the price tag for all this theoretical physics is worth it, even if it could provide the key to understanding how the universe is constructed.

When it was switched on in 2008, the British government’s then chief science advisor, David King, asked whether its $10 billion dollar budget couldn’t be put to better use combating climate change or disease.

That was before the full of extent of Europe’s debt crisis was known. Had the collider still been in its infancy today, when governments are plundering academic grants and other spending to pay off creditors, its future would doubtless face greater uncertainty.

. . .

Physicists involved in the LHC insist it is worth every cent. It might not offer any tangible benefits at the moment they say, but it is the final part of a century-long journey of scientific discovery that has already gifted mankind many medical and technological breakthroughs.

But since the latest announcement out of CERN stops short of claiming the existence of Higgs boson, is it enough to merit the money lavished upon it?

They make the point that a similar research center in the US was shut down last year because of budget constraints. I'd hate to think that this announcement and the hype leading up to it was timed to prevent budget cuts for CERN but it's one possibility. I prefer to think that they've really made an incredible discovery and managed to do so without damaging the fabric of the known universe.

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CERN Leaking Like a Sieve

Boy, the folks at CERN love to leak juicy tidbits. But this former flack knows spin when she sees it.

Ever since tantalizing hints of the Higgs turned up in December at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists there have been busily analyzing the results of their energetic particle collisions to further refine their search.

“The bottom line though is now clear: There’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look,” wrote mathematician Peter Woit on his blog, Not Even Wrong. According to Woit, there are rumors of new data that would be the most compelling evidence yet for the long-sought Higgs.

The possible news has a number of physics bloggers speculating that LHC scientists will announce the discovery of the Higgs during the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia, July 4 to 11.

. . .

Of course, Gibbs reminds us that the rumors come with some caveats, such as the fact that they are vague and not completely reliable. Scientists outside the experiment also don’t yet know how much data has been analyzed from this year, meaning that the rumored results could disappear with further scrutiny. 

 Meanwhile, loooook.... Just like the Eye of Jupiter.

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Scientism at CERN

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I've long been a little chary about the Large Hadron Collider. I don't know if it really could open up a black hole and "swallow the earth" as some critics fear. But I also don't know that it couldn't -- law of unintended consequences and all that. It just takes on a whole new level of seriousness when you're tinkering around with the building blocks of the universe. There's more than a whiff of hubris that comes from CERN.

On the one hand, I'm sort of relieved that they're winding this grand experiment down. On the other, I kind of can't believe the arrogance of their stated position in doing so. According to CERN director Ralph Heuer:

We will know by the end of this year whether it exists or whether it is non-existent.

Except you can't prove a negative unless the positive is already known. I can prove there's no milk in my cereal bowl because I know what milk is and where my bowl is. But if I've never seen milk, I really can't. In point of fact, all they can know at the end of the year is whether or not they've proved the existence of the Higgs Boson or whether it will remain a mystery for the time being. You can't prove the non-existence of the God Particle any more than you can prove the non-existence of God -- a concept that continues to confuse dogmatic atheists. Not everything can be measured empirically. To say otherwise is the very definition of scientism. And to assume that because you haven't proved something when you've reached the limits of existing knowledge and technology is to damn the future. If science isn't self-revising it isn't science anymore.

I don't know why I'm a little stunned at the arrogance coming out of CERN considering the nature of this experiment... but I am.

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Esoterica

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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Has King Arthur's round table been found in Scotland?

The King's Knot, a geometrical earthwork in the former royal gardens below Stirling Castle, has been shrouded in mystery for hundreds of years.

Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older.

Writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur.

. . .

"The finds show that the present mound was created on an older site and throws new light on a tradition that King Arthur's Round Table was located in this vicinity."

We may have been a seafarin' people since before we were even human.

A team of researchers that included an N.C. State University geologist found evidence that our ancestors were crossing open water at least 130,000 years ago. That's more than 100,000 years earlier than scientists had previously thought.

Their evidence is based on stone tools from the island of Crete. Because Crete has been an island for eons, any prehistoric people who left tools behind would have had to cross open water to get there.

The tools the team found are so old that they predate the human species, said Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist from Providence College who led the team. Instead of being made by our species, Homo sapiens, the tools were made by our ancestors, Homo erectus.

Will we find the God Particle in time for Christmas?

The hunt for the Higgs particle is well ahead of schedule, say researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Earlier this year they said they would either discover the Higgs or confirm it does not exist by the end of 2012.

Now, because the machine is working so well, an LHC spokesman, Professor Guido Tonelli, has told BBC News that the search could be completed much sooner.

The Higgs Boson is the particle that in the physics "Standard Model" allows other particles to have mass.

Discovery or elimination of the particle is one of the LHC's major objectives; and it could come as early as Christmas 2011.

Edgar Cayce, look out! The sleeping artist is here. A nocturnal painter believes he may be receiving artistic guidance from the spirit world.

Being an artist is so easy, Lee Hadwin can do it in his sleep, but when he is awake, the 37-year-old, who got a D in art at school, cannot paint or draw to save his life.

He discovered his nocturnal talent aged four, when he began to sleepwalk and draw on his mother’s furniture.

. . .

Since then, he has produced almost 200 sleep-pictures, selling them to collectors such as illusionist Derren Brown, with one piece fetching a six-figure sum. He does not know why he can draw only in his sleep but believes it may be spirits communicating from the other side.

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Gardens in spaaaaaaaaace!

Astronauts on the first manned missions to Mars could tend “kitchen gardens” of salad and vegetables onboard spaceships, scientists claim.

Experts say the crops would not only give crews healthy food to eat during the long journey to the red planet, but would also improve the atmosphere onboard by producing oxygen and removing carbon dioxide.

In addition, the plants suggested as suitable by a NASA scientist would require minimal tending and not take up much room on spacecraft.

Bad pizza in spaaaaaaaaace!

Domino's pizza has announced plans to conquer the final frontier by opening the first pizza restaurant on the Moon.

Domino's Japanese arm has proposed a branch on Earth's nearest galactic neighbour is the latest escalation in a pizza publicity war.

Rival chain Pizza Hut set the bar high in 2001 by delivering a pizza to astronauts orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station, but Domino's fought back last year in a series of events to mark the 25th anniversary of its arrival in Japan.

Diamonds are forever.

A newly discovered alien planet that formed from a dead star is a real diamond in the rough.

The super-high pressure of the planet, which orbits a rapidly pulsing neutron star, has likely caused the carbon within it to crystallize into an actual diamond, a new study suggests.

The composition of the planet, which is about five times the size of Earth, is not its only outstanding feature. [Illustration of the diamond alien planet]

The planet's parent star is a special kind of flashing star known as a millisecond pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star formed from a supernova. The entire system, which is only the second of its kind ever discovered, is located about 4,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Serpens (The Snake).

Chimera alert! Spider goats developed for the military.

Researchers genetically engineered goats to produce milk which is packed with the same protein as silk spiders.

Once this is milked out it can be spun out and weaved into a material that is ten times stronger than steel.

The fabric can then be blended with human skin to make what the scientists hope will be tough enough to stop even a bullet.

Dutch researcher Jalila Essaidi said the ‘spidersilk’ project was called ’2.6g 329m/s’ after the weight and the velocity of a .22 calibre long rifle bullet.

An elephant never forgets. And elephants are smarter than we know.

Kandula, a seven year old Asian elephant living in Washington D.C.’s National Zoo, has proven that elephants are as smart as those that spend a lot of time around them have believed. In an experiment carried out by researchers at the zoo, the little elephant figured out all on his own, without resorting to trial and error, how to go get a cube to use as a footstool to help him reach some food that was just out of reach. The research team, led by Preston Foerder of the City University of New York, has published the results of their study on PLoS ONE.

Other animals (besides humans) such as chimpanzees and dolphins have demonstrated in various ways that they are capable of dreaming up solutions to problems in their head and then carrying them out. Called “aha” moments by researchers, such thinking, a form of insight, is one of the hallmarks of higher intelligence. Most people who have ever worked with elephants will attest to the fact that they are indeed intelligent creatures; though no one (at least in the research community) had ever witnessed an elephant using insight to solve a problem. This has perplexed scientists for several years, and has caused them to study the seeming paradox. It appears now that the team working with Kandula has seen it in action, that previous research had been attacking the problem from the wrong angle.

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