Going on noon and you and the family are at the Great Lakes Science Center on North Coast Harbor in downtown Cleveland. You have seen the exhibits and are in the cafeteria with a diet Coke and your trusty MacAir (which just had a fall from your hand at waist to a concrete car garage floor this morning). The real news as far as you are concerned is discovering the Higgs or at least an element like the Higgs as announced earlier today.
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Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website, Geneva
Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass. Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a "discovery". More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however. The results announced at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research), home of the LHC in Geneva, were met with loud applause and cheering.
Prof Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, wiped a tear from his eye as the teams finished their presentations in the Cern auditorium. "I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement," he added later. "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime." Prof Stephen Hawking joined in with an opinion on a topic often discussed in hushed tones."This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize," he told BBC News. "But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect."
'Dramatic'
The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the protons that lie at the heart of every atom. They claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.
However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-two million chance. Prof Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS, was unequivocal: "The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting. Atlas results were even more promising, at a slightly higher mass: "We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," said Dr Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment at the LHC. Peter Higgs joined three of the six theoreticians who first predicted the Higgs at the conference Prof Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented: "As a layman I would now say I think we have it."
However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-two million chance. Prof Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS, was unequivocal: "The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting. Atlas results were even more promising, at a slightly higher mass: "We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," said Dr Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment at the LHC. Peter Higgs joined three of the six theoreticians who first predicted the Higgs at the conference Prof Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented: "As a layman I would now say I think we have it."
"We have a discovery - we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson. But which one? That remains open. "It is a historic milestone but it is only the beginning."
Commenting on the emotions of the scientists involved in the discovery, Prof Incandela said: "It didn't really hit me emotionally until today because we have to be so focussed… but I'm super-proud." Dr Gianotti echoed his thoughts, adding: "The last few days have been extremely intense, full of work, lots of emotions."
A confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.
Scientists would then have to assess whether the particle they see behaves like the version of the Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model, the current best theory to explain how the Universe works. However, it might also be something more exotic.
All the matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the Universe, the rest being made up by mysterious dark matter and dark energy. A more exotic version of the Higgs could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the Universe that remains obscure. Scientists will have to look at how the Higgs decays - or transforms - into other, more stable particles after being produced in collisions at the LHC.
Dr Pippa Wells, a member of the Atlas experiment, said that several of the decay paths already showed deviations from what one would expect of the Standard Model Higgs. For example, a decay path where the Higgs transforms into two photon particles was "a bit on the high side", she explained. These could get back into line as more statistics are added, but on the other hand, they may not.
"We're reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done before," said Prof Incandela. "We're on the frontier now, on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery."
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Statistics of a 'discovery'
▪ Particle physics has an accepted definition for a discovery: a "five-sigma" (or five standard-deviation) level of certainty
▪ The number of sigmas measures how unlikely it is to get a certain experimental result as a matter of chance rather than due to a real effect
▪ Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin
▪ A "three-sigma" level represents about the same likelihood as tossing eight heads in a row
▪ Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
▪ Independent confirmation by other experiments turns five-sigma findings into accepted discoveries
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You are excited at the prospect of a renewed understanding of ‘how things work’, and upon further reading would like to include this probability in the books’ metaphysics. – Amorella
It opens new pathway to metaphysics it seems to me, I’m just not sure how at the moment, but I really would like to include the concept into the other side of the realm of physics.
Great Lakes Science Center at North Coast Harbor
Today is such a great pleasure to be alive. The media has real news and it will be interesting to see how it is treated when mixed with such heavy themes as politics and personalities. I need to see what else is being said on the announcement on HOW PARTICLES OBTAIN MASS.
You are getting carried away, boy. You want to synthesize this within the books when it is already in place. The focus you want is on Diplomat’s AC not metaphysics itself. The Higgs is physics. Post and note this in today’s initial blog title. - Amorella
Mid-afternoon. You have had an enjoyable day with the family so far, terminating with an excellent choice of lunch at Bar Louie’s at the Legacy Village Mall – Verde Chicken Flatbread. Presently Carol, Kim and Brennan are at Giant Eagle and Paul and Owen are in the backyard.
Owen is in the kiddy pool and Paul is reading his rather large text, Anesthesiology in prep for his upcoming Boards. Yesterday Paul had his first cardio surgery as a Fellow at the main campus. It lasted from 0730 to 1700.
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The Cleveland Clinic is a multispecialty academic medical center located in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cleveland Clinic is currently regarded as one of the top 4 hospitals in the United States as rated by U.S. News & World Report. The Cleveland Clinic was established in 1921 by four physicians for the purpose of providing patient care, research, and medical education in an ideal medical setting. One of the largest private medical centers in the world, the Cleveland Clinic saw more than 3,200,000 patient visits in 2009, with almost 80,000 hospital admissions. Patients arrive at the Cleveland Clinic from all 50 states and more than 100 nations. The Cleveland Clinic's approximately 2,500 staff physicians and residents represent 120 medical specialties and subspecialties. The Cleveland Clinic was ranked number one in America for cardiac care from 1994 to 2009.
Cleveland Clinic is also an Ohio nonprofit corporation which as of December 2010 had 10 regional hospitals in Northeast Ohio, a hospital and family health center in Florida, and a health center in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a specialty center in Las Vegas, and a hospital in Abu Dhabi opening in 2012.
From: Wikipedia
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The above is a bit outdated but it amazes me the numbers and kinds of cardiothoracic surgeries that are so routinely performed on any given day of the week. We drove around the clinic on the way to the science center – so many buildings just west of Case Western Reserve. I have never really paid that close attention. I love science, all kinds of science, always have.
You enjoy the facts, orndorff, but not the continual work that has gone on to keep them fulfilled. Post. - Amorella
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