Tevatron confirms a 115-135 GeV Higgs | Hacker News Reader

Tevatron confirms a 115-135 GeV Higgs

motls.blogspot.com

98 pointsdochtman16 comments

phd-comics.com got it right years ago. This is how news are relayed from the science community http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif

I've been trying to ward off time travel discussions on facebook since the "ftl neutrino". "We measured X, can you help us find out what is wrong with the experiment" to "omg ftl cars next year!!!" is such a common step

"Confirms" is a little strong for sigma 2.2

On the other hand, they're seeing a spike in exactly the same place that the LHC's been seeing a spike. That's good news - it means that there's new physics in there rather than just a measurement error.

Even so, agreement in data does not constitute proof, it's just "closer" to proof, whatever that's worth.

Not just a little strong, its bullshit... 2.2 sigma still leads to about a 4-5% chance of random error, and in particle physics that is an absolutely MASSIVE margin of error.

As people have been saying, Physicists probably won't get truly excited about this discovery until 5 sigma, or a 99.9999% confidence interval.

Articles with titles like this mislead the public and in my opinion do more harm than good because they stop people from thinking critically about whether there are flaws in the process, instead leading them to take things for given.

>Articles with titles like this mislead the public and in my opinion do more harm than good because they stop people from thinking critically about whether there are flaws in the process, instead leading them to take things for given.

I was with you up until the 'thinking critically' part. When did that start?

It looks like his argument is that somehow combining results from various detectors/measurements ends up with sigma > 3. I don't understand why that would be the case, but he isn't just saying 2.2 == confirmation.

It doesn't seem to be fully confirmed yet. There is just much stronger evidence that points to its existence.

Better link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/science/higgs-boson-may-be...

Does anyone here have a good understanding of what the higgs boson is supposed to be?

If I understand correctly it is supposed to be the carrier of masss. At the same time its proposed mass is larger then the mass of a proton or electron. How can mass not be quantized to multiples of the value of a single higgs boson?

The Higgs isn't like some sort of "mass coin", particles don't have mass by containing one or more instances of a Higgs boson. Instead there is a Higgs field which individual particles couple to which gives rise to mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field the same way a photon is an excitation of the EM field, a graviton is an excitation of the gravitational field, etc.

A couple of quick clarifications:

90-99% of the mass in regular matter is due to strong force interactions. In things like protons, neutrons etc the Higgs is only responsible for a small amount. See [1] for a little more detail.

As a quick aside, gravitons aren't quite kosher science yet. We haven't observed them, and we don't even have a coherent theory of how they would work. Something to do with equations being non-renormalizable, I don't claim to understand any of it.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/pd6wc/why_is_the...

Is that page TRYING to make me hate the internet??

So does this mean we can travel to the future now? Woot.

We've always been able to travel to the future, in fact we can't help but do that. Pausing time or going back in it is where the problem-space is.

How you can confirm that there is no pauses in time? To confirm that, we need to watch something outside of our space-time continuum.

Then explain this. How am I typing this message FROM THE PAST?

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