Higgs Boson: Physicists See Best Proof Yet of 'The God Particle' | Hacker News Reader

Higgs Boson: Physicists See Best Proof Yet of 'The God Particle'

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29 pointschegra24 comments

Every time I hear "God Particle" I want to cry. Please, please, media stop saying that. It's the perfect name to annoy scientists and people who are religious. It's a stupid name. The Higgs has nothing to do with God at all. There's no implication that the Higgs boson is anything more than yet-another-particle (albeit an important one).

Why won't people call it the Mass Particle instead?

Seriously, what does it even mean!? What are they trying to convey by including "God" every time they mention it? That the theory was very important and hard to prove? In that case, might we be hearing about the "God string theory" or "God P=NP" next?

They might as well just call it the "Ketchup particle", and it would make just as much sense.

Lederman said he gave it the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," but jokingly added that a second reason was because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."

From (with more): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#.22The_God_particle...

While mass is quite fundamental even to the general public I agree, "the god particle" is just silly.

Your answer to this question: Why won't people call it the Mass Particle instead? is in your post: It's the perfect name to annoy scientists and people who are religious.

Seriously, though, I think people are using it in the vernacular sense, like "God Mode" in video games, or Uber, or Mega or any of these superlative prefixes.

I say we change it back to the 'Goddamn Particle'

"Best proof yet" sounds weird. How about "best evidence yet"?

Does anyone have the actual information of how many standard deviations the data confirms the Higgs to? Last I heard it was four, so I assume that this "update" has more, but I can't find any actual information anywhere.

Edit: found it, physorg says that there's a reported "1 in 1.7 million chance" of them being wrong, which comes out to a z-score of around 4.86. So pretty close to 5, which is their standard, if I remember correctly.

No ATLAS or CMS member is currently allowed to release these numbers. Then numbers these sites are releasing are just pure rumors (although they may have an element of truth). Just wait until the press conference tomorrow and you will see all in gory detail.

I have to wonder where that "1 in 1.7 million" came from, then. It sounds too exact to be speculation, but I guess I did get the numbers from Physorg...

Let's hope they learned the "Faster than light neutrino" lesson...

EDIT: In reply to comments:

1. The speed of the neutrino had already been measure experimentally before. It was unlikely that a new experiment would produce different results.

2. Requests for help from the scientific community are not delivered via press releases. Specially in an area as relatively small as high energy physics where everyone knows everyone.

3. If you look at the slides used to announce the "result" http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=0&material... nowhere does it mention that they are not sure of the results and are asking for help finding the error.

4. The actual article, that was directed at the scientific community, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v2.pdf makes no mention of asking for help to understand where the problem is. It simply announces a new result and the checks that were made to "ensure" that it was correct (as is common in any other scientific publication announcing a new result).

5. Immediate reactions from several leading minds in high energy physics were against the validity of the result. Perhaps these people should have been contacted before if they weren't sure of the result?

6. Shortly after the announcement was made, dozens of papers popped up "explaining" the result from every possible angle and receiving varying degrees of media coverage, further giving the impression to the general public that scientists don't know what they are talking about.

Based on all of this, my conclusion can be just one. This was a publicity stunt that backfired. As a result, people lost their jobs and science was shamed in the public eyes. Nothing more than disservice to science in exchange for 15m of fame...

What lesson? They found an anomaly on an experiment, before researching they found no error so they said to the science community: "We found this, can you spot the error?"

The media overreacted to this, they started writing shocking headlines. Don't blame the CERN, blame the media.

Both ATLAS and CMS have legitimate, crazily cross-checked data and therefore they are releasing it. That's all. This is how science is done - all CERN is doing is updating the world on its of progress the search for the Higgs boson. Sure, sometimes mistakes are made. But you'd have to be an idiot to think that scientists pull these for publicity. Press is a pain in the ass and we try to stay away from them as much as possible.

I'm pretty sure the combination is done blind by an independent research group too.

What lesson? So far as I can tell, there was nothing particularly wrong with how they handled that (other than the media over-reaction).

There was no reason for a press conference. As a physicist, I see it as nothing more than a publicity stunt that was not only bad science but also bad for science as a whole.

There are a lot of differences between the "Faster than Light Neutrinos" (FTLN) and the "Higgs Bosons" (HB), so it's not correct to say that the physic community has to use same lesson learned in that case.

Expectations:

* FTLN: They were measuring another thing, and as a side product they get a strange unexpected result.

* HB: One of the main reasons to build the LHC was to find the HB.

Theoretical background:

* FTLN: There is no theory that explains the FTLN (or at least that theories are not in mainstream)

* HB: The HB are a part of the "Standard Model", there are many correct predictions of the standard model.

Experiments:

* FTLN: That was the fist experiment that showed FTLN. There are some experiments that indirectly show that the Neutrinos travel almost at light speed. (For example, the light and neutrinos from a supernova arrive here with a very little time difference.)

* HB: There experiments in the ATLAS, CMS and Tevatron show that there is happening something very strange at 120-130 GeV. There are a lot of experiments were the results are modified slightly with the existence of the HB. Those experiments give an indirect "proof" of the existence and an estimation of the mass of the HB.

Consensus

* FTLN: Almost everybody in the physics community believed that the FTLN experiment has same error (probably even the authors), but most would have been very happy to see that the experiment was true, because that means that there is a big new theory to create and explore. But physic is (in the long term) driven by experiments and so far there are no confirmations of the FTLN and the authors have apparently found where the error was.

* HB: Almost everybody in the physics community believed that the HB exists, the discussion is about which version is the correct (how many kinds of HB are there, the exact properties, or that there is some even more strange that the HB). But physic is (in the long term) driven by experiments and so far there is only some 3.5-sigma "evidence" (that is really a lot of evidence) and probably in lest than two years there will be one (or two) 5-sigma measurements that are needed to proclaim a discovery.

And what lesson would that be?

Don't call press conferences for results that you aren't sure about and likely wrong.

I strongly disagree. They never claimed they had a result, they had a measurement that they could not explain, which they made public. I think it was an example of how science should be done, being open instead of being afraid of being wrong in public.

fjh - thank you. That is exactly the spirit of science.

It would be interesting to see some counter arguments instead of down votes.

Is there an Odin particle that banishes frost giants?

'' Lederman said he gave the Higgs boson the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," ''

Can we wait until tomorrow? Let's wait to hear CERN confirmation instead of make asumptions.

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