Surprised!

[Brian Ellis]

I'm really surprised that nobody has mentioned the CERN confirmation of the Higgs' boson with a 5-sigma certainty. This is probably the greatest discovery in theoretical physics since Einstein - and certainly the costliest one.

Now, I wonder what particles make up the Higgs' boson?

Any bets on the next Nobel prize for Physics?

[VJ]

Well, for the Nobel prize, it is a problem: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...prize-headache

Traditionally, the science Nobel prizes are given to a maximum of three people, whose contributions are judged to be the most important. The rule is archaic, in that it harks back to a time when much of science was done by individuals or smaller groups.

Two teams of scientists at Cern, amounting to thousands of people, carried out the painstaking work of spotting traces of the particle amid the subatomic debris of more than a thousand trillion collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider. All deserve credit for that effort.

And the discovery cost Stephen Hawkings 100$: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/vi...oson-bet-video

As for what makes up the Higgs' boson... It is one of the elementary particles, so I guess we are still a long way of of knowing what it is made off...

[Brian Ellis]

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising over 1000 scientists. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_priz...aureates/2007/

Prior to J.J. Thomson, we thought the atom was an elementary particle! Then we thought it was composed of electrons, protons and neutrons as the elementary particles, and then we thought the proton was a neutron with a positron attached and then ...


...(and then I got lost off! )

[VJ]

True.. But they got the peace prize. Rules for science prizes are different...

[Umfriend]

This is probably the greatest discovery in theoretical physics since Einstein - and certainly the costliest one.

Not to nitpick, which I promptly do, this is a great discovery in experimental physics. The theoretical discovery was done 50 years ago, no?

But yeah, I am very excited and the meaning must be 42 +/- 1.

[VJ]

Not to nitpick, which I promptly do, this is a great discovery in experimental physics. The theoretical discovery was done 50 years ago, no?

Actually, the hypothesis that the particle existed was postulated 50 years ago, as it made the standard model work. But not everybody was convinced it existed (and as such that the standard model was correct) - one of them was Stephen Hawking, who bet against the Higgs boson to be found.
So the discovery is important, as it shows that the standardmodel seems to be good (it might still not be good enough, but at least the fact that it exists shows that the model is going in the right direction). As such, it serves as a startingpoint to further research the standard model.

[cjolley]

Here is an illustration of the search sort of.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120501.html

[Umfriend]

postulate - theorical, yeah I see where I went wrong :roll-eyes :d

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm still a tad skeptical. They've detected a signature in the correct energy range, but is it the Higgs or something more - or less?

Formal confirmation of the discovery is expected within months, though it could take several years for scientists to work out whether they have found the simplest kind of Higgs particle that theories predict, or part of a more complex picture: for example, one of a larger family of Higgs bosons. The discovery of more than one kind of Higgs particle would open the door to an entirely new realm of physics.

[VJ]

Yes... I think they originally said that they found something that seems to comply with the expectation of the Higgs boson... :-)

[Brian Ellis]

And they are now beginning to look for 5 new bosons, including a mirror Higgs that should theoretically exist. The search will never end!

Higgs' boson is now considered theoretical; before, it was hypothetical. It has a 5-sigma certainty, which still leaves room for a tiny uncertainty, roughly at the same level as Einstein's theories of relativity. As such, it is still theoretical physics, not proven fact. There are still a number of hypothetical particles to be discovered experimentally, but it may run into tens, some of which are still speculated, not yet fitting into hypotheses.

[Marshmallowman]

every student of physics get taught about the higgs boson as part of the standard model... this is experimental physics dotting the i on accepted physics. Admittedly a big dot

[Umfriend]

As I understand it, the higgs boson are everywhere and basically consitute a field through which particles that ineract with it are slowed / have mass. How is that different from the old idea of there being an eather?