Thread: Cern announces discovery of Higgs boson

Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

... show a particle that is new has been discovered.

Yep, whether it is the Higgs or not is what is in question. Even if it isn't, discovering any new quanta is a good thing for our understanding of the fabric of existence.

Originally Posted by deathgodusmc

Lets not act like this is going to be some huge break through. This information will remain next to useless for a long time. Its great we found something but far from actually helpful at this point.

If they discover the Higgs boson this is the definition of a huge breakthrough.

Originally Posted by hannibal

<Rant>

This attitude, right here, this is why we in the US can't have nice things. It is also why China is eating our lunch. In the 90's we were going to build this:

Superconducting Super Collider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Which would have given the US this discovery, we built the International Space Station instead, which hasn't been an unqualified success. Now I am not as excited about this as White (Damn it Jim, I am a Mathematician not a Particle Physicist.) but I do understand that its good for the dicipline of physics if it pans out.

However we as a nation are on in the middle of an intellectual wasteland where people think that if it serves no practical purpose right this fucking second its a waist of time and energy. The transistor was invented 30 years before the internet but it was an essential stepping stone, when Turing wrote, on the computability of numbers and the decision problem, no one had ever even thought about how you compute anything. (Other than Mrs. Ada Lovelace and her friends.) So yes the Higgs has no practical use to us right now, but that is not why you do this research you do it because we do not know where discovery will lead us, we only know that for our society it is technological progress or some form of painful death.

</Rant>

-H

umm, just wanted to say. If i had to pick between a bigger LHC or helping with the space station, I'll pick the space station.

Why? Because we did both. I frankly don't give a shit who discovered it because it was still maybe discovered and in the end that is all that matters.

Originally Posted by deathgodusmc

Ok. So what changed today from it?

Originally Posted by deathgodusmc

What will change next week?
How about next month?
Fuck month how about next year?
Maybe a decade from now it will mean some change but odds are nope.

This is a curiousity thing. The knowledge means next to nothing right now. Kind of like developing a jet aircraft in the stone age. Its great but useless to us for the immediate future with huge potential down the road.

I don't understand this thinking. For one, you have no idea if this is the final piece of a puzzle that is needed for something new and fantastic, it may not be or it may. Knowing it now also I'm sure means they can start doing other research that builds off of this. Your analogy also sucks, a jet aircraft was built off of multiple discoveries and inventions, not just one.

Originally Posted by deathgodusmc

Ok. So what changed today from it?
What will change next week?
How about next month?
Fuck month how about next year?
Maybe a decade from now it will mean some change but odds are nope.

This is a curiousity thing. The knowledge means next to nothing right now. Kind of like developing a jet aircraft in the stone age. Its great but useless to us for the immediate future with huge potential down the road.

Originally Posted by SoySoldier

Basically if it exists it confirms the last 40 years of high-energy particle physics and various theories; if it does not exist, a bunch of people are going back to the drawing board. I know, a crude summary, but pretty much why it is important to see if it exists or not...

Most things you do everyday rely on things people discovered that to the layman may not have seemed important at the time.

I am not having this debate with you; you use the results of such study all the time, and if you don't recognize that, it is your fault at this point.

Not to mention that what "changed" isn't something concrete or physical that you can hold in your hand.

We learned that the theory of the higgs... of a particle that gives mass to everything around us exists. It is what holds our universe together. Is that worth knowing? Is knowing it and marking it off the list of things we have to guess about a big enough "change"?

Is it a big enough change that being able to put a check next to the higgs and measure it and observe it could now lead to discoveries of why gravity is so weak, or what dark energy or dark matter is, or any number of paths that couldn't have been taken by NOT knowing about it?

Edited


America's Discarded Superconducting Supercollider // Current TV

Supercollider Trailer - YouTube - Don't know what the "until now" part is about.

Texas scientists regret loss of Higgs boson supercollider quest 20 years ago | Lubbock Online | Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Originally Posted by MaFioSo

Yet TSA gets 8 billion dollars in funding yearly.

Oooh TSA makes me pissed off.
</threadjack>

Here's one way of looking at the discovery, assuming it is the Higgs boson.

As one physicist said to me a few minutes ago, “unless it has some very weird properties, it’s like the closing of a book, rather than an opening. We’ve done that–we’ve dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s. But it doesn’t open new vistas. It’s the end of something. We’re not going to build another accelerator.”

What’s a Higgs Boson, What’s Being Announced Tomorrow, and What’s Next | 80beats | Discover Magazine