June 23, 2012
Physics Community Afire With Rumors of Higgs Boson Discovery
Adam Mann in Wired:
One of the biggest debuts in the science world could happen in a matter of weeks: The Higgs boson may finally, really have been discovered.
Ever since tantalizing hints of the Higgs turned up in December at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists there have been busily analyzing the results of their energetic particle collisions to further refine their search.
“The bottom line though is now clear: There’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look,” wrote mathematician Peter Woit on his blog, Not Even Wrong. According to Woit, there are rumors of new data that would be the most compelling evidence yet for the long-sought Higgs.
The possible news has a number of physics bloggers speculating that LHC scientists will announce the discovery of the Higgs during the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia, July 4 to 11.
The new buzz is just the latest in the Higgs search drama. In December, rumors circulated regarding hints of the Higgs around 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), roughly 125 times the mass of a proton. While those rumors eventually turned out to be true, the hard data only amounted to what scientists call a 3-sigma signal, meaning that there is a 0.13 percent probability that the events happened by chance. This is the level at which particle physicists will only say they have “evidence” for a particle.
In the rigorous world of high-energy physics, researchers wait to see a 5-sigma signal, which has only a 0.000028 percent probability of happening by chance, before claiming a “discovery.”
The latest Higgs rumors suggest nearly-there 4-sigma signals are turning up at both of the two separate LHC experiments that are hunting for the particle.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:35 PM | Permalink
Comments
So where are all these site improvements we were promised with the fundraising drive last year?
Posted by: Insecure Sinecure | Jun 23, 2012 10:41:50 PM
We are still working on it. The new and improved site should be rolled in by the end of summer. Sorry for the delay.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jun 24, 2012 5:54:43 AM
America is full of promoters and scam artists. These are people who use public relations to hype all sorts of activities which then generate millions or billions of dollars, much of it going to the promoters and others seeking to benefit from the publicity. Examples range from golf tournaments to all sorts of fixed sports activities, promoting esoteric killing machines to generate more money for the Pentagon and all the industries which produce weapons of mass destruction, even the Cancer Industry hyping all sorts of “miraculous” new drugs for the “cure” just around the next billion dollar corner to con the public that they are getting something of value for the hundreds of billions wasted by the criminal enterprises NIH and FDA and NCI.
In the past, most people didn’t even know what a physicist was or did. Many likely still don’t know. But today in 2012, even the physicists, or at least some of them, have climbed on to the propaganda machine band wagon, to hype and promote their hopes for the laws of nature to fit into their narrow, vain, cooked up theory or plan. Why? Because life is too short to spend most of it without coming up with something that might fool other less knowledgeable folks that these people are the new geniuses who figured out the mysterious puzzles of the universe which none of the earlier much more intelligent scientists, like Galileo Galilei, Issac Newton or Karl Gauss, to name a few, could accomplish. Propaganda aids them in their endeavor and the editors of this blog seek to aid them too. It provides them fame and possibly fortune too, in their lifetimes. Physics professors in the academy today don’t work for peanuts any more, like their earlier predecessors did.
And what happened to the rules of science in all this mushrooming propaganda, expanding like a mushroom cloud from the explosion of an atomic bomb? Why it appears the rules of science also got blown up with the bomb too. Many physicists today, even members of the Academy, have not the foggiest idea of what the real scientific method is. I urge all of them everywhere on this planet, to take time to read this excellent summary of the Scientific Method first published in 1924:
“Notes on the Scientific Method”, pp. 756-760, in the book “Physics A Textbook for Colleges” by Oscar M. Stewart, Professor of Physics, University of Missouri, Ginn and Co., San Francisco, New York, … London, 1924-1944, 4th, ed.
This book was reviewed by one the world’s greatest physicists: Professor Robert A. Millikan, Ph.D. who was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics for one of the most fundamental, simple, elegant and timeless experiments that anyone can still perform by themselves, without a multi billion dollar fancy accelerator machine, on their own kitchen table! This fabulous experiment is known as “The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment.” It proved, and was subsequently confirmed and verified by numerous others at different places and times in the universe, that all electric charge exists in integral units of the charge found on an electron and no other units. These confirmations were not just in his own laboratory, but in numerous others all over this planet. This is how the true scientific method must be interpreted and applied. We do not accept a new discovery based on a single claim or observation from a single laboratory as is being hyped in the above article and numerous others.
Since this is the only laboratory, other than the unlimited energies of cosmic radiation, which can produce these energies, who knows how long it will be before others can truly and independently verify these claims if they are made following all this hype and propaganda aided and abetted by the editors of this blog? It could be centuries before these claims are truly confirmed according to the demands of the Scientific Method. But the big shot gangsters of the physics orthodoxy don’t have the patience to wait for fame do they? They want it NOW, just like the banksters who fleece the senior citizens out of their hard earned money at the corrupt New York Stock Exchange with artificially low interest rates fixed by the little bankster dictator . Big Ben. The physics gangsters are fooling the lay public who have no idea of what they are doing, while Abbas Raza and is crony editors are short on the myriad of details of these experiments too. This is all about fooling others and unfortunately even the physicists have degenerated to the level of the Hollywood Perverts.
Winfield J. Abbe
A.B., Physics, UC Berkeley, 1961
M.S., Physics, California State University at Los Angeles, 1962
Ph.D., Physics, UC Riverside, 1966
Institute of Science and Technology Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Former faculty member with lifetime tenure, University of Georgia.
Posted by: WJAbbe | Jun 24, 2012 7:40:38 PM
Talk about degeneration! I should assume Wabbe's rant was fired off without relation to this article, though I would point out that the LHC is not in the US. As for the Hollywood Perverts, what more can be said other than god bless America?
Posted by: Nina | Jun 24, 2012 9:34:44 PM
How cool is that? You have a resident crank. Checked out a few previous comments and, apparently there has been no progress in physics since "The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment". I wonder if I too should lament the fall of physics since it abandoned it's ties to the kitchen table. LOL
Posted by: Peter G | Jun 27, 2012 3:44:15 PM
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