Well that's the difference between pop physics and physics; the difference between talking about physics and doing physics.
Heh heh. That reminds me of a conversation I had at my kids daycare yesterday. I got asked "So what do you know about this so called 'God particle'?" To which I replied (after the neccessary disclaimers about being a chemist not a particle physicist) "That it's only the media calling it that, and continuing to call it that around me is probably a bad idea." Then I got asked "So what about it making a black hole that will kill us all?" (Thanks for that BTW Walter!!) To which I replied "It won't make a black hole unless the laws of physics are just so, even then those same laws of physics also predict it will vanish before it reaches the edge of the reaction and even if it was persistent it would take centuries or millenia to reach any appreciable size but any such theories can be discounted because of the observations we can make of the universe around us. Collisions of the same energy happen on an almost daily basis in the earths atmosphere, and neutron stars probably wouldn't exist." After a few moments of thought the response I got was "So I don't need to worry then?" To which I answered "No, there's more chance of the Earth being struck by a 1km wide asteroid triggering an extinction event than there is of the LHC killing everbody." I was asked what all the fuss was about, and my response was that "Particle physicists have this thing called the standard model, it predicts that everything we can see in the universe is made up of 12 particles and four forces. The Higgs mechanism was proposed by a scottish physicist to explain why things have mass. They have mass because the interact with a field which pervades everything, and the field is made up of these Higgs Bosons. The big fuss is because now we can exclude some theories about such things, and maybe even develop some that explain dark matter and dark energy, which are things that we think are there because of how they change the movement of galaxies but know little else about." We then breifly touched on whether or not there were aliens watching us that weren't happy with what we were doing, I mentioned that there was a lot of pseudo-scientific twaddle on the internet, that all of these arguments had been thoroughly debunked and that they had all been previously put forward when the RHIC fired up. I then repeated portions of the conversation with my wife whom had tried reading some of the technical articles I have shared on facebook but hadn't been able to follow it. That conversation took a humorous twist when we began discussing the Higgs Moron (which explains stupidity) and Murphys Boson (which explains applied Murphology) and how some people we know seem to have bigger cross sections than average to both of these particles. Addendum: I think during the discussion with my Wife I think I even went as far as saying "I'm not fat, I just have a large Higgs cross-section."
I asked AN and he did not answer. May I ask you. Are GR and the standard model logically consistent? Since questioning either is crackpottery, I must assume they are.
Then you base your assumption on a false premise. Certainly questioning the predictions of GR or the Standard Model in the realms where they are well-documented to be consistent with reality goes against point #1, and that is crackpottery, but that is not what you said. Also, by quoting my entire post and not restricting it to an immediately relevant extract, you cause me to lose interest in replying to you.
Seeing as how you either ignored it or missed it back here in this post: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2954217&postcount=36 I gave one very specific example of not only how they are logically consistent with each other, but how they can be at least partially unified.
These are different questions. They also seem to be wrong-headed in that the meaningful question is can they be both expressed as limits of a unified physical theory in the same mathematical framework, which is the open question of supersymmetric string theory and other quantum gravity proposals. "Open question" means no human being, not even AlphaNumeric, knows; and for the moment I am pretending to be human. Trippy, I fail to see how your post of a single Wikipedia link answers any question. That post only partially addresses special relativity in chemistry calculations. The Standard Model already incorporates 100% of special relativity. Moderators, I recommend that Chinglu's posts (including the one on page 2) and the replies on this (currently page 4) page be stripped out as to not distract from the topic of the Higgs boson candidate. -- Recommendation withdrawn after reading posts 36,37,38.
Higgs - why the buzz? Apparently, the Higgs boson has been discovered. By my limited knowledge of physics, I understand that a boson is a particle that carries a force when two particles interact. The higgs boson is connected to giving mass to particles [how? By carrying the higgs field or something?] It is surely a cool discovery, we might better understand how or why things have mass. But why the buzz, how come its called the God particle? It seems to be an important discovery but I dont get it. Can any explain somewhat simplistically? [the wikipedia page has a lot of terms I am unfamiliar with].
Maybe I misunderstood something somewhere, but if they weren't logicaly consistent with each other, no kludge would ever be able to unite them even partially, correct? I guess I just learned something about the standard model that I didn't know twelve hours ago then.
Moronic media people pandering to people's love of compressing vastly more complex concepts into entirely inappropriate single words. I HATE that name. I've explain about the Higgs etc but I'm too short on time at the moment. I'm sure someone, probably Rpenner, will swoop in shortly.
As I understand it, the Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field in a similar way that the photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field. It is not the Higgs boson that gives particles mass, but rather their interaction with the Higgs field (which fills the whole of space). As particles move through space, their interactions with the Higgs field kind of drag on them, and we see that effect as mass. The buzz is because the confirmation that the Higgs boson, and by implication the Higgs field, exists is the last major component of the Standard Model to gain support from experimental confirmation. It shows that major revisions in our understanding of particle physics are not necessary. As for the "God" particle, it was originally dubbed the "god-damn particle" because it was so god-damn troublesome to detect etc. But when an author wanted to publish a book titled "The Goddamn particle", the publishers were somewhat reluctant. And so...
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Conceptually, we are going from something compact and simple; common matter, adding energy so its entropy can increase, then we end up with even more subtle distinctions and separations into sub-particles and interactions which contain many more possible degrees of freedom than were contained within the original common matter. That adds up to an entropy increase. The diagram above is what becomes of simple things; one trick ponies. What I am saying is, colliders tell us many things about the future of common matter when common matter subject to conditions like a collapsing star. These add energy, acceleration and a sudden stop. But the formation of the universe, to be consistent with the second law needs to go in the direction of increasing entropy from the beginning to the end. Going from lower entropy into common matter would conceptually begin with huge particles with very few degrees of freedom which dissociate into the smaller common matter as they change reference and absorb energy; increased entropy. I am not challenging the collider data or its particle interaction interpretation but rather, only the assumption this data represents the initial states of universal matter. Entropy implies this data represents later states of the latter days. If the universe is heading in the direction of higher entropy and collider data is assumed to be lower entropy, experimentally, the generated particles should consistently reassemble into common matter since this would represent stability into higher entropy, correct? That is not how it works in practice, because the sub-particles can't consistently lower entropy into common matter. Instead this keeps moving forward into energy.
Something that should be kept in mind, is that what has been discovered, or observed.., is a particle boson in an energy range that fits with the Higgs Mechanism. There is not yet sufficient data to confirm that it is the Higgs Boson, that will take a great deal more exploration and experiemental data. In some ways the excitement and to some extent media hype, skips over the small details... This search has been going on for a long time. Since before the LHC was fired up. The big buzz is because in all previous attempts, no potential Higgs Boson was detected. This news represents a crack in the door and opens the way for what will be the real work, pinning down the details. It will be perhaps years before those doing the research can say with certainty, that this new particle IS responsible for the Higgs Field, and that portion of the mass of fundamental particles in the standard model, that the Higgs Mechanism addresses. The excitement in the research community is that previous attempts have been like panning for gold and finding nothing but sand, while this latest attempt is like finding something in the pan that sparkles. It is yet to be confirmed that it is gold, but it sure looks pretty when you have become used to finding sand.
Now that the threads have been merged, there are a number of descriptions. Here's mine from paragraph three of post #51. The diagram shows that the Higgs boson, written as H, interacts with all the particles except the photon and gluon -- the massless bosons. It even interacts with itself. Like all particles, the Higgs boson is an excitation of a corresponding quantum field, but unlike all the others, the Higgs quantum field does not default to zero in our universe, it has a non-zero expectation value. Thus it's not "Higgs particles" that give everything mass, but the background Higgs field. What is mass in physics? Anything the works like mass in physics. I know that sounds stupid, but there you are. In the binding energy of nuclei, in the relativistic knots of fields in a nucleon, and in the Higgs field interactions there are a bunch of massless fields that act as excess baggage when you try and move things -- that's mass. With confirmation of the Higgs, that's all that mass is -- excess baggage (interactions with quantum fields) that makes it harder to change ones state of motion. Prior to the Higgs field, there was an uncomfortable split between "intrinsic" mass and a dynamical interaction with quantum fields. Now it's 100% dynamical and the question of what is mass is solved. (As prometheus points out, now we still have a mystery of why the couplings to the Higgs field are what they are. That's something described, but not explained, in the Standard Model.) Eleectroweak symmetry breaking is the proposed explanation of why there is a non-zero Higgs field vacuum expectation value in the universe today. The ideas is while the physical theory is symmetrical, zero is not the lowest energy state and thus the vacuum value of the Higgs field has to settle down at some particular non-zero value. So in a poorly written Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction ) the fields before symmetry breaking lead to a (cooler) world after symmetry breaking where the interactions with the background Higgs field is already factored in as "intrinsic" masses. Some technical references:
Nice to see a nice discussion here.I am learning more about this.With partial knowledge,I decided to learn more and more here and comment less on the subject.Today I read on newspaper "Times of India"that Scientists say that the particle detected shows properties similar to Proposed Higgs Boson,and it will take allmost 3 years to actually officially confirm the detected particle as Boson and to understand its basic properties clearly. They are still in doubt that the particle is Boson.The might be a new particle altogether with some properties similar to Proposed Higgs Boson.
