This is from Lubos Motl's blog. First collisions next week, and 10 TeV by Oct. 12. The full COM energy of 14 TeV will be available early next year. http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-first-collision-next-week.html
yes seriously, they have been searching for so long for it to suddenly be found now would be unlikly. after all the US one was surposedly going to find it ages ago and it didnt
http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/09/19/lhc-first-magnet-failure/ Apparently there's been a setback at LHC---one of the magnets (which are cooled to 1-2 K) which keeps the beam of protons going in a circle has failed. This means that the first physics runs (slated for 10 TeV) could be delayed by "several weeks". This is sad news, but one must remember that there is no instruction manual for this machine.
"The US one"? I suppose you mean FermiLab. Well, you're mistaken (unless you can show me a reference), and I'll tell you why. FermiLab was never supposed to find the higgs. In fact, it's only now that they're beginning to do experiments on the former lower bound, which was set by LEP, which closed down in 1992 or so. The way it works is that the probability to produce a higgs depends on the energy of the beam. The way that you know you produced a higgs is that you look at all of the events and add up probabilities, then multiply by the total number of events. You can either discover the higgs by increasing the probability (i.e. increasing the energy of the beam) or increasing the number of events. At FermiLab, they now have enough events to pick up where the last experiment left off. At LHC, because there will be many more events, the time to pick up where FermiLab leaves off will be something like 2-5 years. So, no---the higgs shouldn't have been discovered already.
As I have said before also the Higgs won't be found because the power needed is nowhere near the levels needed to find this missing particle. They need to go from a 15 to the 17 power up to 15 to the 87 power level and that can't be done with todays equipment. Even if they could get that power they still won't find the Higgs because it doesn't exist at all. The reason I say that is because there are cosmic particles, trillions of them, colliding right now somewhere in space so why hasn't another universe been created? If it has then it is on another dimension somewhere and therefore the Higgs cannot be a real particle at all or else more universes would be popping up all over the place in real time, not as different dimensions of universes. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
And right there, is a more than slightly flawed version of the hierarchy problem. Why is there an expectation that the Higg's mass is between 115 and 192 GeV? Or should I try to answer that?
LOL!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I too don't think the power has anything to do with it as my previous statement said. I just don't think it exists at all.
Really? What makes you think that you're more qualified than all the professionals that have spent decades following the math and the path that predicts it? I'd really like to know the source of your HIGHLY superior knowledge!
I guess in a year or so we will all know won't we, that is if they can ever get that thing up and running! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It seems that the boson itself is predicted by very reasonable and respected scientists. But here is what i think. When science was rife in the early 1900's, we found that physicists where at battleheads with each other, and most of these scientists had very few supporters behind them. Einstein himself, for a profound example, developed his relativity theories, with very little support. It wasn't until after fame did his theories get taken seriously, and added, experimental evidence. But that is just to name one physicist in this era. Schrodinger and Heisenberg, and even Eddington where all prominent scientists of this era, but what would have stood out to them in these days and ages (something might i add which would be so different to how scientists operated back then), was the types of groups we can have today. When it comes to ''scientists within camps'' we have a huge number who take alegence to one single theory, and that theory is (for most of the duration of its existence), exhaulted simply because of the number of followers behind that theory. The Higgs Boson, is a prime example of such followers, and most of its fame and acceptance has derived from the pivotal origins of ''numbers''. I ask, how many scientists today, would be so hyped up about finding such a particle, if the numbers of followers where much smaller? Of course, let us not deter ourselves that there is good reason to believe it 'may' exist. But there are many non-Higgs models out there, and the only thing that neglects these other theories from being so popular, is simply the popularity of the theory itself.
Saxion, a few things. While I disagree with the details of your assessment of 1900's physics, I would point out that the situation was qualitatively different then than it is now. For example, in that time, there was very little idea about some experimental results. There was a host of experiments which contradicted what most of the scientists at the time held as "settled science", to use DH's criteria. An example of this was the "UV catastrophe", which shows up in black body spectra. (There is a nice wiki article on this topic.) So no one knew what was right and what was wrong. (Einstein's case was a bit different, because he was proposing changes to Newton's laws, which most people believed had been settled in the 16th century. Except for a few problems with Mercury's orbit, people more or less thought that gravity was a closed book. (I think, I am always open to correction.) ) Today, there are no such problems with the standard model of particle physics. Of all of the experiments done, there are only a few measurements which stand out. Notable, the muon's magnetic moment, and some forward-backward hadronic asymmetry parameter (which I don't really understand). There are also some discrepancies with some flavor changing neutral current bounds. These measurements can all be accommodated within the standard model (except possibly the muon measurement), and the situation is very different from the situation in the early 1900's, or even the 1960's. When it comes to the higgs boson, there IS no competitor---this is the root of the higgs' popularity. If one examines the evidence, there is no other way to break symmetries without having a fundamental or a composite scalar particle. The particle must be a scalar because we think that the Lorentz symmetry is a good symmetry at low energies. If the higgs were a fermion, for example, we wouldn't be able to do Lorentz Transformations. You can see how intricate things are---if you decide you hate the higgs, then you have to explain several SERIOUS problems with physics as we know it. Finally, I would argue that there are NO alternatives to the higgs model, with one exception. That exception is not particularly well-motivated, in my mind. There are theories called "technicolor", where the higgs is not a fundamental scalar, but a composite scalar made of "techni-quarks". The problem with these theories is that they have real trouble accommodating the top quark mass. I have a friend in Copenhagen who would argue with me about this point, but I feel that technicolor theories are not correct. Now, perhaps you could enlighten me about alternatives to the standard higgs model? Or, are we speaking in general terms about ripping down the whole edifice of quantum theory? Remember, any replacement for the higgs mechanism must also fit in with all of the previous measurements, including the very constraining electroweak measurements that the people at LEP (which was located where the LHC is located now) made. This is a very non-trivial task, and often kills models before they can get off the ground. (I speak from experience!)
Hello BenTheMan. My very point, was for the very fact, no one knows that who is wrong or right even in the case of the Higgs Boson. Further, my point was, that if Einstein had enough followers to begin with, (enough of the scientific troops), his work would have hardly been questioned. Higgs is question however; but very few take the reasonable step of questioning it further, and mostly due to the fact it has a great mass of followers, that are almost cultlike. This is my point. The point you may have missed. Well, no competitor that seems to have taken adjust with popularity. At least. And maybe the very least, for it seems that even the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century, where found to be wrong, in a great many things. Just because a collective of thinkers come to agree on something, does not make its probability more likely, for many reasons. I will let you ponder what these reasons could be. Your friend in Copenhagen seems no wiser than yourself, and i don't mean to sound condescending. This is not about what personal belief means, or how that personal belief may alter the true nature of quantum behaviour, and quantum existence... It's about how we should remain diverse and wise about other possibilities. This is something i think yourself and your Copenhagen friend are fighting over. As for the other models, there are a few. Technicolor is one. I am sure you know of a few others, due to your knowledge of physics. And a few rogue theories will certainly spur interest if the Higgs Boson fails... which it might.
