Topic: Large Hadron Collider nearly ready

[Clive]

Just £200 that's all!   

[Simon]

'That's all' is better than f*** all! 

[sam]

technically the CERN upgrade has cost every EU citizen 40 Euros... well that's what I'm told...

[Clive]

Do I get to press a few buttons now?   

[Simon]

God help us, we're all doomed! 

[GillE]

Will it microwave my cold mug of tea?

[Clive]

I don't think it's that powerful Gill!   

[GillE]

Pity.  I was hoping for something coming out of all this expenditure which might be useful.

Still, it's all very exciting and interesting in its own right.

[sam]

Pity.  I was hoping for something coming out of all this expenditure which might be useful.

Still, it's all very exciting and interesting in its own right.

dont worry all the technology that will come out of it will pay for it.... just like the internet did in the past.

[Sandra]

If it works doesnt that mean that they find the so called god particle ?
So if they find that they can then prove the big bang theory was an actual event.
This will prove that theres no such thing as creation, or intelligent design and it should finally convince all the religous people that there isnt a god.
This means that once people realise that there isnt really any such thing as a god, then world peace has a chance to finally happen, doesnt it 

That sounds very useful to me Gill 

[GillE]

Oh, if they can find it (and I believe it'll take them about five years to work out if it's there) then everything will be worthwhile.  If they can't find it, then what?  That might be an even more interesting scenario.

Incidentally, I understand the particle they're looking for is known as the 'Higgs boson'.  If that's the 'god' particle, it's funny but I never imagined that god would be called 'Higgs'.

Gotta go and finish my cup of tea.  It's probably gone cold by now.

[sam]

Yeah its the Higgs boson, and is the particle that is missing from the standard model that they have built up. If found it will prove their model and mean that we might truly understand particle physics. If it is not found, then indeed, it will be much more interesting.
I don't think it will not prove the big bang though, but proves the particle physics that could have gone into it. The term "God particle" is, like most things, a media invention... though I think the particle physicists don't mind it too much as it gives them some publicity.

[Clive]

In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?'  One of the winning entries taken from Physics World Volume 6 Number 9, was by a friend of mine who now works at at Swansea University.  If you would like to read it HERE it is.

[GillE]

Fascinating, Clive, and very informative for this numpty.

[sam]

Fermilab says: "Hey wait, we're in the Higgs hunt, too!"

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=fermilab-says-hey-wait-were-in-the-2008-08-08&sc=rss

It looks like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may have some competition in its search for the much-anticipated Higgs boson, the source of mass.

Yesterday CERN, the European particle physics lab, announced that on September 10 it would begin shooting protons around the full 27 kilometers (17 miles) of the circular LHC—the most powerful particle accelerator ever built—building up to collisions with a second, opposing beam in subsequent months.

Researchers don't know much concentrated energy it takes to make the Higgs particle pop out, but they are confident that the sheer number of high-energy particle collisions the LHC was designed to produce ought to generate lots of Higgs bosons, enough to spot them from among other collision debris.

But the LHC isn't the only machine with the potential for finding the Higgs. At a conference this week, researchers working on the Tevatron [above, background] at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill.—still the top particle accelerator for a few months more—have finally collected enough data that they can start to rule out the Higgs along portions of the energy range the LHC will also explore.

Combined results from the CDF and DZero experiments indicate that the Higgs most likely does not exist at 170 giga electron-volts (GeV). (A GeV is one billion electron-volts, which are the units of energy associated with subatomic particles.)

Tevatron researchers have been hard at work these past months squeezing every bit of sensitivity from their data to identify enough Higgs-like particle collisions to see if there's an excess suggesting the possible presence of the Higgs.

The finding "marks the start of an expanding region both below and above 170 GeV where the Higgs will be excluded as we collect more statistics and refine our analysis," Fermilab director Pierre Oddone said in a statement. "Even more exciting, if the Higgs is anywhere nearby, we should then see evidence for it with the full data sample in the next two years."

Physicist Gordon Watts, a DZero team member, notes on his blog that this is the first time a particle physics experiment has entered the Higgs range since CERN's LEP collider in the 1990s, which told researchers that the Higgs had to possess an energy greater than 114 GeV.

The LHC will need a few years to complete its own Higgs hunt, as indicated in this provisional timeline, circulated at April's meeting of the American Physical Society. Of course, the machine will be looking for other particles besides the Higgs. Check out Cosmic Variance for a run-down of what's theoretically possible.