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  • Higgs-Boson Announcement
  • TiRed
    Full Member

    So – now we need some evidence of strings. Get to work, boffins…

    Sadly the energy requirements to start to see the unification of gravity with the three other forces, are beyond current technology. About 14 orders of magnitude higher than those accessible in the LHC.

    If you are old enough, you will recall in the 1980’s that the new W and Z bosons were discovered at CERN by smashing electrons and positrons together (predicted by Weinberg-Salam model). To get to the predicted Higgs particle energies required that heavier stuff be smashed together – enter protons and antiprotons (1800x heavier). So the LHC can achieve energies of about three orders of magnitude higher than LEP.

    Now to get another 14 orders of magnitude of energy, we need something 10^14 times heavier, charged and accelerated to all but the speed of light. That particle would weigh about 10^-15 grammes and would need a negative counterpart. Plus the energy of a billion billion more power stations to accelerate it…

    Hence my comment about the end of experimental Particle Physics.

    Some nice perspective on Nobel prizes from Frank Close. Sent Tom a congratulatory email already.

    Garry_Lager
    Full Member

    The Nobel is a shoe-in I guess, but in 3 months time like that author intimates? 2013 would be in line with the W and Z bosun discovery / award timeframe, and that was amazingly rapid by Nobel standards.

    It’s true though that the theoreticians are elderly, so maybe the Nobel committee will act decisively. One of the medicine prizewinners this year died the day before the announcement – only posthumous Nobel prize in history I think.

    GrahamS
    Full Member

    Fresh Goods Friday 696: The Middling Edition

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    TiRed
    Full Member

    The Nobel is a shoe-in I guess

    Not so sure. Close’s arguments are persuasive, but we shall see. It’s been 45 years (and more) in the coming, after all. And yes Steinman is the only posthumous award. He was treating himself with his own dendritric cell therapy.

    I think CERN would be up for the award once more confirmatory evidence of the nature of the Higgs-Kibble boson is described experimentally.

    Smoot and Mather won for the Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer (COBE). But they didn’t put that satellite up there, collect and anlayse the data and publish singlehandedly,

    donsimon
    Free Member

    One thing I heard on the news that amazed me was physicists only know 4% of what makes up the universe

    How do they know?
    To know what 4 from 100 is they have to know what 100 is but they’ve already said they don’t know becasue we only know 4%….
    I’ll leave it to the experts. 😕

    alex222
    Free Member

    Ask our Donald

    [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RpSv3HjpEw[/video]

Viewing 6 posts - 201 through 206 (of 206 total)

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