On 4 July, physicists at a conference in Melbourne, Australia, announced the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider. They have seen a clear signal of a Higgs boson — a key part of the mechanism that gives all particles their masses.
Nature News’ Geoff Brumfiel, was watching the seminar at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. He blogged the results live:
Physicists declare victory in Higgs hunt
Geoff Brumfiel summarises the announcement in a detailed Nature News article:
Physicists announced today that they have seen a clear signal of a Higgs boson — a key part of the mechanism that gives all particles their masses.
Two independent experiments reported their results this morning at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. Both show convincing evidence of a new boson particle weighing around 125 gigaelectronvolts, which so far fits predictions of the Higgs previously made by theoretical physicists.
“As a layman I would say: ‘I think we have it’. Would you agree?” Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s director-general, asked the packed auditorium. The physicists assembled there burst into applause.
The social aspect of the Higgs boson
House of Wisdom blogger, Mohammed Yahia, concentrates on the social aspect of the announcement in his report. He explains how millions of people tuned into the webcast online to hear the announcement first-hand, and how his Twitter feed was unusually full of science tweets:
Beyond the scientific importance of discovering the Higg boson and how our universe works, I also see an incredible social aspect to the discovery. It speaks volumes of the cross-boundary nature of science. It somehow brought everyone together for that brief moment in time.
As people across the Arab world are all dealing with their politics, revolutions, human rights issues and uprisings, science speaks to all of us equally and we become one. The only two human endeavours that are cross-boundary at this massive scale are art and science.
Science diplomacy is poised as a powerful tool to bridge gaps that have been there for too long. The Higgs boson announcement today – and the international response to it, is proof that science might well be one of the most powerful tools to bring people from around the world together for a common cause: our hunger for knowledge.
Satyendra Nath Bose
Indigenus blogger, Subhra Priyadarshini reveals that in India there has also been talk on why Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian physicist who lends his name to Higgs boson, is relatively unknown:
In India, there also has been much speculation on why Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian physicist who lends his name to Higgs boson following his celebrated work with Albert Einstein, has gone unsung through the ages. In fact, there is much criticism of the fact that only the ‘H’ in Higgs boson is written in capital letter. This debate is not going to die soon, at least in the land of Bose, whose Bose-Einstein statistics has become the basis of most quantum mechanics as we know it today.
Hear more about India’s reaction to the discovery in Subhra’s post.
Higgs occupies the minds at Lindau
The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate conference has been taking place this week and is dedicated to Physics. Each year, Nobel Laureates in science are invited to spend a week on Lake Constance in Germany, meeting a selection of young, international scientists. You can read about the online excitement at Lindau around the Higgs news in this Storify.
Over at the Lindau Nobel Community site, Lindau blogger Juan García-Bellido, recalls how he was lucky enough to be at Lindau as CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs, allowing him to see first-hand the unanimous reaction of the physics Nobel laureates:
We had our own press conference at Lindau, with David Gross, Tini Veltman and Carlo Rubbia answering multiple questions from the media, and soon afterwards we had – nicely scheduled by the organizers of this year’s Lindau meeting – an interesting exchange of information with scientists at CERN: John Ellis from the Theory Division and the spokespersons of CMS, ATLAS and LHCb. This session allowed us to discuss further the physical consequences of the discovery of the Higgs boson, its consequences for supersymmetry, and the future of particle physics. In a couple of years, with the upgrade of the LHC up to 14 TeV, and later on with a possible muon collider working as a Higgs factory, one could explore all the Higgs couplings to Standard Model particles and the details of the electroweak symmetry breaking sector. It is definitely a golden moment for particle physics.
Continue to Juan’s post to find out more.
Discovery of the First Fundamental Scalar
Some insights that were gained today during the panel discussion were offered by John Ellis at CERN. He tentatively confirmed that in supersymmetry you may get enhancement of the photon channel as seen. Additionally Ellis indicated that in supersymmetry you would expect at least five Higgs bosons (superpartners). So, as David Gross pointed out several times today we may have seen a Higgs boson, but it would not be the Higgs boson. At higher energies the possibility of discovery of physics beyond the standard model is still quite possible and after a shut down in a few months the LHC will be started and brought back to higher energies than ever before. The search for new physics will continue.
Do you understand?
Nature Network blogger Brian Derby, explains in his post that thanks to the media coverage of the announcement, we can all understand the significance of the discovery, even if we don’t fully understand the physics:
I saw David Willets (Minister for Science) on Newsnight giving his opinion on the discovery – after having been flown out to Geneva for the occasion – he did not give a very good explanation of how mass was conferred by the Higgs field. He talked a lot about bosons bouncing off the particles and giving them mass.
We should all (scientists that is) be grateful for the publicity that such occasional newsworthy articles on science generate. Understaning of the significance may not be universal but the generation of a sense of wonder about the natural world is to be welcomed.
Joke Time – Comic Sans
Finally, the Higgs Boson announcement really got a lot of people going and many jokes sprouted, especially on Twitter. So Scitable’s blogger Khalil A. Cassimally decided to collate the jokes in a Storify. However, he couldn’t resist putting some actual science in there too!
More jokes and science in his post.
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