The fourth day of this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting began with a morning of plenary sessions by six of the Laureates and an afternoon of panel discussions.
To capture the live tweeting around these talks, as well as video and blog content, we have created a Storify storyboard.
Do check back as we’ll be updating it as more coverage is published, as well as creating additional Storifys for each day of the rest of the conference. You can find Monday’s Storify here, Tuesday’s Storify here, Wednesday morning’s Storify here and Wednesday’s panel discussion here.
Blogging coverage
Below is a short summary of the latest blogging coverage over at the Lindau Nobel Community site, but make sure you keep an eye on the English blog for more news, interviews and opinion pieces.
After a few hours sleep, at 8.00 am, I connected to the CERN website to follow the webcast of the two seminars that were supposed to announce the discovery of the last piece of the Standard Model of fundamental interactions, the Higgs particle. I could see people were already filling the Main Auditorium at CERN. I went quietly to breakfast, and at 9.00 am I was already glued to the screen, while the director general – Rolf Heurer – presented to both CMS and ATLAS spokespersons – Joe Incandela and Fabiola Sagnotti. They looked nervous and tired, but very happy. Heurer began: “Today is a special day … and I’m being diplomatic … Today we will take a look at the search for a certain particle … I forgot the name, but I am sure that the experiments will remind me”, which made the whole audience brake into laughter.
Continue to Juan’s post to find out more.
- Discovery of the First Fundamental Scalar
The standard model of physics combines the fundamental forces of electromagnetism, weak, strong force, but it calls for a particle known as the Higgs boson in order to be complete. Physicists have been confirming experimental details of the standard model for decades and looking for predicted particles, such as the top quark which was discovered in just 1995, but the Higgs boson is the last hold out. Physicists are careful with how they describe the discovery today because while the particle is consistent with a Higgs it is not guaranteed to be the Higgs. More data is necessary to confirm the spin of the particle, the decay rates, and the decay channels.
In his talk Osheroff offered five things that scientists should keep in mind if they want make a discovery. One example that Osheroff used to illustrate these points was the discovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. It earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978, and provided evidence for an expanding universe that started with a big bang.