The work at CERN is differentiated when it is performed by westerners or by people from the East:
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]
It is not from the ATLAS experiment, but of another LHC experiment -- but still within the organisation of CERN.
The comment/quote is about evaluating people -- ie. by the simplest budgeting metric, labour cost (with obvious consequences for peer evaluation). It has nothing to do with colour but with peer evaluation of equivalent work, differentiated according eastern or western membership.
edit: unable to reply to the comment below. But I can cite concrete case(s) in which work was performed in Geneva by both eastern and western member within the same group. China isn't a memberstate anyway.
Uh, it says labour costs in different countries. I.e. if the work is done in China then wages may be lower, if it's done in Switzerland then wages will be higher.
There's no big conspiracy here by CERN, just different wages in different countries.
No attempts, just plain facts: a reminder of those, who took their fair share in contributing to such a scientific achievement but were discriminated negatively compared to their "western equivalents" only for being born in a non-western country.
The cited document (did all the downvoters also take their time and actually read the TDRs and papers in detail??? Or are they just ignorant sheep?) is a rare case of putting the facts on the ground down in a written and approved document, despite being taboo in an organisation touting "equal opportunities" and such policies.
No downvotes will change the situation I warn about above, quite to the contrary: may my previous comment serve as a warning to all non-westerners at CERN for the time being.
If you have difficulties in accepting criticism based on a factual quote from a (peer!) reviewed document, then you might consider changing your behaviour.
The moment one experiences the consequences of such discrimination, things get far more real than an absurd conclusion you are alluding to.
No, I posit that you are taking the quote and extrapolating your own conclusion. The report does not make the same conclusions you are making. All it seems to be saying is that labour costs are different between countries.
All it seems to be saying is that labour costs are different between countries.
Would you think, that this evaluation scheme has any consequences to peer evaluation within the same group? [aside from the inherent bias, not even mentioning all the other loopholes with categorisations such as Scottish (read western) MC-EST/PhD etc.]
It's just very quiet, you're just hearing the spillover from the room into the main mic. If you crank your speakers you'll hear people talking, but be careful when someone talks into the mic :)
Why is potentially the worlds finest discovery of the 21st century being communicated using the worst software to be cobbled together in the 20th? (Aka Flash)
It works. Flash Player is the only browser plugin yet that can do an actual streaming (not progressive download) using either Adobe's own Media Server or other similar Open Source at the back-end. If need be, that is the best form of protection against content theft so far.
It is not that difficult to setup the whole streaming with lots of free and open source solutions available today. It's just a good means to a useful end.
EDITS:
Just as I suspected, it's using a Media Server Streaming Server.
"rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/"
It is also automatically streaming corresponding quality depending on the user's bandwidth.
Latest application of the uncertainty principle - you can have 21st century discoveries or 21st century technology, but you can't have both simultaneously.
I'm in a place with single-bar wifi signal and the livestream is really choppy.
Does anyone have something like a buffered stream on a delay so I can be sure I don't miss anything, even if I have to stop to buffer more of the stream?
I have a vanilla, chrome browser, and a fairly recent VLC.
If you're going to make an announcement that is going to be held up to the highest rigorous standards, figuring out exactly what to say is going to be a difficult issue. This presentation isn't for you, this is for the physics community.
Right now, he's presenting general stuff that everyone in the room already knows, including him. It's just a summary of the status of the project up to now.
He could have practiced this 6 months ago.
Aaaand... at this very second he's starting on the new stuff, I think.
Sounds like the kind of content that is just very hard to condense into a reasonable amount of time. This seems super dense to me, but you can imagine to a physicist this is a high level overview.
Next time you do a major presentation on state-of-the-art high-energy physics experiments live to a world-wide community on what could be a Nobel Prize winning event, let us know and we'll watch you do it better. ;)
At the point you made the comment, the full number has not yet been shown. That's only the combined number for Higgs to gamma-gamma for 2011 and 2012 (so far).
Can someone please explain what 5 sigma signifies?
Edit: “Evidence” usually means a 3-sigma signal, which existed last December, “Proof” would be a better way to describe a 5+ sigma signal, if that’s what the combined CMS/ATLAS data shows - http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4809
5 sigma is the traditional limit of significance for new discoveries in particle physics. If you have data showing the existence of a new particle or phenomenon at 5 sigma you publish and you announce and you start saying "this thing exists" instead of "this thing may exist".
They just announced 5.1 sigma, and on a normal distribution that would mean that it is 99.999966% certain, so that there is about a one-in-three-million chance that this is due to random chance, otherwise there is some sort of excess here due to a new particle.
Yeah. The gamma-gamma and Z-Z together have been combined into a signal of 5 standard deviations from the no-Higgs Standard Model. Which is the common threshold for a discovery.
Really striking what a large percentage of the words are jargon. Sometimes I understand less than 10% of the words in a sentence. I think I might now better understand how a non-programmer feels when seeing a talk related to programming.
That's true for almost every field of academic research and work; around 70-80% of the words are not in any dictionary (or, if they are, their standard definition has nothing to do with their professional meaning).
What always interested me is how the ratio of new words to repurposed words varies per field.
For example, in CS we use a whole bunch of words like "string", "thread", "class", "type", "object", "arrow", "map" and "macro" to denote CS-specific concepts related at best tangentially to the words' original meanings. On the other hand, biology seems to prefer to come up with new words for their technical terminology.
I wonder if this is a product of different cultures or something like that.
The worst is botany. Botanists use common culinary words to describe almost entirely non-overlapping sets of plants/fruit etc. The "Tomato a fruit?" question is nothing compared to the "berry" thing. According to the botanical definition cherries, raspberries, strawberries, boysenberries and blackberries are not berries, but bananas, watermelon, avocado and pumpkin are.
Nuts are worse. According botanists, peanuts, cashews, macadamias, pistachios, walnuts, almonds, pecans, pine-nuts and Brazil nuts are not nuts. According to most lay-people, though, botanists are nuts.
I don't understand the particle physics they're talking about, but I do find it fascinating how a lot of the work is really how to sort through a massive amount of data to remove all the noise and find the signal. It sounds like they're using some machine learning algorithms to examine and classify various interactions in the data.
I wonder if the people doing it are trained in computer science or physics? Not that it should matter in the end results, just curious how people got there.
They're probably physicists. One can take IT classes during the study, and some people have a very high skill level. Data interpretation is a big part of being an experimental physicist, and these algorithms are very useful, so people will seek them out.
Computer science people work in other areas, such as setting up and running the data collection and on-line processing. (A professor told us many interesting stories about the many Unix servers they build and the bugs they created..)
few of us are formally trained in CS. some of us are good. others are not.
my understanding is that the computer engineers at CERN are mostly tasked with IT work, the rest (including DAQ software/firmware, network code, distributed+realtime data processing, etc) is made by the physicists.
A lot of the modern research in 'big data' analysis is/was driven by physicists. Bayesian Inference is about trying to make a decision about what you can infer from an observation or series of observations, and the impetus for this came from trying to make sense of experimental results.
Two of the really great text books in the field are by physicists,
1) 'Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms' by David Mackay, a physics professor at Cambridge. Perhaps the most readable and enjoyable text book I own. Certainly up there.
2) 'Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning' by Chris Bishop, now a director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge but formerly a physicist. Delightfully, under the circumstances, his PhD supervisor was Higgs (yes, the one of boson fame)!
I've given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people. I am surprised he didn't start with:
"I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this."
I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.
If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.
Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.
This is for the scientific community. The scientific method is that all results should be scrutinized, tested and verified. If you want a 2-3 minute explanation. Wait for CNN.
I don't really buy that in this case. It's still high level and summarized and no one is verifying or scrutinizing anything based on that presentation alone.
NASA handles these kinds of announcements well, but then they also announce cyanide-based life. So.
When scientists present results to scientists, they present in a scientific way. I.e. methods, analysis, etc. There is no way a scientist can get by with just a short summary when talking to fellow researchers... it's just not how science is done.
I understand that. I don't understand why announcements of this significance are done like this.
Its like NASA landing on the moon without video and presenting geology findings based on the rocks. Sod that. The people want to see VIDEO! They want to live the moment. I thought this could be one of those moments where something significant was discovered which I may be asked about in many years time. A "this changes everything moment." The way it is presented though may be just that for scientists. For everyone else though.. who cares when the announcement is this technical.
Surely I wasn't the only person wondering if we are not closer to the hover board? That would have been a nice way to start.
Screenshot of hoverboard
"For the leymens tuning in. Our discovery means this is / is not closer to being made."
This isn't an announcement. There's no press. This is CERN doing us a courtesy and letting the public see a presentation they were going to give anyway.
Even the Guardian reporter has admitted that it goes over her head. Heck, I'm doing a Master's in condensed-matter physics and I don't understand much of the jargon.
What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits. CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they're talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.
The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say 'bb') and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let's say).
All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating "expected" curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, "expected" vs. "actual", so that you can compare them.
On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what's actually seen and what the statistical "counting" errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to "subtract out the noise" to see the signal more clearly.
I feel like the statistics going on here is almost as fascinating as the physics. Well, they technically are the same, but so intriguing to see people hooping and hollering at 5.0 sigma.
The ATLAS lady has what I think must be the worst set of powerpoint slides I've ever seen. Epically bad. Pretty amazing.
Even if you are working at CERN running the equipment, there's no way you could absorb all the info on each of those slides in the 10 to 15 seconds she shows them. They might as well have pictures of frolicking kittens on them.
Seems like a lot of it is just comparing more recent data to last years data. I'm sure they have spent plenty of time looking at last years data, so they can probably understand quite a bit at this pace.
This, unfortunately, is not even that bad when compared to the litany of bad, overloaded, eye-scorching powerpoint presentation I usually sit through in research group meetings, conferences, and more. Maybe all intro courses in STEM should include a course on communicative design.
Clearly you don't understand how much time pressure these people are under. If you were at CERN you would realize how intense the atmosphere has been in the past 2 weeks.
Also, focus on the content - if you're caring so much about the presentation, then you probably don't understand enough of the physics to comment on the content.
That'll happen, someone will explain it in "layman" terms about why/how this is fundamentally important. That's probably not going to be done at this announcement though, but hopefully in the aftermath by the media reporting on the announcement.
I am a particle physicist. The most interesting point of this announcement for me is that this is a confirmation of predictions of a very exotic particle.
The properties of subatomic particles include something called 'spin' - that's a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we've discovered; it's completely unlike anything that we've seen up until now.
That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we're in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.
That's why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It's an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.
(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been much more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)
There will be time for popularization for the laymen. It is not now. It's more important that the knowledge be transmitted accurately and completely, than it is to give a reader's digest for the laymen. We'll have to wait until all of the discovered information is processed, and then summarized. Making a summary early on in the discovery is likely to contain errors. It's also better handled by people other than physicists working on the project.
The standard model predicted it and it was found. That's a major win for the standard model, which is the result of many years of theoretical work, as said above - it was able to predict something completely new, something that was never observed before.
I'm not deep enough in the field to see what questions could be answered, and we will see, but it's always a good thing to be able to rely on your model of the world.
So - this is not about other questions in the first place, it's about the validity of the standard model. We can continue from there.
(A common title for talks etc is "Physics beyond the Standard Model".)
I'm curious what you mean by "pretty much." Did the Standard Model predict 125 GeV?
I'm asking because I've seen a few casual descriptions of this Higgs as a "lightweight." I'm assuming that means it's not as heavy as expected?
EDIT: "If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV)."
This isn't exactly my field, but as I understand it a Higgs of 125GeV implies a supersymmetric model with relatively light squarks and no excitingly novel features. Basically, a small adjustment to the standard model that allows for one more family of heavy quarks and not much else.
I am just a hobbyist, but as i understand it, 5.0 sigma is just the probability of the result being bogus. So 5 sigma is very high probability, something like one in 1.4 million. i.e. the chances of the result being wrong is one in 1.4 mil. 4.9 sigma will mean lesser probability, but i am not sure by exactly how much will that 1.4 mil number reduce.
It's possible to combine the data and get a higer significance. AFAIK, Officially, CERN doesn't do these combinations, but independent people do. See here:
Those two detectors are attached to the same accelerator, right? My guess is they don't because they cannot guarantee the results to be independent from each other?
This paper combines different channels from CMS, but not CMS and ATLAS.
"In this Letter, we report on the combination of Higgs boson searches carried out in proton-proton collisions at
Sqrt[s] = 7 TeV using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC.
...
Combined results are reported from searches for the SM Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions at Sqrt[s] = 7TeV in five Higgs boson decay modes: gg, bb, tt, WW, and ZZ."
Short answer: They discovered a particle which looks like a Higgs Boson.
They are talking about the standard model Higgs, which is the result of a specific way to break electroweak symmetry. A consequence is, that there are quite well understood predictions from this how the cross sections and branching ratios should look like. And on the current level of statistical significance it looks like a standard model Higgs.
On the other hand, there are so called effective field theories, that is you can start from a complicated theory and derive a simpler theory from it, which behaves the same in some aspects (for example at low energies).
So the more exact answer is probably that now a theory has to contain a Higgs boson in the appropriate limit.
In December 2000, Hawking bet Gordon Kane $100 that the Higgs Boson will be discovered at the Fermilab Tevatron.
Since the funding dried up for the Tevatron and the first hints for the discovery of the Higgs boson come from LHC we can conclude that Hawking won the bet and Kane will be the one paying up.
The error bars on the mass range are typically just 1 sigma, so there's considerable overlap between the two figures (the Atlas figure is within the 95% confidence interval for the CMS figure, for example).
Designer sits in coffee shop wearing his hipster outfit drinking his hipster coffee, writing incensed blog post about the outrages of Comic Sans.
Physicist makes presentation on what is clearly a state-of-the-art advancement in the progress of high-energy particle physics (and thus, physics) to a world-wide community, live, and NOT a fuck was given as to what font is used. :P
Thank you! It seems very few people understand the immense pressure and intense atmosphere that surrounds work like this, especially in culminating times like these.
Fabiola would likely rather spend her time improving the quality of her analysis, which is undeniably more valuable to the scientific community than agonizing over the font.
I have a 5 sigma level of confidence it was either Chalkboard or Comic Sans. We'll need a real designer to chime in to present their own numerical analysis.
Probably because the guy's presentation style is terrible, rushed, and his slides are a graphical disaster. He jumps from overload to overload, connecting with "obviously" and "as you can see". There is no overview, nothing connecting the endless series of slides. Everyone in the room is just waiting for the Higgs announcement.
I gather that they wanted to include last minute data, but given that they're livestreaming this and tons of people are watching, it was a huge chance to get a decent presentation done that would at least highlight the important results clearly rather than having them be throwaway lines between jargon.
224 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] thread"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]
source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report
ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264
Western discrimination is firmly in place there.
That is referring to production costs for the calorimeter, which is part of the ATLAS detector, (it picks up neutral particles IIRC.)
It doesn't refer to differentiating between work done by white people and non white people actually at CERN, which is what you seem to be implying?
"1the western equivalent value is 1'390 kCHF. 2the western equivalent value is 5'450 kCHF"
http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost...
It is not from the ATLAS experiment, but of another LHC experiment -- but still within the organisation of CERN.
The comment/quote is about evaluating people -- ie. by the simplest budgeting metric, labour cost (with obvious consequences for peer evaluation). It has nothing to do with colour but with peer evaluation of equivalent work, differentiated according eastern or western membership.
edit: unable to reply to the comment below. But I can cite concrete case(s) in which work was performed in Geneva by both eastern and western member within the same group. China isn't a memberstate anyway.
There's no big conspiracy here by CERN, just different wages in different countries.
The cited document (did all the downvoters also take their time and actually read the TDRs and papers in detail??? Or are they just ignorant sheep?) is a rare case of putting the facts on the ground down in a written and approved document, despite being taboo in an organisation touting "equal opportunities" and such policies.
No downvotes will change the situation I warn about above, quite to the contrary: may my previous comment serve as a warning to all non-westerners at CERN for the time being.
The moment one experiences the consequences of such discrimination, things get far more real than an absurd conclusion you are alluding to.
Would you think, that this evaluation scheme has any consequences to peer evaluation within the same group? [aside from the inherent bias, not even mentioning all the other loopholes with categorisations such as Scottish (read western) MC-EST/PhD etc.]
...inconvenient truth?
What makes it even worse, is that the worse comment is actually factual.
edit: Sound is working now!
It is not that difficult to setup the whole streaming with lots of free and open source solutions available today. It's just a good means to a useful end.
EDITS:
Just as I suspected, it's using a Media Server Streaming Server. "rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/"
It is also automatically streaming corresponding quality depending on the user's bandwidth.
So far, I haven't found a decent way to do that in HTML5 without having to encode multiple video-streams for multiple bitrates.Unfortunately I was unable to listen in due to being on a mobile device....
To Flash or not is probably the least significant decision anyone at CERN makes.
Does anyone have something like a buffered stream on a delay so I can be sure I don't miss anything, even if I have to stop to buffer more of the stream?
I have a vanilla, chrome browser, and a fairly recent VLC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jul/04/higgs-bos...
If that's choppy, save it to disk with rtmpdump: rtmpdump -v -o cern1_900.flv -r rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900
edit: alternate bitrates (thanks to Brajeshwar): cern1_900 cern1_600 cern1_300
Didn't he practice this before? Can't he just tell us what he wants to tell us, and skip over the rest?
He could have practiced this 6 months ago.
Aaaand... at this very second he's starting on the new stuff, I think.
Nobel prizes all round!
Edit: “Evidence” usually means a 3-sigma signal, which existed last December, “Proof” would be a better way to describe a 5+ sigma signal, if that’s what the combined CMS/ATLAS data shows - http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4809
That corresponds to 99.99994% confidence on a standard null hypothesis test, and is the usual threshold in physics for considering something proven.
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8752/standard-dev...
It means a statistically very very significant number of physicists are getting laid tonight, around the world. ;)
For example, in CS we use a whole bunch of words like "string", "thread", "class", "type", "object", "arrow", "map" and "macro" to denote CS-specific concepts related at best tangentially to the words' original meanings. On the other hand, biology seems to prefer to come up with new words for their technical terminology.
I wonder if this is a product of different cultures or something like that.
Nuts are worse. According botanists, peanuts, cashews, macadamias, pistachios, walnuts, almonds, pecans, pine-nuts and Brazil nuts are not nuts. According to most lay-people, though, botanists are nuts.
They are.
Computer science people work in other areas, such as setting up and running the data collection and on-line processing. (A professor told us many interesting stories about the many Unix servers they build and the bugs they created..)
my understanding is that the computer engineers at CERN are mostly tasked with IT work, the rest (including DAQ software/firmware, network code, distributed+realtime data processing, etc) is made by the physicists.
Two of the really great text books in the field are by physicists,
1) 'Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms' by David Mackay, a physics professor at Cambridge. Perhaps the most readable and enjoyable text book I own. Certainly up there.
2) 'Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning' by Chris Bishop, now a director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge but formerly a physicist. Delightfully, under the circumstances, his PhD supervisor was Higgs (yes, the one of boson fame)!
"I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this."
I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.
If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.
Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.
NASA handles these kinds of announcements well, but then they also announce cyanide-based life. So.
Its like NASA landing on the moon without video and presenting geology findings based on the rocks. Sod that. The people want to see VIDEO! They want to live the moment. I thought this could be one of those moments where something significant was discovered which I may be asked about in many years time. A "this changes everything moment." The way it is presented though may be just that for scientists. For everyone else though.. who cares when the announcement is this technical.
Surely I wasn't the only person wondering if we are not closer to the hover board? That would have been a nice way to start.
Screenshot of hoverboard "For the leymens tuning in. Our discovery means this is / is not closer to being made."
Ah ok, you're trolling.
PS - it's "laymen", not "leymens".
What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits. CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they're talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.
The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say 'bb') and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let's say).
All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating "expected" curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, "expected" vs. "actual", so that you can compare them.
On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what's actually seen and what the statistical "counting" errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to "subtract out the noise" to see the signal more clearly.
"We are 99.999995% sure we found it!"
Even if you are working at CERN running the equipment, there's no way you could absorb all the info on each of those slides in the 10 to 15 seconds she shows them. They might as well have pictures of frolicking kittens on them.
Also, focus on the content - if you're caring so much about the presentation, then you probably don't understand enough of the physics to comment on the content.
The worst powerpoint presentations are ones that are content-free - this one could be accused of too much content.
The properties of subatomic particles include something called 'spin' - that's a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we've discovered; it's completely unlike anything that we've seen up until now.
That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we're in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.
That's why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It's an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.
(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been much more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)
What is the significance of discovering a particle without a spin?
Does this answer some questions about black matter, anti matter, big bang etc.
Then it would be interesting thing for us, laymen.
So - this is not about other questions in the first place, it's about the validity of the standard model. We can continue from there. (A common title for talks etc is "Physics beyond the Standard Model".)
I'm asking because I've seen a few casual descriptions of this Higgs as a "lightweight." I'm assuming that means it's not as heavy as expected?
EDIT: "If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV)."
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/H/Higgs_boson.html
Atlas comes in at ~126.5 GeV with 5.0σ. That would be a confirmed discovery!
Interesting that Atlas' mass is outside CMS's confidence range, though Atlas didn't have a range on theirs.
Clarification:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.ht...
http://blog.vixra.org/
"In this Letter, we report on the combination of Higgs boson searches carried out in proton-proton collisions at Sqrt[s] = 7 TeV using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the LHC. ... Combined results are reported from searches for the SM Higgs boson in proton-proton collisions at Sqrt[s] = 7TeV in five Higgs boson decay modes: gg, bb, tt, WW, and ZZ."
They are talking about the standard model Higgs, which is the result of a specific way to break electroweak symmetry. A consequence is, that there are quite well understood predictions from this how the cross sections and branching ratios should look like. And on the current level of statistical significance it looks like a standard model Higgs.
On the other hand, there are so called effective field theories, that is you can start from a complicated theory and derive a simpler theory from it, which behaves the same in some aspects (for example at low energies).
So the more exact answer is probably that now a theory has to contain a Higgs boson in the appropriate limit.
Since the funding dried up for the Tevatron and the first hints for the discovery of the Higgs boson come from LHC we can conclude that Hawking won the bet and Kane will be the one paying up.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18708626
Since this is apparently "only seen" through the Monte Carlo analysis I suppose they haven't seen one specific particle decay with it, I suppose?!
Designer sits in coffee shop wearing his hipster outfit drinking his hipster coffee, writing incensed blog post about the outrages of Comic Sans.
Physicist makes presentation on what is clearly a state-of-the-art advancement in the progress of high-energy particle physics (and thus, physics) to a world-wide community, live, and NOT a fuck was given as to what font is used. :P
Much respect to the latter folks.
Fabiola would likely rather spend her time improving the quality of her analysis, which is undeniably more valuable to the scientific community than agonizing over the font.
I'm not exactly sure how you'd expect some sort of tldr; of potentially one of the most important scientific announcements of the last 100 years.
I gather that they wanted to include last minute data, but given that they're livestreaming this and tons of people are watching, it was a huge chance to get a decent presentation done that would at least highlight the important results clearly rather than having them be throwaway lines between jargon.