This one from xkcd is very apposite!
“It could have been another particle not inconsistent with the Higgs boson – or something like it. And it’s really small” – cartoon by xkcd/1437
Posts Tagged ‘Higgs Boson’
XKCD captures the spirit of CERN
October 22, 2014The end of the Universe is nigh and getting closer
December 16, 2013This is beyond Rapture.
Not just the end of our world, but the end of the entire Universe.
It could happen tomorrow or many billion years later. It may not be the classic Big Crunch which will negate the Big Bang but it could be a phase transition which will cause the entire Universe and all its galaxies and all their suns and all their planets to collapse in on themselves.
Collapse of the universe is closer than ever before
Journal of High Energy Physics: Standard Model Vacuum Stability and Weyl Consistency Conditions, Authors: Oleg Antipin, Marc Gillioz, Jens Grund, Esben Mølgaard, Francesco Sannino (CP3 – Origins and DIAS). arXiv:1306.3234 arxiv.org/abs/1306.3234
PhysOrg: Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction – and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.
Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything – every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy – will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
This violent process is called a phase transition and is very similar to what happens when, for example water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its magnetization. The phase transition in the universe will happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value results in lower energy and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass, that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will be pulled together and form supermassive centers.
“Many theories and calculations predict such a phase transition– but there have been some uncertainties in the previous calculations. Now we have performed more precise calculations, and we see two things: Yes, the universe will probably collapse, and: A collapse is even more likely than the old calculations predicted”, says Jens Frederik Colding Krog …….
The theory of phase transition is not the only theory predicting a collapse of the universe. Also the so-called Big Crunch theory is in play. This theory is based on the Big Bang; the formation of the universe. After the Big Bang all material was ejected into the universe from one small area, and this expansion is still happening. At some point, however, the expansion will stop and all the material will again begin to attract each other and eventually merge into a small area again. This is called the Big Crunch.
“The latest research shows that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, so there is no reason to expect a collapse from cosmological observations. Thus it will probably not be Big Crunch that causes the universe to collapse”, says Jens Frederik Colding Krog.
Although the new calculations predict that a collapse is now more likely than ever before, it is actually also possible, that it will not happen at all ….
Oh Well! No need to stock up anything just yet. No real possibility of some Universal-Engineering to put off the evil day.
I’ll just get more warm clothes for the global cooling that is happening!!
2012 Nobel prize speculations begin
September 12, 2012UPDATE – 8th October
(The Physiology / Medicine awards are to be announced today)
The 2012 Thomson Reuters predictions are here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/19/idUS36510+19-Sep-2012+HUG20120919
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Every year around this time with about a month to go before the awards are announced the predictions and speculation begin about potential Nobel prize laureates. I don’t believe there is as much lobbying / marketing involved in the Nobel speculations as for the Oscars – but certainly some institutions and laboratories do try – much earlier in the year – to get some appropriate publicity for “their candidate”. This year the CERN publicity machine – which made much ado about their discovery – or not – of the Higgs boson – has been in full swing. Perhaps the hype was just to ensure funding but I am sure the possibility of a Nobel was not very far from their thoughts.
The prize awarding institutions have set the following dates for their announcements of 2012 prize decisions:
PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE– Monday 8 October, 11:30 a.m. at the earliest
PHYSICS – Tuesday 9 October, 11:45 a.m. at the earliest
CHEMISTRY – Wednesday 10 October, 11:45 at the earliest
PEACE – Friday 12 October, 11:00 a.m.
ECONOMIC SCIENCES – Monday 15 October, 1:00 p.m. at the earliest
LITERATURE – The date will be set later
The Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates will probably be announced in another 10 days or so.
Each year, Thomson Reuters uses data from its research solution, Web of Knowledge™, to quantitatively determine the most influential researchers in the Nobel categories of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. Based on a thorough review of citations to their works, the company names these high-impact researchers as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates and predicts them to be Nobel Prize winners, either this year or in the near future.
Thomson Reuters is the only organization to use quantitative data to make annual predictions of Nobel Prize winners. Since 2002, 21 Citation Laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
A few of the early predictions are out in the blogosphere:
Higgs Boson may not have been found after all. Just a PR exercise?
July 12, 2012Is this some new way to ensure that funding continues?
First some very high profile publicity to announce some fantastic new discovery – which then gradually gets debunked over the next few months but at a much lower level of interest. But the initial high-profile announcements probably help to maintain the perceptions necessary to ensure funding. The low profile debunking does not register. It seems to be getting to be a habit for CERN.
Last September the CERN PR apparatus went into overdrive with the announcements that FTL neutrinos may have been found. FTL particles were announced with great fanfare only to be debunked later. And by November the story had died but the publicity had no doubt helped to bolster the perception that CERN is important.
A few days ago the CERN PR operations went into full swing. Advance warnings of an “Important Announcement” were disseminated widely. Background information was spread to all the media. Physicists around the world were interviewed about what the Higgs Boson was and what the discovery would mean. It was not long before the new “discovery” was being hailed as “the most important scientific discovery of the 21st Century, and on par with Copernicus’s discovery that the sun is the center of our solar system”. And now just one week later it appears that whatever was found may not be the Higgs Boson and may not even be a separate particle at all.
I am naturally cynical about the extravagant trappings that sometimes surround “big science” but lately CERN’s PR seems more impressive than any physics they do:
CERN PR in action: Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General (C), Fabiola Gianotti, ATLAS experiment spokesperson (L), and Joe Incandela, a spokesman of the CMS experiment, look at a screen during a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin near Geneva July 4, 2012. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
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