Long-sought 'God Particle' cornered

[punkypink (imported)]

Wait, so they may have seen it? Like, not 100% sure, but they think they might have, like if you're chasing an elusive rare animal species, and you see a glimpse of it, but not captured it fully on camera yet?

Well that is actually exciting!

[Prudence (imported)]

Bear in mind that with four basic forces - gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force and nuclear weak force. That means there are really four sets of particles and those particles and fields (that the particles cause) are many and varied. Gravity is a force like the force you feel in two magnets. Certain electron configurations generate an electromagnetic field. The Higgs Boson generates a Higgs Field that is responsible for causing what we call mass and mass generates gravity.

That's the

best explanation of it I've seen yet. Thanks for sharing it with us!

[A-1 (imported)]

It has been found. It is running for U.S. President and it's name is NEWT... Every scientist who is told about Newt and his candidacy always says...

OH GOD!

[Riverwind (imported)]

Keep your political comments in the political section, all Newts aside, this is about god, er the god particle not god complexes.

River

[BossTamsin (imported)]

Wait, so they may have seen it? Like, not 100% sure, but they think they might have, like if you're chasing an elusive rare animal species, and you see a glimpse of it, but not captured it fully on camera yet?

Well that is actually exciting!

In some ways, essentially yes.

At least as I understand it, they have some traces which seem to show the results they were expecting, should the Higgs boson be in the expected (115-140GeV) range, but either not enough of them yet, or the traces aren't conclusive enough to rule out the decay products as having come from a different source.

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but what they're doing is largely akin to recreating what happened to one specific vehicle in a 10,000 car demolition derby based upon the skid marks on the track. When the particle beams collide, the amount of energy released briefly creates all number of rare and exotic particles which don't normally like to exist in the world as it is now. Those particles only wind up existing for microscopic fractions of a second before decaying into other particles, which then may decay into others. They track the traces those particles leave behind, and based upon how they acted (mass, charge, speed, how long they lasted, etc), and what they decayed into, determine what they were. Because of how much raw data is involved in each test, and their requirements for absolute certainty in the result, this will take some time before they can point to even one trace which definitely must have been a naked Higgs boson. They need to have a number of traces of the right energy levels, decaying into just the right by-products, in a manner that cannot be explained by any other particle.

So, for anyone figuring that the LHC managing to create a Higgs boson will doom the world... there's a good chance they've already created one, and just haven't found out about it yet. (Of course, if Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is in full force, you can now be paranoid about the idea that while the tests have been run and the particle possibly created, until someone reads the data and forces the universe to retroactively decide what happened we're all good. Schrödinger's humans, anyone?)

As a side note, I've had the happy opportunity to actually tour a small particle accelerator (TRIUMF, at UBC,) and found it an amazing experience.

[punkypink (imported)]

It's amazing stuff. Although I do remember reading somewhere that in quantum mechanics, just the act of observing what happens, causes reality to change. Will that be a factor?

[Dave (imported)]

It's amazing stuff. Although I do remember reading somewhere that in quantum mechanics, just the act of observing what happens, causes reality to change. Will that be a factor?

I don't know how the act of observing figures in. Or the Heisenberg principle figures in. I would need to think hard on those points and right now I need sugar and caffeine

IEUNUCH's metaphor about the the skid marks in a car wreck is good metaphor for the analytical work that has to be done from the raw data.

[Slammr (imported)]

It's amazing stuff. Although I do remember reading somewhere that in quantum mechanics, just the act of observing what happens, causes reality to change. Will that be a factor?

It's not so much that measurement (observing) causes reality to change on the quantum level, there is no reality without observation. A particle, an electron for instance, only exists as a probability wave until it is observed. If that there is no reality on the quantum level until a measurement is made blows your mind, don't feel bad. Even Einstein resisted this idea, but it has consistently been proved through experimentation.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principal says that one can never know both the location and velocity of a particle. If one measures its location, one cannot know its velocity, while if one knows its velocity, one cannot know its location. A hydrogen atom consists of one proton and one electron, but that electron isn't a single electron whirling around the nucleus, as atoms were pictured when I was a kid. It exists as an electron cloud of possibilities until it is measured.

Albert Einstein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein), himself one of the founders of quantum theory, disliked this loss of determinism in measurement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr-Einstein_debates). (A view paraphrased as "God does not play dice with the universe.") Einstein held that there should be a local hidden variable theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_hidd ... ble_theory) underlying quantum mechanics and that, consequently, the present theory was incomplete. He produced a series of objections to the theory, the most famous of which has become known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein-P ... en_paradox). John Bell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell) showed that the EPR paradox led to experimentally testable differences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem) between quantum mechanics and local realistic theories. Experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments) have been performed confirming the accuracy of quantum mechanics, thus demonstrating that the physical world cannot be described by local realistic theories.[40] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_me ... te_note-39) The Bohr-Einstein debates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr-Einstein_debates) provide a vibrant critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation from an epistemological (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological) point of view.

The Everett many-worlds interpretation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_ma ... rpretation), formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a multiverse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse) composed of mostly independent parallel universes.[41] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_me ... te_note-40) This is not accomplished by introducing some new axiom to quantum mechanics, but on the contrary by removing the axiom of the collapse of the wave packet: All the possible consistent states of the measured system and the measuring apparatus (including the observer) are present in a real physical (not just formally mathematical, as in other interpretations) quantum superposition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition). Such a superposition of consistent state combinations of different systems is called an entangled state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entangled_state). While the multiverse is deterministic, we perceive non-deterministic behavior governed by probabilities, because we can observe only the universe, i.e. the consistent state contribution to the mentioned superposition, we inhabit. Everett's interpretation is perfectly consistent with John Bell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell)'s experiments and makes them intuitively understandable. However, according to the theory of quantum decoherence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence), the parallel universes will never be accessible to us. This inaccessibility can be understood as follows: Once a measurement is done, the measured system becomes entangled (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement) with both the physicist who measured it and a huge number of other particles, some of which are photons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon) flying away towards the other end of the universe; in order to prove that the wave function did not collapse one would have to bring all these particles back and measure them again, together with the system that was measured originally. This is completely impractical, but even if one could theoretically do this, it would destroy any evidence that the original measurement took place (including the physicist's memory).

In 1925, following pioneering work with Hendrik Kramers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Kramers), Heisenberg developed matrix mechanics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics), which replaced the ad-hoc old quantum theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_quantum_theory) with modern quantum mechanics. The central assumption was that the classical concept of motion does not fit at the quantum level, and that electrons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrons) in an atom did not travel on sharply defined orbits. Rather, the motion was smeared out in a strange way: the Fourier transform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform) of time only involving those frequencies that could be seen in quantum jumps.

It's not just that the physical restrictions of our measuring devices prevent us from measuring both the position and velocity of an electron, it's that an electron never possesses both in the manner we would think from a classical concept of motion. In other words, one cannot think of an electron as a ball traveling on a particular path.

[A-1 (imported)]

Keep your political comments in the political section, all Newts aside, this is about god, er the god particle not god complexes.

River

Godparticle, Demigod, they are both descriptions of some very small things...

[Dave (imported)]

Einstein knew that his theory of relativity only described large scale effects and he read and understood the papers on Quantum Mechanics. That's where that famous quote about

"God does not play dice with the universe

" comes from.

Quantum Mechanics is all probability with particles and waves that represent the same thing. There are a bunch of experiments with light (reflection, refraction, Interference, diffraction, polarization and photoelectrics) that highlight that photons are both waves and particles.

Quantum mechanics is really not intuitively obvious. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and this wave-particle duality are two good examples.

The hardest subject in Chemical Engineering is Thermodynamics and it is completely obvious to anyone as a three or four broad principles. I can explain these with ease and the mathematically averse people understand them.

But Quantum Mechanics is not plain or obvious. It is that much harder in both the mathematics and the theories. There are no big, broad principles to guide a mind, just tiny seemingly contradictory and tedious details. don't feel bad about looking at these subjects and shaking your head. Everyone who comes to quantum mechanics does that.