Posted on 07/03/2012 10:58:39 AM PDT by lbryce
Full Title:God Particle is 'Found': Scientists at Cern Expected to Announce on Wednesday Higgs Boson Particle Has Been Discovered
Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed.
Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.
Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland.
The management at Cern want the two teams of scientists to reach the 'five sigma' level of certainty with their results - so they are 99.99995 per cent sure - such is the significance of the results.
He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'
The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass.
Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.
The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons – sub-atomic particles – together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Oopsilon?
Wow… something that not only kept its job, but was "created" during the Obama Depression.
Wow, found at a press conference that occurs in the future. This is good stuff! I wonder if that's the same particle I spotted on Craigslist (they won't return my calls).
And just think, I could have discovered it and this could have been named after me if I hadn't decided to be a trash collector for the city.
There was a gal by the name of Higganbothom in my high school class. She had big bosons, but wasn’t particularly attractive.
But I was expecting an Earth shattering KABOOM.
“so they are 99.99995 per cent sure”
I’m surmising, given time, that the .00005% will be proven correct.
Not exactly like Johnny Ringo thought it would turn out.
Now, a jillion dollars later, will this yield a 300 MPG carburetor? Or maybe some way to cut down on my power bill? A new kind of super-insulation?
Or just more pi$$ed away so some egghead can have a footnote in a dry, dudty book nobody will read?
Ya, I feel the same way about the ISS - a massive waste of money....
Do You ?
The Higgs boson is often referred to as "the God particle" by the media, after the title of Leon Lederman's popular science book on particle physics, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?Lederman is a scientist. But you're right. It's mostly journalists who call it that these days.Lederman said he gave it the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive," but jokingly added that a second reason was because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."
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