Thank you The Bad Astronomer for once again explaining things for those of us that chose to spend our school years soaking brain cells in ethanol.

*burp*

//Pre-emptive

Well.. whata ya kno....I prefer Higgs fermions instead.

Would that make it the Devil particle?

WhyteRaven74: alwaysjaded: Thank you The Bad Astronomer for once again explaining things for those of us that chose to spend our school years soaking brain cells in ethanol.

Stephen Hawking did the same thing as an undergrad.

And look at what happened to him.

/ I'll show myself out

AverageAmericanGuy: Now that we've found the Higgs boson, perhaps we can focus some of our energy into solving the education gap.

To be fair, CERN is in Europe, so we should expect Europeans to be overrepresented.

wildcardjack: What can we do with this information?

We don't know yet. Keep in mind, when Relativity was new, we didn't even know about the existence of the atomic nucleus, so the very idea of things like nuclear reactions weren't even able to be contemplated. But the products of Relativity defined the 20th century more than any other discovery.

Pure research leads practical applications by decades, sometimes longer (Newtonian gravity/mechanics predicted orbital rockets centuries before anybody actually tried).

Whie in Amerka we're still debating evolution, treating women like chattel, homeschooling kids to think Jeebus lived with the dinosaurs, think healthcare for all is socialzims, the financial sector can police itself, taxes are too high (they're the lowest in 60 years), and our crumbling infrastructure is Obama's fault.

We couldn't have built the LHC (let alone HSR) because we can't do anything requiring long term planning. The rest of the world is passing us by while the forces of conservative thought rally in their triumphs of willful ignorance.

OOoohh, when can I 3D print my own Higgs bosons and build a private space station with them?

WhyteRaven74: Actually roughly half of the high energy physicists in the entire world are involved either directly or just one step removed from the LHC.

And we still would expect more Europeans to be physically present in Europe. I'm not saying that there isn't a global education gap, but I would argue that this one data point probably isn't a good one to draw a line from.

Thanks Phil
Now wheres our light sabres or warp engines?

It's time that you realize that we already have the capability to tantilize or tease this particle and are already able to control mass within an atom. Now when you see something and a minute later it dissapeared, you will know what has happened. A item as heavy as a car can be lifted up with one finger. Also we will be able to control time as well as mass, so you may be here in the present at one moment and the next thing you know a dinasour will be chasing you up a tree for it's next meal....good luck with your new science.

apachevoyeur: The Bad Astronomer is a spotlight seeking asshole. Met him at SXSW. Total douchebag.

but you're not a spotlight seeking asshole for posting this, are you?

skodabunny: I'm confused by this passage , I'm not sure how to interpret it. If the Higgs can only survive for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, does this mean the mass of electrons, etc is continually being refreshed with these coming into and out of existence the whole time, like virtual particles?

Quantum mechanics gets weird about the idea of "existence". It's not exactly like virtual particles, but it's the same idea. Let's use a different example- we have a photon. At one end, we have an electron jumping down an energy state to emit the photon. At the other end, we have an electron absorbing the photon and jumping up an energy state.

In between those two points, does the photon exist? With QM, it boils down to, "It depends how you describe the system."

You can describe the system, not as photon emission, but as entanglement between two electrons. The photon mediates the interaction, but we don't actually need the photon in the system.

The Higgs is similar. It's a particle that mediates the interaction between massive particles and the Higgs field. If we aren't the particle and we aren't the field, the Higgs basically doesn't exist in any practical sense. But, when we whack massive particles together hard enough, we can actually create a free Higgs particle. But Higgs particles, like BDSM enthusiasts, don't want to be free. So the Higgs particle rapidly decays into a tell-tale signature that we can look for.

Valiente:
Hell of a post for July 4, dude. What are you, stealth Canadian?

What's to celebrate today? The grand marketing of the Great Lie that we are a free people? Tell that to gay people who are denied access to existing civil law contracts and benefits while others rally in that withholding of basic equality and liberty.

We've replaced the aristocracy of intergenerational noble birth with the aristocracy of intergenerational wealth. We are still ruled by the top 1% who have theirs and to hell with everyone else.