jack63
July 11, 2012, 11:37pm
17
<p>It’s great that Michigan men and woman played a big role in this discovery. The bet with Hawking is cool and worth sharing. I’m not convinced this is real yet though. </p>
<p>Here are some articles worth reading </p>
<p><a href=“http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/[/url] ”>http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/</a> ; (3rd article down)</p>
<p>From this article…</p>
<p>
“So - if we can find a particle whose mass matches what we predict, and it has the correct properties for a mass-field exchange particle, then we can infer that the Higgs’ field is real, and is the cause of mass”? There are two thing we need to show to conclude that we’ve found the mediator of the Higgs’ field. There needs to be a particle with the right mass, and it needs to have the properties of a mass-mediator. What we’ve got right now is an observation that yes, there is a particle at the mass we’d expect for a Higgs’. But we don’t have observations yet of any properties of the particle other than its mass. Assuming the standard model is right, the odds of finding another particle with that mass is damned unlikely, but the standard model could be wrong. It’s not likely at this point, but people like to be careful. So at this point, to be precise, we’ve observed a Higgs’-like particle - a particle that according to all of the observations we’ve made so far appears to be a Higgs’; but until we observe some properties other than mass, we can’t be absolutely certain that it’s a Higgs’.
</p>
<p>Another article…</p>
<p>[Physics</a> Buzz: Does 5-sigma = discovery?](<a href=“PhysicsCentral ”>PhysicsCentral )</p>
<p>From the article…</p>
<p>
Remember when neutrinos were supposedly traveling faster than light late last year? That result reached a six-sigma level of confidence – even higher than the 5-sigma level convention required for new particle discoveries. But we learned earlier this year that neutrinos indeed obey the universal speed limit, so what went wrong?</p>
<p>Most crucially, the faster-than-light neutrino experiment suffered from a systematic error that affected all of the data; faulty cables consistently gave the researchers bad readings. No matter how many times physicists repeated the experiments, they would get the same yet inaccurate results.
</p>
<p>My gut is that there is something wrong with the standard model, rather than this being a systematic error. Just saying, I’d hold up paying the $100.</p>