Large Hardon Collider

[Kaylia]

Jupiter, Saturn...same shit.


[edit]
Actually, they both have hexagon. It's the same shit afterall.


[edit2]

Apparently, this kind of shape isn't uncommon in fluid dynamics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eH8d...yer_embedded#!

I'm still glad it wasn't common in my exam though.

[Max™]

http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_resear...eid_saturn.jpg

http://lasp.colorado.edu/~bagenal/37...turn_npole.jpg
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~bagenal/37...tPlanets3.html

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi...12/hexagon.jpg
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...aturn-hexagon/

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/files/PIA...full_movie.gif


Incidentally: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...ttles-delayed/

The aging space shuttle fleet was granted a few more months of life today. NASA decided to postpone the last two flights due to delays with the missions’ hardware.
The next launch, STS-133, was pushed from Sept. 16 to Nov. 1. The final shuttle launch, STS-134, was moved from late November 2010 to Feb. 26, 2011.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...#ixzz0sybyGPOI

[Kaylia]

The proton just shrinked?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture09250.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/1007....2010.337.html

Published online 7 July 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.337

News

The proton shrinks in size
Tiny change in radius has huge implications.

Geoff Brumfiel


Measurements with lasers have revealed that the proton may be a touch smaller than predicted by current theories.
PSI / F. ReiserThe proton seems to be 0.00000000000003 millimetres smaller than researchers previously thought, according to work published in today's issue of Nature1.

The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."

Protons are among the most common particles out there. Together with their neutral counterparts, neutrons, they form the nuclei of every atom in the Universe. But despite its everday appearance, the proton remains something of a mystery to nuclear physicists, says Randolf Pohl, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and an author on the Nature paper. "We don't understand a lot of its internal structure," he says.

From afar, the proton looks like a small point of positive charge, but on much closer inspection, the particle is more complex. Each proton is made of smaller fundamental particles called quarks, and that means its charge is roughly spread throughout a spherical area.

Physicists can measure the size of the proton by watching as an electron interacts with a proton. A single electron orbiting a proton can occupy only certain, discrete energy levels, which are described by the laws of quantum mechanics. Some of these energy levels depend in part on the size of the proton, and since the 1960s physicists have made hundreds of measurements of the proton's size with staggering accuracy. The most recent estimates, made by Sick using previous data, put the radius of the proton at around 0.8768 femtometres (1 femtometre = 10-15 metres).

Small wonder
Pohl and his team have a come up with a smaller number by using a cousin of the electron, known as the muon. Muons are about 200 times heavier than electrons, making them more sensitive to the proton's size. To measure the proton radius using the muon, Pohl and his colleagues fired muons from a particle accelerator at a cloud of hydrogen. Hydrogen nuclei each consist of a single proton, orbited by an electron. Sometimes a muon replaces an electron and orbits around a proton. Using lasers, the team measured relevant muonic energy levels with extremely high accuracy and found that the proton was around 4% smaller than previously thought.

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That might not sound like much, but the difference is so far from previous measurements that the researchers actually missed it the first two times they ran the experiment in 2003 and 2007. "We thought that our laser system was not good enough," Pohl says. In 2009, they looked beyond the narrow range in which they expected to see the proton radius and saw an unmistakable signal.

"What gives? I don't know," says Sick. He says he believes the new result, but that there is no obvious way to make it compatible with years of earlier measurements.

"Something is missing, this is very clear," agrees Carl Carlson, a theoretical physicist at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The most intriguing possibility is that previously undetected particles are changing the interaction of the muon and the proton. Such particles could be the 'superpartners' of existing particles, as predicted by a theory known as supersymmetry, which seeks to unite all of the fundamental forces of physics, except gravity.

But, Carlson says, "the first thing is to go through the existing calculations with a fine tooth comb". It could be that an error was made, or that approximations made in existing quantum calculation simply aren't good enough. "Right now, I'd put my money on some other correction," he says. "It's also where my research time will be going over the next month."

tldr: Proton seem to be 4% smaller when a muon is in orbit around them instead of an electron, something that isn't predicted by our current understanding of QM.



[edit]
easier to read article

[BerenTebogo]

Hexagon thing was fucking awesome.

[Max™]

My name is Ingo Sick-toya, you killed my father, prepare to die.

[Khamsin]

radius of the proton at around 0.8768 femtometres (1 femtometre = 10-15 metres).

Wow, a femtometer is a lot bigger than I thought it was. And less precise.

[Max™]

http://www.twilightvisions.com/berse...13ch10rain.jpg
I'll show you precise.

[Kaylia]

Wow, a femtometer is a lot bigger than I thought it was. And less precise.

It's not like physics require insane precision level. As long you know the atom is within 10 or 15 meters of the experiment, what could go wrong.

[Pirian]

what could go wrong.

Ahh, the famous last words

[Kryssan]

Ahh, the famous last words

This is science man. Things don't go wrong, they get interesting. And that's what interns are for right? Cleaning up the messes?

[Max™]

I thought interns were for absorbing the brunt of the explosion when things go wrong.

[BerenTebogo]

Had cause to post this in another thread which led to me watching it again for the 5th time.

Figured that even though most of the material is common knowledge to all the posters in here some of you may enjoy the commentary / presentation style.

One of my favorite lectures on youtube for any subject:

[Mizango]

Mhmmm

[Mizango]

I know it's been slow lately, but I wanted to share this with you guys and get your thoughts. If something does come from this then I've got to give Max props, because he told me 3 years ago that Fermi would rock Cern in the search for the Higgs lol.

This is all heresay at this point, but its slow and I figured it would be cool to get thoughts on this "light Higgs" and where this will take us in regards to a new model. Bored? Yes.

http://www.physorg.com/news198202639.html

http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/fermilabcdf.jpg

(PhysOrg.com) -- A rumor that Fermilab’s Tevatron may have discovered evidence of a light Higgs boson wouldn't be the first unsupported speculation from Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy, on his lively blog, but it is probably one of the most intriguing. Even a slight possibility that the world’s second largest accelerator has beaten the largest, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in finding the last particle in the Standard Model is enough to catch most people’s attention.

“It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal,” Dorigo writes at his blog, A Quantum Diaries Survivor. “Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result. That the result comes from the Tevatron is for sure, since the LHC experiments do not have nearly enough data yet to search for that elusive particle, and other particle physics experiments in the world have not nearly enough energy to produce it. However, I am unable to understand whether the rumor comes from CDF or from D0 [Fermilab's two particle detectors].”

Both CDF and DZero have been collecting data for many years, and have been narrowing down the possible energies and masses at which a Higgs boson might appear. As Dorigo notes, last November, the two experiments jointly released an improved Higgs limit. With the additional data they’ve gathered since then (Dorigo estimates 50% more data), the scientists may have narrowed the limit even further. Last year, Fermilab physicists even predicted that they would have a 50% chance of detecting the Higgs by the end of this year.

In Dorigo’s blog post, the “three-sigma effect” refers to the statistical certainty of the result, corresponding to a 99.73% chance of it being correct. Generally, a three-sigma effect isn't classified as a true discovery; rather, a five-sigma (or 99.9999% chance of accuracy) is considered a high enough degree of certainty to be considered a fully acceptable discovery. Yet, three-sigma would still mean strong evidence of the existence of the Higgs. On the other hand, some physicists are hoping that the Higgs doesn’t actually exist, since this could provide clues to a theory beyond the Standard Model.

Dorigo is not part of the group(s) that may have discovered the Higgs evidence, and he is quick to admit that the rumor is pretty groundless right now. It seems that he just wants to share the excitement of the rumor he’s heard with the rest of the world. He adds that more news about the subject may be revealed by physicists later this month at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris.

Tommaso Dorigo's blog post: "Rumors About A Light Higgs"

[Max™]

http://news.discovery.com/space/higg...t-so-fast.html

"It's best to wait for an official announcement as it keeps things in perspective."
But what is all this discussion about a "three-sigma event"? Is it significant?
"Three-sigma events happen occasionally, especially when you look at a lot of data," said Sean Carroll, senior research associate in the Department of Physics at Caltech. "But it could be real."
Three-sigma refers to the statistical certainty of a given result. In this case, the rumored result is supposed to have a 99.7 percent chance of being correct (and a 0.3 percent chance of being wrong).
"Three-sigma isn't seen as a 'discovery,' but it would be strong evidence for the existence of the Higgs," Butterworth added. "Really, a 'five-sigma' is classed as a discovery. Five-sigma is the 'Gold Standard.'"
Also, this "three-sigma" claim arose from a rumor that may or may not be substantiated.
Carroll also urged caution about Dorigo's dramatic blog post: "I would be inclined to wait until there was some actual announcement, rather than just rumors on the internet, before taking it seriously."
So, it looks like we'll have to wait until scientists present their research at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris on July 22 before we start getting too excited.

Poppin' fresh, 9 minutes old:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/l...cientists.html

A spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory told the Telegraph: "The rumour of evidence for the Higgs boson is just that: a rumour, with no factual basis.

"Beyond that, we don't comment on rumours."


Earlier, the laboratory's Twitter feed said: "Let's settle this: the rumors spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumors. That's it."

[Mizango]

America doesnt lie.

[Takedown3]

so no hard fact until the 22nd?

what does finding evidence of higgs existence do for magiscience?

[Eliseos]

what does finding evidence of higgs existence do for magiscience?

Explain how magnets work.

[Takedown3]

what about rainbows? is science going to finally tell us they are full of these boson's

[Mizango]

so no hard fact until the 22nd?

what does finding evidence of higgs existence do for magiscience?

Everything. Straight Boson n shit yo.