Large Hardon Collider

[Chun Liroy]

edit: On rereading a bit, REM for memory consolidation works best 4-8 hours after learning a task, so maybe there is something biasing towards multiple shorter intervals of sleep during the day? I dunno. Interesting question though.

Lemme find the study, but there's also a cracked article that talks about the advantages of shorter intervals of sleeping being more efficient. Obviously it's a cracked article lol, but they are mostly based on some sort of fact; http://www.cracked.com/article/127_5...o-awesomeness/

[Eliseos]

[Kaylia]

lol

[Tyche]

I''m going to post this with the assumption of two things. YE OLDE, and fake.

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/04...-particle-1-3/
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/higgs-rumor/
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...est=latestnews

Just in time for Easter, physicists may have found the elusive God particle.

A leaked internal memo from four scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator that spans the border of Switzerland and France, said an experiment there may have finally recorded the existence of the long sought-after Higgs boson.

Scientists believe that the hypothetical particle — the last one still undiscovered in the standard model of physics — plays a very special role in the universe, by imbuing all other particles with mass, making reality as we know it possible.

So science nerds were agog last week after Peter Woit, a Columbia University physicist, posted the memo on his blog, “Not Even Wrong.”

The results would appear to be "the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model," the leaked memo read. "Exciting new physics, including new particles, may be expected to be found in the very near future.”

If discovered, the “God particle” would be just the beginning of a new era in science and technology, said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist and professor at the City College of New York.

“It’s going to open the floodgates for a whole new branch of theoretical physics,” Kaku told The Daily. “There are some eternal questions that cannot be answered in the framework of conventional physics. Is time travel possible? Are there gateways to other universes? Are there parallel dimensions?”

Leon Lederman, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for physics, dubbed the Higgs boson the God particle in his 1993 book of the same name.

“The God particle is both a particle and a field,” said Rob Roser, a Fermilab staff scientist who heads a study at the Tevatron particle collider near Chicago. “The way any other particle couples to that field is what generates its mass.”

But nobody has been able to detect one. Higgs bosons would be extremely unstable, researchers say, lasting for less than a nanosecond before decaying into other particles like photons.

Roser said it was hard for him to comment on the memo because it hasn’t been fully vetted and formally published.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Roser told The Daily.

Hans Georg Ritter, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, noted that there might be strategic reasons to leak unvetted results of the sort contained in the memo.

“If the stakes are high and if there is competition, the collaborations tend to try to publish earlier than under normal conditions,” Ritter wrote in an email. “But those publications have still to follow the scientific process. I think [leaks] are generated as a means of internal positioning for credit.”

One commenter on Woit's blog had a less skeptical perspective: “Keeping secret the work of 2,000 persons in the age of Internet is just impossible.”

According to Kaku, the Higgs boson is the one missing piece at the center of a jigsaw puzzle consisting of a vast array of subatomic particles. Locating it could move science toward developing the theory of everything, a quest that eluded Albert Einstein, Kaku has said.

That kind of knowledge ultimately could enable humanity to do things that would today seem magical under our present understanding of physical reality, Kaku wrote in his 2008 book, “Physics of the Impossible.” Since they don’t necessarily violate any known laws of physics, things like teleportation, anitmatter engines and invisibility might become feasible one day.

Finding the God particle was one of the primary motivations for building the multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider. Only by smashing atoms together at velocities near the speed of light will the required energy be produced to generate a Higgs boson long enough for scientists to demonstrate it is real.

Or not.

If the particle never appears, physicists would be forced to revise the formulas they have created to describe reality.

One thing the collider did for certain, scientists announced on Friday, is set the record for high-intensity particle crashes.

Researchers used beams with 6 percent more particles per unit than the previous record, set by the Fermilab Tevatron last year.

“Beam intensity is key to the success of the LHC, so this is a very important step,” said Rolf Heuer, head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which runs the Large Hadron Collider, in a statement. “Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential.”

[Lhyet]

Tweet from Prof. Brian Cox who works at ATLAS regarding that:

ProfBrianCox Brian Cox
The Higgs rumors are from an internal, unchecked ATLAS document. Very bad science to leak it. Many mistakes are made in un-reviewed papers


So fingers crossed, but won't get my hopes up =/

[Eliseos]

Unless if my memory is getting worse, this guy also posted something about finding the Higgs a while ago and it turned out to be false.

I remember the name of his blog, "Not Even Wrong", wrong about something fairly big.

[Mizango]

Unless if my memory is getting worse, this guy also posted something about finding the Higgs a while ago and it turned out to be false.

I remember the name of his blog, "Not Even Wrong", wrong about something fairly big.

Absolutely correct.

[Mizango]

Also this is the 3rd announcement of such findings in the past 9 months Tread lightly of ye olde lad whom wept canis lupus.

[Chun Liroy]

Miz, FB etc.

[Mizango]

k

[Chun Liroy]

[Tristam]

Lemme find the study, but there's also a cracked article that talks about the advantages of shorter intervals of sleeping being more efficient. Obviously it's a cracked article lol, but they are mostly based on some sort of fact; http://www.cracked.com/article/127_5...o-awesomeness/

That's really similar to what I was remembering, so there is probably some neat real science in there. If I could go back in time and pick new things to study in graduate school, sleep would be way up there on the list.

[Chun Liroy]

More than just sleep, I'm extremely interested in the mind. I was actually toying with the idea of neurologist for a bit. The human mind just fascinates me.

Edit: I might look it up sometime when I have a chance, but would anyone else be interested on some sort of study that relates how well information is retained with how close it is acquired before sleeping.

[Eliseos]

Little bit of an update of my situation if anyone cares:

Called the place that offered me a job yesterday to ask for more time to make my decision (I'm going to just call them Force, to make it easier). They gave me another week, but he sounded pretty annoyed at the prospect. I think they might be confused on when I can actually start, because it wasn't the first time he asked "when can you start for us?", acting like I was going to take the position when he called. I'll at least be able to do the phone interview with Boeing tomorrow and have an idea of how I do. Not sure what I'm going to do if either I do really well and they offer an in-person interview after this coming Monday, or I think I do well and they are waiting to offer an in-person interview. I am definitely sending an email to Force tomorrow to hopefully clear up the fact that I won't be able to start until the end of May, which I've told them all in the multiple interviews I've had.

[Mizango]

Awesome, I was wondering how you were going to juggle the two. Go in there and kill it man. Im happy for you :D Then again you know im partial to St Louis lol, ill turn you into a Cards fan yet!

[Eliseos]

Beer4Lyfe.

And yeah, don't know if I mentioned this, but there (as far as I know, they accidentally emailed all of the people up for this position) are only 4 others besides me up for the Boeing position. Only one of them besides myself used an edu email address, with two of the gmail accounts being something like scythe2331132. If there were more people up for it (like 20+) I'd probably feel a lot less better about my chances.

[zoobernut]

Good luck on your next interview. I am glad you got it all figured out and have some extra time to decide.

[Mizango]

Beer4Lyfe.

And yeah, don't know if I mentioned this, but there (as far as I know, they accidentally emailed all of the people up for this position) are only 4 others besides me up for the Boeing position. Only one of them besides myself used an edu email address, with two of the gmail accounts being something like scythe2331132. If there were more people up for it (like 20+) I'd probably feel a lot less better about my chances.

ROFL I hate that. Man we used to get resumes where the contact emails (These are 100% real) were [email protected] and [email protected].

[Mizango]

Needless to say, they were not hired.

[Chun Liroy]

ROFL I hate that. Man we used to get resumes where the contact emails (These are 100% real) were [email protected] and

Woah woah woah I told you that email was between me and you.