What, no Higgs Bosun yet found.

[rov1100]

Still no Higgs Bosun after all these experiments with the LHC. Could all these scientists be wrong in their prediction? They got it wrong about global cooling and whose to say global warming will go the same way.

[YT52]

...or deliberately antagonistic.

[LewPaper]

Now now girls, let's kiss and make up or it'll be handbags at dawn!!!

[jake-the-peg]

Lots of peer reviewed papers? Right!

As opposed to what is now pretty much the entire scientific community - you can't even find me a single solitary scientific society to back up your global warming conspiracy theories!

There is simply no comparison - there is better evidence for cold fusion and perpetual motion!

Anyway on the more serious point of the Higgs Boson.

The standard model does not tell us what the mass of the Higgs Boson is - so finding it is challenging - you know what to look for but you don't know where to look.

Whilst you're looking you see billions upon billions of other useless interactions before you find just one that might be usefull.

A bit like Answerbank really

I met a guy a few years back who was an investigator on the team that discoverred the Z0 boson back in the 80s

I asked him whether there was a Eureka moment - He said 'No it was just a growing degree of confidence as you recorded more and more events until we were ready to make the case'

You may remember recently there was a 'false alarm from CERN' http://www.bbc.co.uk/...-environment-13424231 that may well have been an over enthusiastic junior blabbing about a first candidate event.

Also they have decided to skip the planned 1 year shutdown.
http://press.web.cern...ses2011/PR01.11E.html

I'm surprised that Beso thinks the Higgs is a bore - It's the last undiscovered particle in the standard model - If there was an element that was missing from the periodic table wouldn't you want to find it? I know I would

I suspect t

[rov1100]

Nice to see you back Jake with your knowledgable answers.

///Whilst you're looking you see billions upon billions of other useless interactions before you find just one that might be usefull.///

Surely they don't have to sift through these by hand...don't they have a computer program to do it?

[Old_Geezer]

I would suspect it is more a case of needing the intelligence to interpret what you see as opposed to knowing what you are looking for and programming a computer to search for it.

[Davethedog]

Beso - Birdie - Jake possibly the most informative thread I have ever read on AB (not the god bit) Thanks and I mean it.

[jake-the-peg]

Birdie you don't even seem to know what youre arguing!

Last time we had this discussion you were telling me the sun was causing the warming - today it's global cooling.

I don't know about perpetual motion but there's certainly more scientific backing for cold fusion than for the idea that humans are not having an effect on global warming!

Anyway back to the Higgs

Yes event descrimination is done by computers - it's probably the biggest computer challenge in the world:

15 Million Gigabytes of data a year - it's spread over 8,000 physicists in 34 countries making the world's largest computing grid - it needs around 100,000 CPUs

http://www.datacenter...arge-hadron-collider/

I don't know what uses more power the collider, the instrumentation or the computing.

It's probably the air conditioning!

[beso]

I don't think the search for the Higgs is a bore at all. On the contrary I am a great enthusiast for this kind of research. I wax lyrical bout the energy of the beam in the LHC and people look at me kind of strange.

I was really just saying much the same about it not being a Eureka moment but a probability.

What is boring is people who call it the God Particle.

[rov1100]

///it's spread over 8,000 physicists in 34 countries making the world's largest computing grid - it needs around 100,000 CPUs///

If the Higgs Bosun is eventually found I wonder who will win the nobel prize for it. The person who designed the LHC, one of the 8000 physicists, or the number cruncher who found it.

[R1Geezer]

It will be group credit, the computers will sift out the chaff and real people will analyse the stuff flagged up for Human intervention.

[starone]

How do they know there is an element missing? (from an ignorant peasant who knows nothing whatsoever.)

[R1Geezer]

Starbuck It's not an element, it's a force comminicator, a boson, eg the photon is the boson for electromagnetic force. Mass can be considered mathmatically as a "force" and the boson should be present to explain current observation, the Higgs is expected to be there. Just as most of the periodic table was predicted to exist before the actual elements where found.

[jomifl]

Starbuck .. If you had a pack of cards with 4 suits of cards, 3 suits having cards numbered from 1 to 10 then jack, queen ,king and one suit without a jack you might suspect there was a card missing. The structure of the table of elements is very similar to a pack of cards.

[beso]

BTW. Cold Fusion does exist and those who predicted and demonstrated it were awarded the Nobel Prize.

No, not that rubbish published by Pons and Fleischmann.

Real Cold Fusion
http://en.wikipedia.o...Muon-catalyzed_fusion