A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.
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| Higgs boson |
Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs bosont. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.
But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.
Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]
"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.
Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model," referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.
To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.
Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.
Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the "plain vanilla" Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.
From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe's doom in the very far future. That's because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.
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How Does This Impact on Fatties?
Unfortunately our resident scientist and astronomer Dr. Gerald "Teddy" Bear is unavailable to comment on this. Dr. Bear is recovering from minor surgery and an assault by fat haters. Having some experience with particle physics I will try to make sense of the mystery of the Higgs boson particle.
When it's all said and done this is about gravity and who knows more about gravity and a fat guy. We simply have more gravity than skinny people. While the skinny person may have more mass we have more size.
The reason that the Higgs boson particle is referred to as the God particle is because like a fat guy it really throws its weight around. Because this is about gravity it is also about energy. Like food which is a form of energy itself is finite but hunger is infinite so therein lies the problem of the Higgs boson particle because of its mass Higgs boson particle has a tremendous appetite for energy just the same as a fat guy but because it is a great mass an extremely small size it doesn't have enough room to store the energy. Eventually a great imbalances created and the cohesion of matter and space itself eventually comes apart. Eventually the glue that holds the very fabric of time gravity and matter together wakens due to the weight of the Higgs boson particle. Think of it as your power chair. You keep eating and eventually the energy in the battery of your power chair is no longer sufficient to propel you. You recharge the battery and each time the battery holds less and less of the charge and the drain on the battery du jour increasing weight gets bigger and bigger. Eventually you are unable to get the energy you require. First of all because you not able to move to with a weak battery and by energy I mean food. You become weaker and you try to get up and you fall. This same scenario is going to happen on a much larger scale than you. The question then is what will happen after complete in total annihilation of existence. Will the process that created the universe repeat itself and will we begin with hydrogen the lightest element?
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| The Piggs Boson captured by the Grazenhiemer/Oinkner Collider |
Study of the Higgs boson and existence itself creates a new science. Great minds like Dr. Baer, Rev. BLA and of course belly boy are needed to combine all the disciplines of mathematics science and philosophy in order to take the next quantum leap. We can't say it existence will stop or not. The Higgs boatswain particle is a real heavyweight but if you take away gravity will it still have mass? Rev. BLA can tell you with great certainty that fatty heaven is a place without the limitations of gravity. What this means for fat people is there is no limit to how big one can become. What this means the universe may prove devastating. The Piggs boson will not be a supermassive subatomic particle. The Piggs boson will be a giant fact guy with zero mass or gravity relative to objects around him. This fact guy will continue to grow and grow and grow. In fact our universe in which we live is really a big fat guy. I believe that we could get several trillion light-years away and into another universe our universe would look very much like Jackie Gleason or John Goodman. This can be proven by very simple formula that we all learned during recess in junior high. The heat of the meat times the angle of the dangle equals the torque of the pork times the square of the hair over the mass of the ass.
Without gravity we can't have time. So look at it like this. You order a meal and you are really hungry but without time the meal matter comes. If you're eating a meal and is not time because her is no gravity the meal never ends and your growth becomes unlimited.
