The LEP Collider Will Be Closed Down 100
mukund writes "The Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider will be dismantled soon, as this article on BBC News reports. The LEP is the world's largest particle collider and is built inside a 27km long tunnel. The collider has been used to confirm the existence of the Higgs particle unsuccessfully. A new project to build another larger collider is on the way. The article says, "According to commentators, whoever finds the Higgs first will probably win a Nobel Prize.""
Say that again (Score:4)
Is that like the Presidential election was used to confirm the new President unsuccessfully?
May he/she/it rest in piece... (Score:1)
Er.... (Score:3)
Er, what does this mean? They confirmed it, or didnt they? What is the Higgs boson anyway, beyond the sketchy clues the article gives? Pointers from the physicists out there?
Re:May he/she/it rest in piece... (Score:1)
...ufff (Score:1)
It's about time. (Score:1)
There has been talk of (and I'm posting AC because I know about it!) corruption in the construction phase - the use of a substandard emitter array has long been seen as being caused by shill bidding.
Hopefully, the next one they build there will do better.
Re:...ufff (Score:1)
Black Holes (Score:3)
But really, why are they closing it down?? the more the merrier.
Re:Er.... (Score:1)
As the article said, they 3 of the 4 collectors saw 'shadows' of the particle. Therefore, they feel justified is saying that it exists, but it hasn't been proven yet. So, they did not confirm its' existance conclusively, but did 'hint' at its' existance.
The article goes on to state that a Higgs boson is a field that 'defines' the mass of other particles. Defines is not really the best word, but as particles pass through this field, they experience drag. The more drag, the more massive the object. The analogy isn't really good, but try to imagine a net in which everything must pass through. Now the net doesn't necessarily stop anything, but 'slows it down' depending on its mass. As I said, it's not a great analogy, an my physics friends will probably get on my case for it, but that is the best way I know how to explain it.
Eric Gearman
--
The Nobel Race (Score:2)
Eyes on the nobel prize (Score:1)
I don't know what the heck the Higgs is, but I sure hope that the scientists don't think along the same lines as these commentators. The scientists should be after something "just because". Not for the Nobel Prize.
Noble (adj) Having or showing qualities of high moral character, such as courage, generosity, or honor: a noble spirit.
Yes, I know that it is actually named after Alfred Bernhard NobEL, but I like to think that people who get it should be nobLE.
Self funding (Score:1)
Re:Er.... (Score:1)
Have a look at the ATLAS education site. (Score:2)
For those who just want a quick summary of what a Higgs boson is, jump straight to that page here [lbl.gov]
About Higgs Particles (Score:3)
For more background information, see links:
Scientific American [sciam.com]
Another description [fnal.gov]
Oh-So-Useful Slashdot Article [slashdot.org]
Uh, Keyboardist [higgsboson.com]
Higgs info (Score:4)
CERN is awesome (Score:2)
It was by the way the first place, I ever saw scientific notation used for numberz: A Swiss physicist was giving a briefing on the Large Hadron Collider (the new collider with superconducting magnets, they are going to place in the ring), and at that time estimated the cost around 1 x 10^9 Swiss Francs...
Re:The Nobel Race (Score:1)
a) scientists are still human ... if you've been looking for something for 10 years it's a bit upsetting if someone else gets it, and more importantly
b) science is funded by governments who tend to want concrete achievements to brag about (before they give you money for your swanky new experiment). Finding the Higgs boson would fit nicely.
It isn't just egomaniac physicists behind this race, but instead physicists desperate for cash trying to satisfy their funding bodies.
Re:The real reason... (Score:1)
Holy Smashing Pumpkins (Score:1)
Maybe Railtrack Can Buy It... (Score:1)
Even nuclear physicists have their fun. (Score:1)
Except this time, the apparatus to accelerate the particles is many miles long. Who says that size doesn't matter here?
This is a 'good thing'! really! (Score:4)
Let a lower powered accelerator attempt to find the Higgs, I STILL don't believe it will be discovered, because it's been stated over and over 'we just need a little more power to find the Higgs boson!'. The problem is that all of these vast teams are lead by one or two scientists, who desperately want the Nobel Prize. Hence, good science is sometimes ignored in favor of the limelight... I'm just glad 'good physics' prevailed this time around.
I had hoped to talk about this on BottomQuark [bottomquark.com] but lost all my research midway through the discussion [bottomquark.com]. whoops. `8r) I wonder if there is such a thing as an amateur partical physics person....
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Why the LEP shutdown. (Score:4)
noble or nobel (Score:3)
All these people seem to be complaining about scientists chasing the Nobel prize, implying that that's a bad thing to be taking into consideration, etc.
I mean, if you worked for several years at a company developing some sort of important software , wouldn't you be sort of pissed off if someone else came out with essentially the same product during an unforeseen server outage on your company's side?
The nobel prize is to a scientist as writing some piece of software like Napster or Linux is to a programmer - it provides:
It's "proof" that they accomplished something. Without said proof, even if you are very, very close, no one is going to give you any more money (at least not politicians - remember, sonny boy, these fancy partickal excellorators come out of my taxpayers pockets, and they ain't done one dang thing but ask for more money! Look at what happened to the Princeton Plasma Physics lab [pppl.gov] - they were close to actually getting a positive energy return on a fusion reactor (closer than anyone else), but since they weren't actually getting one, they lost their funding and their accelerator just sits there. I've talked to some of the physicists, and believe me, they are bitter about it.
Higgs and all that. (Score:3)
Why is the Higgs so important?
Apart from being the last of the Standard Model particles to be discovered, it is also (via the so-called) Higgs Mechanism responsible for the generation of mass.
What?Well, just as the photon is the "carrier" of the electromagnetic field, the carrier (incidently, all such carrier particles are bosons - that is, have integer "spin") of the mass field is the Higgs Boson, and will be seen as evidence for either the Standard Model of Particle Physics, or (depending upon its properties, or indeed, existence!) for other competing models. As one might well imagine, the mass generation process is very interesting to Physicists, and Higgs discovery would certainly be worthy of a Nobel prize.
As to the closure of LEP - LEP has done some startling physics and has been an extremely successful endevour however you look at it (for a start, without CERN we would not have the World Wide Web!) The collaborative model of smaller states coming together to afford large scientific projects was the predessesor to the ISS, and even a couple of the US High Energy Physics experiments (such as the experiment I'm involved with, BaBar [stanford.edu] are going the same route.
Finally, don't forget that Physics is still a human endevour, and us Physicists need a pat on the back sometimes too!
- Dan
PS: Ed, get back to work!
Fermi's Tevatron, Higgs particle, sci note, data (Score:5)
To give a (very) rough explanation of the Higgs: when you smash things together with very high energies, you get a huge explosion (huge, considering it was started by one proton and one antiproton) and all sorts of fragments are produced.
However, we have to measure these fragments using very odd means, because it is mostly impossible to directly measure most of these things... you can only measure the effects they have on the relatively normal stuff we can build a detector out of. (if you build it out of these things, the detector would vanish in much less than a second...) So the more "normal" fragments are relatively easier to measure, because they interact more with the more normal detector.
In recent high energy physics history there has been a string of these things, Higgs is the next.
Someone said they first saw sci notation in 93, and I'm amazed. I'd heard in Junior High earlier than that... or did you mean something else.
Btw, Fermi has a significant linux community. Also, (from a bad memory and this isn't my department but) they have to filter the incoming data in realtime, keeping only the most interesting 1/millionth of it - and that data alone is a couple CDs/second worth of data. Lots o' bandwidth there...
Re:Self funding (Score:1)
The Scoop from inside LEP (Score:5)
Anyway, here's the email:
-------------------
Where's Higgs? (Score:1)
World's Largest Trash Compactor? (Score:1)
That would rule!
Not that I would ever be sarcastic or anything...
Time Travel (Score:1)
Wrong! (Score:1)
Question on Higgs... (Score:1)
I ask this because if physicists can determine how mass is "applied" to an object, couldn't we then change the characteristics of an object by affecting the way it's mass is determined? By altering a group of these paritcles so that an object in that space has its mass reduced or increased based upon the way the Higgs bosons have been altered?
That could solve alot of problems.
Regards.
Nobel prize (Score:1)
Not a good return on investment (Score:1)
Clearification (Score:3)
For some more (but brief) information about the Higgs boson read here [teachers.cern.ch]
Some comments:
Maybe some of you wonder why these guys can't tell if they found the Higgs particle or not. Let me try to explain. It's all about statistics. Imagine you have two dices, one has the numbers from one to six on it. The other one you just know it has the numbers one to five and the last number can be any of 1 to 6, there might be e.g. another 2 or something. let's call this dice 'signal dice'. Unfortunately they look exactly the same and you can only read the number on top.
The Higgs is like the number 6 on the second dice.
ok. roll the dices. you get 3 and 5. Now you know there is at least a 3 or a 5 on the signal dice. Noone cares. again: 1 and 6. Wow.. do we have something? You don't know because you cannot tell which dice shows the 6.
The trick: if you roll a hundert times, you expect 100 * 2 (dices) / 6 = 33.3 times the number 6 if the 'signal dice' has a 6 and only 100 * 1 / 6 = 16 times 6 if the signal dice has no 6.
You see, a single (or a few) rolles don't help. Even if you see the 6, it might be the other dice. Unfortunately they cut the power to LEP so they cannot keep on rolling.
Actually only Aleph has 3.5 sigma excess in one channel Z*->H Z (H -> b + anti b), so that means pretty much nothing and they don't really trust their Monte Carlo (which provides the second dice :). That means they see something, but just have not enough data to really confirm the existence. NOrmally you do that with at leat 5 sigma.
Well, todays HEP collaborations are very large. Especially when it commes to LHC experiments. There is no single 'person' that is by any means able to actually 'find' the Higgs. My best guess is that, given the Higgs particle will ever be found, Peter Higgs himself might get the Nobel Prize.Re:Question on Higgs... (Score:1)
Time Travel (Score:1)
The world is fueled by money, right? (Score:1)
Make back their initial investment?
---
Give the LEP a second life (Score:1)
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Man, I can't believe... (Score:1)
Re:The real reason... (Score:1)
Re:Er.... (Score:1)
OK, so that's not a perfect version, either, and my gun-toting friends will probably get on my case for it, but that is the best way *I* know how to explain it.
Re:The Nobel Race (Score:1)
There are also plenty of people of other nationalities working side by side with them.
Big sciense is done internationally.
The interesting thing is that when the results are published, the paper will have two hundred or so names on it. This includes graduate students that helped build the detectors years ago and are no longer on the project.
But if the discovery is done at Fermilab, a different set of two hundred names will be on the paper.
Re:May he/she/it rest in piece... (Score:1)
Re:Where's Higgs? (Score:1)
--
Re:Higgs particle (Score:2)
Re:Fermi's Tevatron, Higgs particle, sci note, dat (Score:2)
They had the same problem of wanting to store all the data for all the transducers in the detector.
But they could only store it if they triggered on
one in a million events (roughly).
So they used a lot of electronics to generate the trigger signal (think at least one 50ft trailer filled with relay racks).
Of course, this was around 1986 or so.
At that time, they used a VAX 11/780 to store the data onto digital tapes (the 9 track 6250bpi variety). They also used Fujitsu IBM mainframe clones things.
And they used a lot of FORTRAN.
I could see why Linux would be very popular in Physics today.
Once they capture the data, they have to plot it.
They could use GNUPlot now. I was in Physics
just before Unix and X-Windows moved in.
I believe the transition was driven by the RISC
processors gaining ground from the CISC (like the
VAX instruction set).
They had something like GNUPlot called TopDrawer.
Physicists have such big computing needs that they
will use anything they can get their hands on.
So Linux and FreeBSD have great potential.
They are also used to sharing their source code.
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Re:Not a good return on investment (Score:1)
Re:CERN is awesome (Score:2)
That damn thing (the LEP) is easily the most complex/huge/impressive thing I've ever seen. The accelerator was running when I was there (12/98) so I was not able to tour the tunnel but surface of the CERN site conveyed the proper impression. Driving the length of the tunnel on the surface would necessitate several stops Swiss/French customs crossing the border while inside the tunnel was granted a special treaty exemption. You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a Nobel winner. Toss a second rock and hit a Nobel laureate from a different country than the first.
Btw, TBL's first WWW host, a NeXT box, was still running in a display case near the Swiss cafeteria. If the CERN staff didn't need to empty the tunnel for the LHC installation you can be sure it (the LEP) would be running as long a it could produce data.
right Nobel, wrong prize (Score:2)
"According to commentators, whoever finds the Higgs first will probably win a Nobel Prize."
Actually, they got the Nobel prize, but instead of getting it for finding the Higgs it was for inventing the Tachyon Tardyon Collider. See Robert Sawyer's Flash Forward.
Re:The Nobel Race (Score:1)
Re:Why the LEP shutdown. (Score:2)
The LHC will smach protons and anti-protons together.
One minor correction: LHC is a proton-proton collider, not a proton-anti-proton machine. pp machines are cheaper to build and run than p-pbar machines, and for the energies of the LHC (14TeV Center of Mass), they have almost the same reach for finding new phenomena. This is mostly because at such high energies, protons and anti-protons both are "mostly" gluons (meaning glue, not quarks, carries most of the energy). So, LHC is basically a gluon-gluon collider. Otherwise, I agree with everything you said.
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
CERN demands recount (Score:2)
Re:CERN is awesome (Score:1)
If the CERN staff didn?t need to empty the tunnel for the LHC installation you can be sure it (the LEP) would be running as long a it could produce data.
In fact, LEP may live again! The magnets, RF cavities, and other stuff (but not the detectors, I don't believe, although I could be wrong), will be put into storage, on the chance that CERN decides to convert the LHC to an electron-proton machine at some point in the distant future (much like HERA at DESY in Germany), after its planned program is completed.
Re:The Scoop from inside LEP (Score:1)
The flip side of course is that the construction contracts for LHC contain large penalty clauses for delays caused by CERN. A year of data collection would pretty much wipe out the LHC budget completely, just paying for the delays. Compared with the miniscule chance of actually confirming the Higgs - remember, from the note, that there is only one detector (ALEPH) out of four with a potentially notable excess in one channel. From the perspective of many of my colleagues (theoretical particle physicists), there is little chance (given the lack of supporting evidence in other channels and detectors, and the history of such "potential discovery" announcements) that this is actually the real thing.
Just a passing note for those that never learned or don't remember this stuff, random fluctuations to the 1 sigma level would occur in 1/3 of all experiments set up and performed exactly the same way; and 2 sigma is about a 5% chance of random fluctuation. And that is assuming perfect knowledge of all the uncertainties, which is never the case. The number of "well established" three-or-more sigma "discoveries" that have evaporated in the face of more data is well in excess of what you would expect from chance. Bottom line for a physicist (and I don't remember where I first saw this):
Re:This is a 'good thing'! really! (Score:3)
Here are the current Center of Mass frame energies of the colliders:
What is likely to happen, is that LEP data will be able to rule out a Standard Model Higgs boson up to about 110GeV in mass, or "discover" a slightly lighter Higgs (where "discover" means a very particular thing, not just seeing a few events), while the Tevatron (I think) will be able to rule out a Higgs up to something like 140GeV and discover one up to 130GeV (these may be wrong, but they're in the right ballpark). LHC will be able to discover any Higgs up to about a TeV (with the exception of a small range right around where the limits are at now). So, if the Higgs is lighter than about 140GeV, it will be discovered by the Tevatron long before LHC turns on. RHIC, however, is not the right type of machine to study these phenomena, and so is not really a concern for LEP in the Nobel search :-)
On the other hand, RHIC may be the machine to confirm the existence of the quark-gluon plasma at high nuclear density. There is tantalizing evidence from the SppS (I think) collider at CERN, but not confirmation. If RHIC isn't big enough, LHC should be (in lead-lead mode). So the race is on there too.
The next few years will be extremely exciting on the experimental front (Higgs physics, supersymmetry/technicolor discovery, CP violation physics, neutrino oscillations). It's a great time to be a physicist :-)
the slashdot model (Score:1)
it has been too long a day...
-l
Book on the Subject (Score:1)
Its a piece of fiction about the discovery of the higgs boson.
--
Ebay? (Score:1)
"I think a particle accelerator would make a nice conversation piece for my apartment. I can put it next to my Saturn V rocket or maybe use it for a doorstop, my door is always knocking over my Easter Island heads. I really should do something about that..."
Re:...ufff (Score:1)
(It's a republic where the different Cantons have their own internal political systems, which includes deciding whether the female of the species can have the vote.)
So not everyone is lucky to live in Switzerland...
FatPhil
Re:About Higgs Particles (Score:1)
"
... and the weak nuclear force, which governs beta decay--a form of natural radioactivity--
"
You know it's "popular science" when they come up with phrases like "natural radioactivity".
What's an unnatural radioactivity then?
Having said that I remember bugger all about Higgs fields, so thanks for the links, I'll put up with the "popular" nature in the interest of learning.
FatPhil
Phil
Re:The Scoop from inside LEP (Score:2)
It's nice to compare relative "scientific" "certainties".
You'd never hear mathmos say "My theorem's truer than yours"...
Oh, sorry, actually you would!!!
FatPhil
Re:Fermi's Tevatron, Higgs particle, sci note, dat (Score:1)
I was working at FermiLab when the transition from VMS to UNIX (and from F77 to C) occured.
Boy did I hear a lot of bitching.
But yes, FNAL was one of the biggest first users of RedHat (aka fRedHat).
Humerous Explanation of Higgs field/boson (Score:1)
http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/epp/higgs3.html
(i.e. from High Energy Physics at the University of London, for those interested)
There are 5 descriptions, indexed at
http://hepwww.ph.qmw.ac.uk/epp/higgs.html
But I think that number 3 is the best!
FatPhil
Higgs and the SEP (not LEP) confusion (Score:1)
The Higgs boson is the manifestation of Gravity.
In contrast to what someone said about the Higgs boson NOT being responsible for the mass (saying someone else is wrong) then THEY are wrong... (see Er... thread) the gluons are manifestations of the strong force, which holds nuclei together, and as such contribute to the energy (you could say the rest mass energy, the ubiquitous E=mc2), but not strictly, in terms of definitions, the gravitational mass (maybe not the inertial mass, these may be different, but in terms of gravity, it is the gravitational mass that matters).
Now what gets me (an astrophysicist, not a particles buff. I hate particles), is that Einstein (and others) went on at length about the SEP, or the Strong Equivalence Principle. You know when you are in free fall, everything falling with you in your frame goes at the same speed etc. and behaves like there is no gravity? Well this is application of the SEP. So what happens to the Higgs in this case? Does it disappear? But you can't just annihilate particles simply because you are travelling at some different speed - they should still exist in any frame! Surely? I have been puzzling about this for ages - can someone help?
[Prepared to sacrifice karma by going slightly off topic for an answer]
Re:Higgs and the SEP (not LEP) confusion (Score:2)
Re:Wrong! (Score:1)
Yeah, and speaking about Nobel prize... (Score:1)
That sounds really weird to me? Will you qualify for a Nobel prize, just beacause you are proving someone else's theory to be practically correct?
Give the prize to the guy who in the first place came up with the idea about these Higgs thingies...
Another thing... I've also heard that contrary to popular belief, you won't get a Nobel prize for one amazing discovery alone, unless it is really brilliant. You kind of have to earn them through "long and faithful service". When you after many years as an outstanding scientist present a fine theory, you may get a noble prize.
I might have heard wrong though.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
Re:Higgs and the SEP (not LEP) confusion (Score:2)
Re:Fermi's Tevatron, Higgs particle, sci note, dat (Score:2)
Engineers at TRIUMF [triumf.ca], Canada's national particle research facility, have been using in-house data acquisition cards to do the job. Their FastBus cards are an interesting experiment in home electronics, and they hope to put them into production for any use where large amounts of data need to be processed quickly.
This doesn't make sense. (Score:1)
Re:Book on the Subject (Score:1)
It's in Best SF 13, a nice collection by all accounts. Amazon.co.uk listing [amazon.co.uk]
Re:This doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
The synchrotron radiation from a charged particle (like a proton or electron) is proportional to the gamma-factor (the time-dilation factor if you like) to the fourth power. This means when you do all the maths that the LHC can reach energies of approximately 2000^4 times greater than the LEP.
This is because the limiting factor is not exactly the energy pumped in but the energy that is radiated away, if you see what I mean...
Its not brilliantly clear because I've been drinking rather heavily tonight, but basically the larger mass of the proton means it has a lower time-dilation factor for the same energy and so loses less energy as it goes round the collider.
I know I've trivialised it a fair bit, but this is the best way I can see to explain it in what are loosely called laymans' terms.
Its not the energy that the collider can provide... but the energy that the particle loses that limits the ability of us to build bigger colliders.
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Why? (Score:1)
Why do we need this crap, will finding a Higgs-Boson (or whatever) further mankind in any way? What are they hoping to actually achieve with all this? Anybody know of any real applications for this other than "because it's there"?
--Gfunk
Re:Yeah, and speaking about Nobel prize... (Score:1)
that would be Scottish physicst Peter Higgs, who came up with it in 1964
Real Lowdown (Score:4)
Not a usual poster on slashdot, but it seems that few/none of the other Higgs searchers at LEP are sticking their necks up. For the benefit of non-Higgs searchers in particle physics, and for those willing to wade through some details, here's a Higgs searcher's perspective on the story.
Unfortunately, the majority of the information presented on this has been to the public session of what is essentially an internal meeting of LEP. What the experiments (and the LEP Higgs group) have shown in their brief presentations are summaries of much more detailed work which is of course still ongoing (data taking only finished a few days ago).
The comments that I've seen in this forum from physicists are coming from what could be termed either the general community, or the competition. They reasonably point out that brief status reports of ongoing analyses have not convinced *them* that the Higgs is there, but unfortunately this was the structure of the forum in which the results were presented. Another interpretation is that we didn't properly anticipate confusion about issues that seemed obvious to the experts.
One common misinterpretation seems to be that LEP observes only 3-4 Higgs candidates, which is actually very false. This is just the number of events collected that really 'stood up' as extremely signal-like. In fact, hundreds of possible Higgs candidates were collected, and they are each given a rating on a "signal-like" scale. If you skim off the top few, you get four events, three from Aleph and one from L3. Up until very recently, Delphi also had one, but it dropped down on the signal scale after reanalysis.
As you drop down on the scale, to the point where you'd expect half of your events to be background and half to be signal, you expect 7 from background, and observe 14. The weight distribution agrees across the board with the signal distribution. These are divided among all four experiments and all search topologies. In fact, the sample was divided in several different ways for consistency checking purposes, and they all came out looking exactly like a Higgs signal. It gave us goosebumps to see the results of these tests.
If there's no signal, we've had a one in a thousand blip. There is a standard for discovery which requires that to be a bit less than one in a million. We are confident that, if it's real, we'd be able to reach that one in a million, and if it's not, that the effect would dry up. The whole point is that this is an exciting observation which we'd like to verify that is at the edge of our sensitivity. To do that properly would take six months of extra running, which all of the LEP experiments requested. The whole point is that it's not yet conclusive. The CERN management has been weighing questions of cost of running (in dollars and delay of future projects) vs chance that we did just get a freaky blip in the background, and has unfortunately decided not to take the risk. People will have the next 6-7 years to wonder if what we saw was real or not before it can be tested again.
At the moment, the most complete information is at the Physics Co-ordinator's Page [alephwww.cern.ch].
A collection of all of the presentations at the public sessions of the LEPC meetings can be found here [delphiwww.cern.ch].
Cheers,
Pete McNamara
Re:Black Holes (Score:1)
Why is it stopping soon? Because it is being replaced, and as we delay stopping it, the longer it takes to set the new proton anti proton collider up.
Then why is it still going? Because we want to find the particle as quickly as possible. We have hints that we have found it, as the collider was running greater than maximum power, but we need more events to be sure. Sure, we can leave it to Fermilab to possibly find it (I dont know the power of any of the colliders), but is it not better to find it as early as possible? If we find it now, maybe we can better optimise the new collider?
BTW - for those who keep saying the physicists just want to keep their job as long as possible, all of them are staying on to work on and for the new collider.
And this is for science's sake, just a nobel prize would be neat - it is not like in medicine, however, where the nobel prize is the be-all and end-all of life as we know it.
Discalimer, I have not much information on this subject - IANAPPY (I am not a particle physicist yet)
Re:Why the LEP shutdown. (Score:1)
Re:Fermi's Tevatron, Higgs particle, sci note, dat (Score:1)
Pretty neat for graphing, but the language is a kind of macro kind or fortran language which just *sucks*! Works for linux, unix etc, and tar.gz file is only 50MBs or so, if I remember correctly.
As for your comment about source code - yeah we generally are all for openness - remember the WWW? And Science is generally (except for medicine, where they like to patent genes, for fscks sake) all about sharing knowledge
Government screwing over physicists (Score:2)
A few weeks from the funding deadline, the fundraisers had raised almost all the necessary funds, and had a donor lined up and ready to give the remaining amount, when the government backed out, claiming that they hadn't made the deadline (even though it hadn't passed yet, and they were going to have sufficient funds). While TRIUMF is still in use, it can't reach the energies needed for most particle physics research nowadays, so it's been relegated to other tasks (materials science, muon spin rotation experiments, medical research...)
The Superconducting SuperCollider that got cancelled in the US is another example of government backing out of important research...
Nobody realizes that basic scientific research nearly always pays off in the long run, in spades... Everyone is too obsessed with the short term. Where would our CD players, our computers, our satellites, and our microwaves be without basic scientific research in fundamental physics?
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Apart from being the last of the Standard Model particles to be discovered, it is also (via the so-called) Higgs Mechanism responsible for the generation of mass (my emphasis).
Does that mean that the anti-Higgs (if such a thing is supposed to exist) can be labeled an "anti-obesity drug" :-)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
-Legion
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
No. It doesn't. The Higgs itself gets it's mass via the same Higgs mechanism. What actually is wrong is that the Higgs boson is responsible for the masses. Right is: The Higgs-Field (not the boson) is responsible for the mass (of fundamentals).
The real secret of time travel (Score:1)
Re:Wrong! (Score:1)
The interaction of massive particles with the Higgs field is what gives particles inertial mass. The force of gravity i.e. weight of the particle is given by the particles interaction with whatever curved spacetime exists at that scale, which is unknown, as the effects of GR gravity below a scale of ~1mm hasn't been measured, and these particles are smaller than 10^-12 mm
Re:Anti-mass (Score:1)
Re:Black Holes (Score:1)
Re:This is a 'good thing'! really! (Score:1)
Not really. The detectors operating at the Tevatron, CDF and D0, will need roughly five years of operation to collect the luminosity necessary for Higgs discovery, and still could only find a Higgs below 120 GeV with 3 sigma confidence level. In five years, LHC is scheduled to start operations.
Combined CDF and D0 limits after roughly five years of operation (integrated luminosity 10 fb^-1) would allow for a 3 sigma evidence below 120 GeV or 5 sigma discovery below 100 GeV. The latter is already excluded by LEP.
So chances for a Higgs discovery at Tevatron are not too good, really. It's possible, though not very likely.
Cheers, patrick
Re:About Higgs Particles (Score:1)
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Higgs and all that. (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
I think not.
All I asked was if there was something in particular they were trying to achieve, you need to calm down buddy.
Gfunk
--Gfunk