nilaykumar

Thank you! It seems very few people understand the immense pressure and intense atmosphere that surrounds work like this, especially in culminating times like these.

Fabiola would likely rather spend her time improving the quality of her analysis, which is undeniably more valuable to the scientific community than agonizing over the font.

When scientists present results to scientists, they present in a scientific way. I.e. methods, analysis, etc. There is no way a scientist can get by with just a short summary when talking to fellow researchers... it's just not how science is done.

Clearly you don't understand how much time pressure these people are under. If you were at CERN you would realize how intense the atmosphere has been in the past 2 weeks.

Also, focus on the content - if you're caring so much about the presentation, then you probably don't understand enough of the physics to comment on the content.

There is no known outcome.

"what are our governments buying for us?": - knowledge - possible future applications

It's that simple. That's always how fundamental research works. How politicians were convinced, I don't know - that's an excellent question.

Fundamental particles enter the Standard Model through the Lagrangian. Each particle is given its own field in the action: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Construction_of_...].

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "orthogonal" as the mathematics involved is not simply linear algebra.

Classically, yes.

Quantum mechanically, acceleration is a rather ill-defined quantity, so I don't know how to answer the question other than through Ehrenfest's theorem - <F> = m <a> when we're talking <averages> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest%27s_theorem]

Photons can have momentum, which, when doing relativity, blends together with energy into the momentum 4-vector [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-momentum]. Relativity also asserts that energy and mass are related [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93momentum_relatio...], so you can imagine how we could talk about the "mass" of anything with energy or momentum.

Fun fact: One of the ways physicists are looking for Higgs is by looking for bumps in the "invariant mass" spectrum of LHC events with 2 photons!

Elementary particles have no volume! (think about that one, it's kinda mindblowing)

They can only have "effective size" that arises due to say, electromagnetism. The electron has an effective radius that is measured by bouncing other charged "test" particles off of it. You don't get an answer of zero only because your test particles are attracted or repelled by the electron.

Mass should be thought of as something intrinsic to a particle, just like charge or spin. There's really no good way to visualize it - it's just something different particles have in different amounts.

There is a single Higgs field. But the Higgs field can be excited in many different places! Same for anything else, like an electron - that's why we say that two electrons are indistinguishable from each other. Fundamentally, they're made of the same "stuff": the electron field that permeates the universe.

Particles get mass by "coupling" to the Higgs field. I.e. the excitations of the electron fields - electrons - interact with the excitations of the Higgs field - Higgs bosons. This, through a complicated process described by quantum field theory (that I don't admit to fully understand), gives the particle what we call mass. Different particles couple to the Higgs with different strengths, yielding various particle masses. The Higgs even couples to itself (rather incestuously), which is why it has mass!

Quantum theory is based on the concept of wave-particle duality. Think of the ocean. The water as a whole is pretty wave-y and non-localized (i.e. it's not in one place). But the crests of the waves (the "excitations") can be thought of as particles because they're localized fairly well.

So really all a Higgs boson is, is an excitation of the Higgs field.

fjh - thank you. That is exactly the spirit of science.

Both ATLAS and CMS have legitimate, crazily cross-checked data and therefore they are releasing it. That's all. This is how science is done - all CERN is doing is updating the world on its of progress the search for the Higgs boson. Sure, sometimes mistakes are made. But you'd have to be an idiot to think that scientists pull these for publicity. Press is a pain in the ass and we try to stay away from them as much as possible.

No ATLAS or CMS member is currently allowed to release these numbers. Then numbers these sites are releasing are just pure rumors (although they may have an element of truth). Just wait until the press conference tomorrow and you will see all in gory detail.

We don't yet know if whatever we see is or is not the SM Higgs. That's why the LHC is scheduled to continue running through the year, so we can get more details. All we can really say at this point is we see something. Heck, we've been able to say that from December!

I still find it hard to see any practical, hard benefits of switching to tau. Perhaps you could argue that many things become "more natural" but at this point, pi is ingrained in mathematics, and it works perfectly well. I just can't imagine that switching to tau would allow us to reap any benefits that were previously inaccessible. I don't think there's any reason to fix what ain't broke.

Yep, had the exact same reaction.

The videos can be downloaded from here: http://streamer2.perimeterinstitute.ca/f4v-med/

What's the solution? All I can seem to find is http://jugend-forscht-sachsen.de/2012/teilnehmer/fachgebiet/...

I don't think conservation of momentum is under fire here - the vacuum fluctuations (due to second quantization, quantization of electron, quark, etc. fields) might pick up the difference... although I don't really know enough QFT to be definite. Not that I believe any of this though, haha, seems like complete bullshit. The original article, especially. None of the physics seems to make any sense.

We're living the future, guys.

Here's an exposition on the math: http://hippomath.blogspot.com/2011/06/pendulum-waves-mathema...

> Journal peer review is unpaid.

Oh okay, that's good to know.

> Journal peer review helps fellow researchers. But if I'm planning on using a text, then helping to review it helps me -- and my students.

Hmm, that's a good point, though, of course, it would depend on the researcher and how well established/organized the framework is. Perhaps it's worth looking into the history of arXiv...

Ah yes, I was looking at some of Wikibooks - it doesn't seem too developed yet; hopefully that will change.

Hmm, I agree with your issue with the lack authority, and honestly, I don't really know what to say. Having something like this peer-reviewed by professionals (determining who is is a different matter, I guess) is perhaps too idealistic. At best, I can imagine students dedicating some of their time to such an endeavor - I don't know if many researchers, for example, who usually know their field quite well, would be willing to volunteer their skills.

This is going on my books to check out as _soon_ as I get to college list!

Oh, that's a very good point! I never really thought of that technique as this kinda trick, but yeah. For some reason I always thought of it as squaring the integral (or the contour integration method).

Haha, yeah. That one's pretty cool too. There are a couple of slightly more easier-to-see ways, but they still involve seemingly arbitrary multiplications of cosine, etc (or product-to-sum rules). Man... integrals. Love/hate relationship.