It's a boson! But we need to know if it's the Higgs

[mmix]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... nline-news

...

If we don't know the new particle is a Higgs, what do we know about it?
We know it is some kind of boson, says Vivek Sharma of CMS, one of the two Large Hadron Collider experiments that presented results on Wednesday. There are only two types of elementary particle in the standard model: fermions, which include electrons, quarks and neutrinos, and bosons, which include photons and the W and Z bosons. The Higgs is a boson – and we know the new particle is too because one of the things it decays into is a pair of high-energy photons, or gamma rays. According to the rules of mathematical symmetry, only a boson could decay into exactly two other photons.

Anything else?
Another thing we can say about the new particle is that nothing yet suggests it isn't a Higgs. The standard model, our leading explanation for the known particles and the forces that act on them, predicts the rate at which a Higgs of a given mass should decay into various particles. The rates of decay reported for the new particle yesterday are not exactly what would be predicted for its mass of about 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) – leaving the door open to more exotic stuff. "If there is such a thing as a 125 GeV Higgs, we know what its rate of decay should be," says Sharma. But the decay rates are close enough for the differences to be statistical anomalies that will disappear once more data is taken. "There are no serious inconsistencies," says Joe Incandela, head of CMS, who reported the results on Wednesday.

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[iak1992]

Cool! Always been a fan of physics ut ended up in computer engineering

[gohlip]

Higgs Boson went into a church. The priest said, "Sorry, we don't serve bosons here." Then Higgs Boson replied, "But without me, you cannot have mass."

[gohlip]

I hope Higgs Boson is not the old testament god particle. Then we'll all wish we haven't found him.

[gohlip]

If after confirming the boson detected is indeed the god particle, but a Hindu one, we'll still have a lot of work to confirm if it's Krishna, Vishnu or Siva.

[Max]

I personally think it will be one of the Lords of Binary.
There are 10 of them.

[gohlip]

The second book, a new collection of papers on the god particle, came out as it is discovered the destruction of mass may be avoided by the sacrifice of another particle, the scientists named it the jesus particle.

[gohlip]

Wikileaks today published an expose detailing american government pressure on Los Alamos scientists to suppress reports that iranian scientists are not building mass destruction fields with Higgs derivatives. Meantime 2 more iranian scientists died in mysterious circumstance. Plutonium poisoning is suspected. American and israeli agencies deny creating suxcox viruses that incapacitated iranian reactor computers despite microsoft 128b encryption. Microsoft denies complicity. As a pentagon spokesman commented, “Nobody did anything because Nothing happened.” Meantime, in the gulf of hormuz, american ships are laying mines which they say is to deter indian fishermen from tamil nadu.....

[gohlip]

Pope Hadrian (of Hadrian Collider fame) accepted what the Second Council of Nicaea (formerly known as CERN) had decreed, that only 27 papers on the god particle will be accepted and the rest destroyed.

[gohlip]

A group of american scientists disagreed with the official papers stating american scientists were not given prominence (they did nothing) and decided to publish their findings in Kansas City, renaming the particle Joseph Smith particle.

[gohlip]

A splinter group of scientists dispute the findings that there are more bosons to be found, and decreed the Higgs Boson as the last particle and renaming the Higgs Boson as The Mahdi particle.

[gohlip]

A new movement led by 4 vociferous scientists (nicknamed the 4 horsemen) dispute the existence of any boson stating it is scientifically impossible to verify its existence. Their only argument is that it is impossible to prove a negative (ignoring the fact that gluons are positively charged and tau-mesons are not).

[gohlip]

The dalai lama, when asked by australian today show why he is so quiet on such an important discovery of the god particle, the dalai lama replied, " Heh heh heh heh heh, have you heard about the buddhist monk who buy a hot dog....."