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 :o :o :o Press conference at 11.00 AM European time:

http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

LOL, i hope this time they have learned from their neutrino hoax desaster  ;D

 ;D Well, they seem to be a bit more careful this time... (watching it right now)

(A "Higgs-like Boson"... will know for sure in 3-4 years maybe...)

obviously, they are more careful.
they numeralise the significance of the data to 4,9 Sigma. a Discovery starts at 5...

not so bad, i guess.

lol, although i dont know anything about it, here is an article
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/07/higgs_boson_announcement_from_cern_why_the_god_particle_is_so_important_.html

No, not too bad... The Director General of CERN put it well, he said "As a layman I would say 'This is the Higgs particle', but as a scientist I say 'which particle is it?'

This could be BIG...  O0

...130 times the mass of a proton... :o

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/04/higgs-boson-cern-scientists-discover

(http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/7/4/1341391153749/A-representation-of-trace-008.jpg)

^...is that a _SphereInv hybrid???

another higgs explanation
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12547980-the-higgs-boson-made-simple?lite

i just hope that no new weapons can be done with it, and more hope in advances to fusion core reactors :D

and now?

imho the interresting question is: can higgs cast a little light on the strange value called "dark matter" - in literal sense...

Not shure. Dark matter is just weakly interactive particles with no electrical charge and some other things we don't see. Everything we just don't see. They could be neutrinos, micro black holes - holeums, burned out stars and all another stuff put together.
(http://www.scan-interfax.ru/Document/Image?docRef=DOC%3ASMI2012A%3Akprumsk_20120703_AEC59B16_enc001)

today, dark matter is nothing more than a value, that's needed, to match standard model with observation. a few scientists (not many) are already assuming, that dark matter (and dark energy) is a helpless attempt to save a basically wrong theory.
when higgs - the last unfound particle of standard model, can't enlighten some aspects of a value related to mass, the number of physicists, declining standard model will grow and i could understand.
while we are talking today about candidates for a "theory of everything" we only know about 4% of universes containment. higgs should bring significant improvement, or it's getting similar ridiculous, than at the end of the 19th century, where scientists honestly believed, physics is a science close to completion.

we'll see...  :dink:

what i cant understand is, scientists ( i studied astronomy a few semesters ) say that dark matter is something special, and that visible material ( suns ) are far more than the "unlightened" material, but i could imagine that "dark matter" is just unlightened material that is floating around, like planets without sun, or astreroid belts, that cant be seen because the are not near a lighting source ... they always say ... just look at our solar system, sun has far more mass than any planet, but couldnt it just be that, planets overcount suns on universe scales ?!?!??! they just cant be seen, and could explain why outer regions of out galaxy move with same speed as inner parts ?!?!?

more than unlikely and afaik no scientist even considers this. it would need about six times more "dust" than suns (or even black holes, that are barionic, "light" matter).
just to bring it back to mind. the word dark matter implies, that scientists would have some imagination of what they are talking about, but besides the value they don't have. they have two very successful theories (and they are very successful, noone declines that), but when they observe the rotation of galaxies, the theories fail massively. so they need to add an additional force to declare the behaviour of the galaxies.
dark matter is not an implication of the standard model, it's an implication of observations to save the possibility, that the standard model could be right. we should not forget this.
with dark energy it's very similar, but the higgs boson does not promise help here.

You know, they actually were quite rigorous, there. All they were saying back then, was: "HELP, we have a systematic error. Please help us find it. We measured neutrinos that went faster than light."
It was just the media that blew it up into "ZOMG EINSTEIN WAS WRONG!"

They still are quite careful now, saying "it's a Higgs-like particle", as opposed to "it's the Higgs!"

Agreed kram! It actually boosted my level of confidence that real science is alive and well, hearing them say "we don't get it but here are our results".

Clouds, mountains, trees, lungs alveolae ... are all examples of natural fractals in the macroworld.

Are there any fractal features down there at the scale of the subatomic microwolrd of elementary particles?

Well...
For one thing, that level of physics is in a way a single iterated fractal system. Even with fairly simple structures, you get complex dynamics that probably soon become strange attractor - like
In the end, all the fractals we see are made up of those tiny particles.

Though look on page 5 of this
http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~keenan/pdf/spinxform.pdf
They aren't quite directly fractals - they mostly look like spherical harmonics of sorts, but there is some kind of self-similarity going on there.

Yes, thanks. I had a look at this paper earlier today. And the image at page 5 was the one that provoked my question.

My line of thought is the following. Clouds and mountains are complex structures. We can investigate their substructure and the substructure of that substructure ... and so on at least a few generations. And from the similarities of these generation we can assume some fractal behaviour.

The elementary particles are at the current bottom of the Nature. We cannot go deeper even one generation. How do we find any fractality in them or in their properties (assuming their properties are very very discrete)?

My best shot so far is the diagrams (photos) of spiral traces of particles (something like this: http://theputnamprogram.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/bubble-chamber-bwt1-s2.png (http://theputnamprogram.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/bubble-chamber-bwt1-s2.png)). They are nice and fractalish, but maybe they are not fractals. Or maybe if we overlap the traces of thousands of particles we will finally get something fractal-like? This is like this: a single pixel is not a fractal image, but a collection of pixels picturing the Mandelbrot set is a fractal image. In this respect, individual particles might be the pixels, but in what is the picture?

Hmm... I see your trani of thought but I'd think differently about it.

For instance, look at a planetary system.
If you take two planets, their traces are easily predictable. But go up to three and almost any configuration will lead to deeply chaotic behavior.

Apply the same thing to particles. Any two particles that are able to interact with each other, probably lead to quite predictable paths. But take three or four and it'll soon become a huge, complicated mess.
However, because many such particle configurations decay quickly, in the end only the stable configurations stay for an extended amout of time.
Although the instable versions often give you transitional states. Like the Strong and Weak forces which have Protons and Neutrons not burst appart (despite their sub-elements that would strongly repell each other), Protons both repell each other AND keeping them together (Which ultimately gives a Nucleus its volume AND stability) and protons and neutrons change into each other (which happens once a neutrino flys through the nucleus, interacts with a neutron, becomes itself an Electron and turns the neutron into a proton, etc.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv3EMq2Dgq8&hd=1
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNDOSMqGLlg&hd=1
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnL_nwmCLpY&hd=1

Here's my contribution to this discussion :

(http://chzlolcats.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/funny-cat-pictures-well-those-physics-lessons-were-a-waste-of-time-then.jpg)

I actually have a lot to say on this and many other current discussions - but am still typing without a keyboard!  (on-screen thing sucks!)  (typing with a mouse is tedious).

So LOL-Cats is it for now...

Is there supposed to be a video in there or something? Because I see nothing...

Yeah, just a joke picture found here:  http://chzlolcats.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/funny-cat-pictures-well-those-physics-lessons-were-a-waste-of-time-then.jpg

It shows from my place, and the site does allow hotlinking, so not sure why you wouldn't see it  (unless you're addressing a different post?)

must have been schrödinger's cat, before vanishing in the box, beeing half dead / half alive  :dink:

(http://img.beta.rian.ru/images/69165/62/691656219.jpg)
There it reads:

- This is higgs boson!
- We found it!

Oh I see the image now. I wonder what went wrong yesterday^^