Halfway to the Higgs?
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July 25, 2011 |
I’m always told that scientists are never ‘certain’ about anything. But when it comes to the discovery of a new particle they’re aiming to get pretty close.
Scientists at CERN have announced they’re about ‘halfway’ to discovering the Higgs boson – the particle that gives stuff mass. US scientists have also seen signs of the Higgs, but their results are less certain.
For an ‘official’ discovery researchers will need a 1 in 1 million chance that the result is just a fluke.
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Subatomic particles are smashed together at high speed in the search for the Higgs boson.
Image: CERN
Suzy
Okay – I’ll admit that I’m excited about this and not just because I’m a big geek working in a Science Museum. This huge discovery in the history of physics is probably going to happen sometime soon. But I’m curious – who else is hyper about the Higgs? And why?
Peter
I know a little bit about Higgs part of the Higgs-Boson particle but I know nothing about Boson the 2nd person in the Higgs-Boson therory
Alex
I wasn’t too sure either about the ‘boson’ part, so i’ve done a little digging.
Apparently a boson is a sub-atomic particle which obeys the Bose–Einstein statistics.
So the boson is name after Bose… Satyendra Nath Bose 1894-1974 an Indian mathematician and physicist.
Charlotte
I am in two minds about the Higgs Boson particle: firstly I would love to have the final piece of the standard model confirmed. However, if this happens, would it stop creativity in physics, as physicists would feel they had found the final solution?
Alex
Everything i’ve read suggests that scientists are by no means certain what kind of ‘Higgs-Boson’ they’ll find. So much so that what they do (or do not) discover could raise new questions and new areas of physics. It could just be the end of the beginning.