PARTICLE PHYSICS
The hunt for the
Higgs has involved several crests and plateaus during research. The particle
reported last July is indeed the Higgs, but it takes more research work and
analysis before there could be any cold evidence to confirm the case.
Physicists admit that it will take more work and analysis before they will have the cold numbers that clinch the case that the new particle announced on July 4 last year is in fact the exact boson first predicted by Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to be the arbiter of mass and cosmic diversity.
Joe Incandela, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and spokesman for the leader of one of the teams, calls the particle a Higgs boson. He spoke on the eve of the Moriond workshop in La Thuile, Italy, where CERN physicists presented the latest analysis of some 2,000 trillion collisions recorded by the Large Hadron Collider.
There could still be surprises, but so far, physicists say,
the particle is on target with the predictions of the Standard Model, the
current reigning theory in physics. This is a triumph for the theorists who
invented the boson, but might be a disappointment for those who dream of
revolution.
Fate of the universe
What is the fate of the universe? The questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century is not answered. Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called super symmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite.
Fate of the universe
What is the fate of the universe? The questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century is not answered. Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called super symmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite.
Sucked into a black hole
Giudice’s calculations suggest that it would take much longer than the age of the universe; the whole Milky Way galaxy could disappear into a black hole long before then.
Giudice’s calculations suggest that it would take much longer than the age of the universe; the whole Milky Way galaxy could disappear into a black hole long before then.
If that should happen — tomorrow or billions of years from
now — a bubble would sweep out through the universe at the speed of light,
obliterating the laws of nature as we know them.
Source: New York Times News Service
