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Javier E

All Signs Point to Higgs Boson, but Still Waiting for Scientific Certainty - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-scientific-certainty.html

higgs boson universe physics prediction

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • 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
  • What happened in the first instant of the Big Bang? What happens at the middle of a black hole where matter and time blink in or out of existence? What is the dark matter whose gravitational influence, astronomers say, shapes the structures of galaxies, or the dark energy that is forcing the universe apart? Why is the universe full of matter but not antimatter? And what, finally, is the fate of the universe? These are all questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century, does not answer
  • Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called supersymmetry, 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. It predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called superpartners to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the dark matter that pervades the universe. If such particles exist, they would affect the rate at which Higgs bosons decay into other particles, but the CERN teams have yet to record what they consider a convincing deviation from the Standard Model predictions for those decays. Supersymmetry is still at best a beautiful idea.
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  • One thing that has hampered progress is that physicists still do not agree on how much the new particle weighs.
  • What does it matter how much a Higgs boson weighs? It could determine the fate of the universe.
  • his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future. The reason lies in the Higgs field, the medium of which the Higgs boson is the messenger and which determines the structure of empty space, i.e., the vacuum.
  • It works like this. The Higgs field, like everything else in nature, is lazy, and, like water running downhill, always seeks to be in the state of lowest energy. Physicists assume that the Higgs field today is in the lowest state possible, but Dr. Giudice found that was not the case. What counts as rock bottom in today’s universe could turn out to be just a plateau. Our universe is like a rock perched precariously on a mountaintop, he explained, in what physicists call a metastable state. The Higgs field could drop to a lower value by a process known as quantum tunneling, although it is not imminent.
  • 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.
  • The calculations assume that the Standard Model is the final word in physics, good for all times and places and energies — something that no physicist really believes. Theories like supersymmetry or string theory could intercede at higher energies and change the outcome.
  • The calculations also depend crucially on the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, as well as the Higgs, neither of which have been weighed precisely enough yet to determine the fate of the universe. If the top quark were just a little lighter or the Higgs a little heavier, 130 billion electron volts, Dr. Giudice said, the vacuum would in fact be stable.
  • , “Why do we happen to live at the edge of collapse?” He went on, “In my view, the message about near-criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.” Guido Tonelli of CERN and the University of Pisa, said, “If true, it is somehow magic.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion, he said, if there hadn’t been enough time already for this universe to produce galaxies, stars, planets and “human beings who are attempting to produce a vision of the world,” he said.
  • “So, in some sense, we are here, because we have been lucky, because for this particular universe the lottery produced a certain set of numbers, which allow the universe to have an evolution, which is very long.”
Javier E

Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ggs-leads-to-more-puzzles.html

physics higgs boson science supersymmetry multiverse

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Taken at face value, the result implies that eventually (in 10^100 years or so) an unlucky quantum fluctuation will produce a bubble of a different vacuum, which will then expand at the speed of light, destroying everything.”
  • The idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it. Naturally, we would have no warning. Just blink and it’s over.
  • . You might think that finding the Higgs boson, after 50 years and $10 billion or so, would bring clarity to physics and to the cosmos. But just the opposite is true: they may have found the Higgs boson, but they don’t understand it.
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  • they don’t understand why it weighs what it does — it is about 125 times as massive as the protons that were collided to make it, not gazillions of times as heavy, as standard quantum mechanical calculations would suggest.
  • For years the preferred solution to this conundrum has been a theory called supersymmetry, which, among other things, predicted the existence of a whole new spectrum of particles, superpartners of the ones we already know, that would cancel out the quantum calculations and keep the Higgs light. One of these particles might also be the dark matter that makes up a quarter of the universe by weight.
  • experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have already eliminated the simplest versions of supersymmetry.
  • The most talked-about alternative to supersymmetry is the idea of the multiverse, an almost infinite ensemble of universes in which the value of the Higgs — as well as many other crucial parameters — is random. We just happen to live in the one in which the conditions and parameters are fit for us. This is a notion that flows naturally from string theory and modern theories of the Big Bang, but accepting multiple universes means giving up the Einsteinian dream of a single explanation for the cosmos, a painful concession.
  • “Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
Javier E

Planck Satellite Shows Image of Infant Universe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-image-of-infant-universe.html

cosmology universe origins inflation

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Recorded by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, the image is a heat map of the cosmos as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, showing space speckled with faint spots from which galaxies would grow over billions of years.
  • is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years, of a cosmos dominated by mysterious dark energy that seems to be pushing space apart and the almost-as-mysterious dark matter that is pulling galaxies together. It also shows a universe that seems to have endured an explosive burp known as inflation, which was the dynamite in the Big Bang.
  • “The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete.”
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  • Analyzing the relative sizes and frequencies of spots and ripples over the years has allowed astronomers to describe the birth of the universe to a precision that would make the philosophers weep. The new data have allowed astronomers to tweak their model a bit. It now seems the universe is 13.8 billion years old, instead of 13.7 billion, and consists by mass of 4.9 percent ordinary matter like atoms, 27 percent dark matter and 68 percent dark energy.
  • “Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting.”
  • The microwaves detected by the Planck date from 370,000 years after the Big Bang, which is as far back as optical or radio telescopes will ever be able to see, cosmologists say. But the patterns within them date from less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe is said to have undergone a violent burst of expansion known as inflation that set cosmic history on the course it has followed ever since. Those patterns are Planck’s prize.
  • Within the standard cosmological framework, however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more hot and cold spots in the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth than toward the south, for example. And there is a large, unexplained cool spot in the northern hemisphere.
  • The biggest surprise here, astronomers said, is that the universe is expanding slightly more slowly than previous measurements had indicated. The Hubble constant, which characterizes the expansion rate, is 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec — in the units astronomers use — according to Planck. Recent ground-based measurements combined with the WMAP data gave a value of 69, offering enough of a discrepancy to make cosmologists rerun their computer simulations of cosmic history.
  • a Planck team member from the University of California, Berkeley, said it represents a mismatch between measurements made of the beginning of time and those made more recently, and that it could mean that dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe, is more complicated than cosmologists thought. He termed the possibility “pretty radical,” adding, “That would be pretty exciting.”
  • The data also offered striking support for the notion of inflation, which has been the backbone of Big Bang theorizing for 30 years. Under the influence of a mysterious force field during the first trillionth of a fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink, so the story first enunciated by Alan Guth of M.I.T. goes.
  • Submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in this force field are what would produce the hot spots in the cosmic microwaves, which in turn would grow into galaxies. According to Planck’s measurements, those fluctuations so far fit the predictions of the simplest model of inflation, invented by Andrei Linde of Stanford, to a T. Dr. Tegmark of M.I.T. said, “We’re homing in on the simplest model.”
  • Cosmologists still do not know what might have caused inflation, but the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has provided evidence that the kinds of fields that can provoke such behavior really exist.
  • another clue to the nature of inflation could come from the anomalies in the microwave data — the lopsided bumpiness, for example — that tend to happen on the largest scales in the universe. By the logic of quantum cosmology, they were the first patterns to be laid down on the emerging cosmos; that is to say, when inflation was just starting.
Javier E

Physicists Anxiously Await News of the 'God Particle' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-news-of-the-god-particle.html

physics particle

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • At 8 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass
  • no one thinks the Higgs is the final word about what underlies the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that describes the most basic elements of matter and the forces through which they interact. Even if the Higgs boson is discovered, the question will still remain of why masses are what they are.
  • According to quantum field theory — the theory that combines quantum mechanics and special relativity — masses would be expected to be ten thousand trillion times bigger. Without some deeper ingredient, a fudge of that size would be required to make it all hang together. No particle physicist believes that.
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  • We all expect a richer theory underlying the Standard Model. That’s one reason the mass matters to us. Some theories only accommodate a particular range of masses. Knowing the mass will give us insight into what that deeper underlying theory is.
  • The other possibility is that the answer is not the simple, fundamental particle that the Large Hadron Collider currently is looking for. It could be a more complicated object or part of a more complex sector that would take longer
Javier E

The Self-Promotion Backlash - NYTimes.com - 0 views

op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-self-promotion-backlash

self-promotion careerism career satisfaction supervision reputation collaboration excellence

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • From “building your personal brand” to “stepping up your social media presence,” we’re constantly inundated with advice about how to promote ourselves
  • some are saying that the pressure to self-promote could, ultimately, be hurting us.
  • David Zweig profiles a group of people whose jobs are behind the scenes in some way (a guitar technician and a United Nations interpreter, for instance), and who derive satisfaction not from public recognition, but from the internal sense of a job well done. These “Invisibles,” as he calls them, are often extremely fulfilled in their careers, and they may have something to teach
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  • The Invisibles offer “an alternate path to success” — they got where they were not by courting attention, but by working quietly and extremely carefully toward something bigger than themselves. “The work they do is always in service of a larger endeavor,”
  • they show that at least for some people, “when you focus on excellence and good work, that actually does get recognized in the end.”
  • Many Americans, he said, feel “this pressure to have more of a presence online and just in the overall corporate environment to be promoting themselves more, when they really would be far better off focusing on their work.”
  • many people he’d talked to while working on the book expressed “anxiety and even resentment about a work culture today where it’s expected of you to really be pushing yourself in a promotional way.” His book, he said, “gives them permission to step off the wheel” of self-promotion and go back to their actual jobs.
  • Those who feel more comfortable working in a collaborative way should do so — “the people in my book show again and again that that has brought them to success.”
  • the increasing emphasis on the self over the collective could cause problems for science:
  • “When building an individual’s reputation takes precedence over the common good, it creates troubling distortions. One of them is that scholars and scientists are encouraged to produce as many measurable units of publication as possible.
  • Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, of Higgs Boson fame, said he wouldn’t make it as an academic today because he wouldn’t be considered productive enough. There’s no time to think.”
  • “When so many people are competing for attention, getting attention becomes a full time job with dispiriting results (and is highly annoying to everyone else).”
  • Overall, she said, “there’s not a lot of evidence that self-promotion works. It’s exhausting both for the people doing it and their audience
  • “It could be argued that a culture of recognition dovetails with a culture of excessive supervision. If the expectation of recognition for nearly everything we do becomes increasingly normalized, what affect does that attitude have on our relationship to privacy, in particular to employers, corporations, and governments overseeing much of what we do?”
  • “One thing that organizations and managers might think to do is create an environment where it’s frowned upon or not as prevalent for people to constantly promote themselves.”
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