Mashed article from mashed NYTimes articles by Pat Darnell, and the Herd | Dec 7, 2013 | Bryan TX
[Slide LINK]
On my desk sits a Rubric's Cube with dust on it, and unsolved. If I had an exotic brain I would be more like the wise bovine with its special cultural symbiosis. One cow alone does not a Summer make... eh? It takes many diverging carbon based entities to make up a theory about life, the universe, and everything. It also takes a compendium of particles and winking beams, and dark energies to make up everything in the universe. It takes a herd to get through life.
Lately, for the past 50 years, Nobel Prizes in Physics have centered around finding "new particles" in the make up of matter and all things. In 2002:
" ... It was there, in the 1970s, that Raymond Davis Jr. attempted to catch neutrinos, spooky subatomic particles emitted by the sun, in a vat of cleaning fluid a mile underground and for a long time came up empty. For revolutionizing the study of those particles, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002. ( DENNIS OVERBYE. Published: October 30, 2013. LINK) ... "It sort of has become a melee of particle farming. "If it is out there, we will find it," say the many hopeful, yet frustrated, physicists. Each experiment, to find the elusive dark matter that supposedly makes up 25% of the universe, takes at least a year to complete. And for those who devote themselves to the task, there is seldom joy at the end of the procedure. Lately, experimenters have this to say:
" ... As has become de rigueur for such occasions, the scientists took pride and hope in how clearly they did not see anything. “In 25 years of searching, this is the cleanest signal I've ever seen,” Dr. Gaitskell said in an interview.
That meant, the scientists said, that their detector was working so well that they would easily see a dark matter particle if and when it decided to drop by. (ibid. DENNIS OVERBYE. Published: October 30, 2013.) ... "
What can all this fantaz-morphic research bring to the table of common knowledge? That's a good question, and not easily answered. Safe to say knowledge of our primordial physics does not help us in any knowable way today.[Picture LINK]
The math of Higgs-boson is impossible for the layman to understand. High energy physics, H.E.P, is what is called "basis-independent." However, unlocking pre-Big-Bang physics could offer knowledge of particles and their energies that could be used in medicine to heal, or to help read all the band waves that are invisible to humans. It turns out that high energy physics research is open ended research, although fundamental, that will take many generations to find that which it seeks. And, some "basis's are misleading, or too convenient." Nonetheless, it will be the "correlations between deviations in Higgs-boson couplings that will reveal the underlying physics."
Each discovery is tagged by the issuance of a Nobel Prize, as in "... finally, in 2012 — after 48 years, billions of dollars and the work of thousands of talented experimental physicists — we finally saw a tiny bump in data plots obtained at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. That bump, evidence that the collider was producing Higgs boson (SEAN CARROLL. Published: October 8, 2013. LINK ) ... vindicated the work of Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs years before ... "
Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles - NYTimes.com: EXCERPT | " ... As Joseph Lykken, a theorist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, of the California Institute of Technology, put it in a new paper reviewing the history and future of the Higgs boson: “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."
"But cheer up. ... 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. (DENNIS OVERBYE. Published: November 4, 2013.) ... "
'via Blog this'
In reference below you will find a slew of NYTimes articles mostly by Dennis Overbye, about multiple universes, dark energy, massive protons, Higgs-Boson, super-symmetry; how does it all go together? Because, "accepting multiple universes means giving up the Einsteinian dream of a single explanation for the cosmos, a painful concession."
We, as a species, are limited by what we can explain.
“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. (Steven Weinberg,November 7, 2013. LINK) .. ”CONCLUSION
This mad hatter idea of "Theory of Everything, T.O.E." is a lonesome, undiscovered thing. If it is even out there, it will escape many future explorations. It was a folly to get excited over a T.O.E in the first place; or was it?
" ... Dark matter has teased and tantalized physicists since the 1970s, when it was demonstrated that some invisible material must be providing the gravitational glue to hold galaxies together. Determining what it is would provide insight into particles and forces not described by the Standard Model that now rules physics, not to mention a slew of Nobel Prizes. (ibid. DENNIS OVERBYE. Oct 30, 2013.) ... "For now, a quarter of the universe is still missing in action. The biggest surprise of discovering the Higgs boson? That there were no surprises; ... in theoretical physics: what if the Higgs field exists in an ultra-dense state that could mean the collapse of all atomic matter? If so, then it explains how fundamentally the universe lives and dies -- and regenerates.
Steve Braun EXCERPT | Comment:
" ... Nov 23 2013: I get a little frustrated when physicists use a cloaked version of the "fine-tuning argument" in their cosmology. You will find many physicists saying that the "how" questions should replace the "why" questions, because "why" begs the question of "purpose" and "who dunnit". We should not conclude that there is anything special about the Higgs mass, anymore than we should conclude there is anything special about the strength of gravity. If you think that the universe must be fine-tuned to support our life, you have started with a conclusion - life, or the length of time we expect to be observers of our universe - and then looked at empirical data and concluded that there is something special because the values for the Higgs field in either state allow us to continue to observer our universe for "a long time". (LINK) ..."Therefore, in another universe parallel to ours, the alternate me understands the value of Higgs-boson? Now that the quantum vaccuum is "the medium" ... Probably so, but the alternate me might be Ferdinand the Bull.
_________________________Reference
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/finding-the-higgs-leads-to-more-puzzles.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fscience%2Fspace%2Findex.jsonp
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/science/space/dark-matter-experiment-has-found-nothing-scientists-say-proudly.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/finding-the-higgs-leads-to-more-puzzles.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fscience%2Fspace%2Findex.jsonp&_r=0
http://www.ted.com/talks/gian_giudice_why_our_universe_might_exist_on_a_knife_edge.html
http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/lhc-c13/lykken/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/physics-what-we-do-and-dont-know/
http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~weintech/weinberg.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/08/science/the-higgs-boson.html#/?g=true
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/science/physicists-see-higgs-boson-in-new-particle-but-more-study-is-needed.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/englert-and-higgs-win-nobel-physics-prize.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/higgs_boson/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/dark_energy_astronomy/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cern/index.html?inline=nyt-org
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/nobel_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/1247466052693/collider-reaches-its-power-goal.html?ref=largehadroncollider
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