New particle found by the Large Hadron Collider

[Bill Boddy]

Following the restart of the collider after a major upgrade has shown up a new particle.

Large Hadron Collider may have detected a new particle

Oh, hold on, it's not new, it's just never been seen before. I do wish someone would talk to these people, leading them to use words correctly.

 

[sushifiesta]

May is the key word here. It is a fairly modest excess that could be a new particle but at this stage could just as easily be a statistical variation. It's roughly a 2 sigma deviation from the mean, nowhere near the 5 sigma required to claim a discovery.

With the amount of data taken and number of different analyses done you're almost guaranteed to find a small statistical fluctuation somewhere, although there is quite some excitement about this one and both experiments have seen it. Unlikely to be any significant update until the second half of 2016, though. People were actually quite disappointed with the news because there were a lot of rumours before that the excess was much larger than what actually got presented.

 

[Titch]

Will it find dark matter though ?

 

[sushifiesta]

Could do.

 

[Titch]

Maybe not.

 

[Incubus]

Blimey. If that thing on the link is a large hadron collider I wouldn't much fancy standing next to an enormous one.

 

[cider_and_toast]

I love the way that scientists using the collider are pretty sure that using it won't cause the end of the world. Guess we'd never know if it did go boom on us anyway.

 

[Incubus]

Maybe it actually has already and we've been reincarnated? It's just that with our rotten luck we've come back as ourselves again?

 

[sushifiesta]

Blimey. If that thing on the link is a large hadron collider I wouldn't much fancy standing next to an enormous one.

Wait 30 years and you might be able to: CERN eyes new giant particle collider

 

[FB]

Oh for pity's sake, can these people not piss money down the drain quickly enough?

 

[sushifiesta]

It's very unlikely to be built as it's too expensive considering CERN's current budget. I don't think investments in cutting edge science/technology are just pissing money down the drain though. You don't make progress unless you push the boat out on projects like these, even if there may be no obvious benefit during our lifetimes.

 

[Incubus]

Well that's the same old debate though, the benefits of research V the £££ spent on it.

In the 20th century the most significant scientific breakthrough was probably Einstein's E=Mc2. But when it came to actually putting the formula into pracctice for something the first thing they did with it was the nuclear bomb...

 

[FB]

I'm sorry but the money would be far better spent on resolving many other far more serious issues there are in the world and if the brilliant minds that design and work at CERN put there efforts into these then we would probably live in a much happier and more tranquil planet. I am realistic enough to know that this will never happen though.

 

[sushifiesta]

If you look at the history of pure Physics research I think its contribution to society is exceptionally high. Purely from a particle physics perspective in recent times you can point to cancer diagnosis and treatment (PET, CT, MRI, creation of isotopes using accelerators in hospitals, direct cancer treatment using particle beams etc.) and everyone's go to example of the World Wide Web, which has completely revolutionised how everyone communicates and accesses information. The internet has a huge impact on every single problem the world has to solve and so you can almost end the argument there. Yes it would have come in to existence in some form without CERN, but not in the open source format we have it today. As for E=mc^2 and special relativity Incubus , nuclear power plants are currently the only realistic long term source of power that can meet global demands, and GPS navigation depends on special relativity and has countless applications worldwide. We might not even be aware of all the serious issues there are to solve in the world if it wasn't for people in human history "wasting" time and money playing with things like electricity and aeroplanes.

The annual CERN budget is not even ridiculously high - roughly $1 billion per year split between 24 countries - and let's not forget the significance of having an organisation where 24 countries can successfully collaborate, by the way! Many other organisations have much larger budgets - NASA is $18 billion per year, the UN $13 billion per year - and the worldwide spend on defence is $1630 billion!

 

[Incubus]

Oh I totally agree with all of that sushifiesta . No argument from me on that.

My argument is rather different. With everything that NASA are achieving on an-ever shrinking budget, just think about about how much more they achieve in a way that benefits humanity if so much of their findings didn't end up in the hans of government-funded private interests... and that's a very old story. You only have to look at the Moon landings. If you look at the headlines from 45 years ago you'd forgiven for thinking the sole purpose of them was the ability to plant a US flag on its surface before the russians did...

 

[Bill Boddy]

....If you look at the headlines from 45 years ago you'd forgiven for thinking the sole purpose of them was the ability to plant a US flag on its surface before the russians did...

I always thought that was the reason for it in the first place, just another part of the "cold war".

 

[Incubus]

Exactly.

 

[FB]

Not to be overly negative but the things you mention sushifiesta were as a result of the research, they weren't the reason the research was being carried out. Imagine if the minds that do this fundamental research actually thought about applying themselves real world problems rather than doing research simply for the sake of it.

As to the World Wide Web, wasn't that created by the US military simply to allow them to keep communicating after the bombs were dropped? Most major leaps forward in technology have been due to war, does the end always justify the means?

 

[sushifiesta]

Which real world problems are these exactly? Global spend on health related research undoubtedly dwarfs any Particle Physics spend, something approaching $150 billion was spent on pharmaceutical R&D alone in 2015. ITER (the fusion project) has received billions in research. Tens of billions per year are spent on agricultural research. I don't think CERN sticks out like a sore thumb in terms of the money it receives compared to other fields.

 

[FB]

But CERN is funded by tax payers money, most other medical research is funded by charities or medical/drugs companies looking to turn a (huge) profit. Anywho, I'm not picking on CERN in particular, more using it as an example of where I believe money could be better spent.

Governments across the world spend trillions funding all sorts of things which are neither use nor ornament to mankind when people go hungry in the streets. Me ranting on here about CERN isn't going to change that, it's also not going to stop the billions spent on space missions by China and India (and other countries where people have to use food banks or live in cardboard boxes in the pissing rain and snow) or finding new ways to kill people by the "defence" industry.

Something as simple as providing fresh water and sewage systems in the third world is a real world problem but we in the UK get our knickers in a twist about the amount of money put into the foreign aid budget. Let's shelve HS2 and the replacement for Trident and put this money in to the UK aid budget.

I shall now get down off my soap box and apologise for having taken this thread wildly off topic.