7 ms·
What would a Higgs at 125 GeV tell us?
- michaelcampbell 15y agoI didn't understand most of this article, but it was fascinating nonetheless. It, combined with the comments (which also seem written by well informed people), would make a great corpus from which to generate markov chains.
- bigohms 15y agoAs Larry David told Ari Gold in Entourage: "I dont know what you talking about, youre talking chinese!" in all seriousness, i agree and am thankful there are people dedicating their lives to answering some of these fundamental questions.
- CountHackulus 15y agoSmall aside, "you're talking chinese" is a French colloquialism for not understanding someone. So the quote is quite apt in this case.
- bigohms 15y agoGood to know!
- ghshephard 15y agoPerhaps more fascinating than the article itself, was the appearance of particles that started moving across the graphs and text. At this early hour of the morning I thought I was having some type of hallucinatory episode.
- wladimir 15y agoI had the same WTF. White particles on a white background, making parts of the text disappear. Site owners, please don't pull these kind of tacky javascript tricks, especially not if we're meant to read the (difficult) text.
- gegenschall 15y agoMe too. I instantly stopped reading to return here and see if anyone else complained. Now I have to start over. -.-
- jrabone 15y agoTry this: 1. Install Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) 2. Add the following to etc/user.action {+block{Stupidities}} /(.*/)?snow(storm)?\.js(.*)? 3. Configure browser to use localhost:8118 as an HTTP proxy 4. Profit.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mkup 15y agoJSSwitch addon seems to help against that stuff. I've placed its nice red JS button on the right side on statusbar.
- thetrendycyborg 15y agoReadability fixes this. I read most things in readability.
- Periodic 15y agoI actually ended up with the white "flakes" over my inverted readability page. I was very confused at first, but was able to ignore it fairly easily.
- dpcan 15y ago0 TeV collisions of snow particles with alphanumeric characters were recorded at max annoyance levels at 9:23AM PST.
- yread 15y agoWow this is the first time I heard about unstable vacuum and that > the universe could in theory spontaneously explode at some point releasing huge amounts of energy as it fell into a more stable lower energy vacuum state. This catastrophe would spread across the universe at the speed of light in an unstoppable wave of heat that would destroy everything in its path. Also >instability could also set in at energies around a million TeV .. so if LHC was million times more powerful it could explore such instabilities i.e push the vacuum out of the metastable state and trigger the scenario above!? It seems I wasn't giving enough credit to the religious nuts saying that LHC will destroy the world
- Sharlin 15y agoYes; triggering a vacuum collapse is one of the three (EXTREMELY hypothetical) doomsday scenarios associated with high-energy particle accelerators: * Triggering the collapse of the vacuum to a more stable state * Production of strangelet particles that convert everything to more strangelets * Production of microscopic black holes that eventually swallow the Earth First of all, all three require hypothetical extensions to currently accepted physics, but the most compelling argument against these being possible is the fact that thousands and millions of times more energetic events than what LHC is capable of occur all around the Universe all the time, including in Earth's upper atmosphere, and we're still here. See http://user.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html http://user.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html
- maeon3 15y agoAlso, assuming there are advanced civilizations in our visible universe, none of them have produced a universe destroying event... At least not for the last 14 billion years. We are safe. everything going on at the lhc has already happened Near the earth. On the plus side, if something does go wrong, you wont get a chance to worry about it.
- jordanb 15y agoI don't think we have to go that far. These particles exist in nature, but not conveniently here on earth in the vicinity of test equipment. The Universe produces very high energy events all the time -- supernova among others -- and many of these have happened within our light cone, yet have not thrown a wave of new vacuum at us.
- chris_gogreen 15y agothe snowflakes are slowing firefox down
- rkon 15y agoI can't imagine the talk of vacuum instability and universe-destroying explosions will make the general population very supportive of this project: "World's Most Powerful Laser to Tear Apart the Vacuum of Space" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8857154/Worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-tear-apart-the-vacuum-of-space.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8857154/Worl...
- jerf 15y agoGenerally speaking I consider the Many World hypothesis unprovable, but proving the vacuum is unstable is one proof I'd accept. For a sufficiently unstable vacuum, that would imply that the vast majority of our futures end in vacuum-instability death, and that our continued existence is actually a universe-scale Quantum Suicide result; we can never observe a wave front of total death coming at us at light speed. If Many Worlds is true, it wouldn't matter how what percentage of our futures are wiped out in total light-speed annihilation as long as the survival percentage chance is non-zero.
- jessriedel 15y agoAn extremely large or infinitely large universe would also be compatible with this anthropic argument, without invoking many worlds. (The philosophical caveats are legion here, since both quantum mechanics and the anthropic principle is involved.)
- petercooper 15y agoWell, if Doc Brown used 1.21 gigawatts to go back in time and the "God" particle is at 125GeV, perhaps we learn that God turning back time would draw 9.68 million electron amps.