8 ms·
New particle observed at LHC
- JacobAldridge 15y agoA reminder for me to practice pronouncing 'quark' like 'quart' - I think that original plan has been overun in practice and 'quark' is like 'lark', but I like the occasional air of eccentric pretentiousness.
- ars 15y agoI still pronounce it like lark, and I don't intend to change.
- nknight 15y agoI'm utterly confused. I've never heard it pronounced like "lark". When/where has that been common?
- Toucan 15y agoStar Trek:Deep Space 9 ?
- nknight 15y agoEr, OK, I find that much closer to "quart" than "lark". Maybe we're dealing with some sort of accent/dialect issue here, and/or people are hearing something far more subtle than I am.
- lmm 15y agoquart is (at least where I live) pronounced to rhyme with wort (or, I dunno, sort).
- jonnathanson 15y agoI think it's a regional/accent thing. I'm on the West Coast, and I've always used (and heard) the DS9-style intonation of the word (which, to my ear, sounds a lot more like "quart" than "lark"). Midwesterners and New Englanders are probably more likely to hear and use the "lark" pronunciation in the word. (And the James Joyce explanation needs to take into account that Joyce, being Irish, would have pronounced and rhymed things a bit differently from an American).
- rprospero 15y agoMidwesterner (Indiana) here. I've never heard anyone use the "lark" pronunciation.
- kbutler 15y agoquart rhymes with wart (and not with art, bart, cart, dart, fart, mart, part, or tart) quark rhymes with ark, bark, dark, hark, lark, mark, nark, park, stark. Idaho/Utah, though I developed various pronunciations from early reading rather than hearing.
- Angostura 15y agoFrom Murray-Gellman's The Quark & The Jaguar: The Quark and the Jaguar:[45] “ In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark", as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking-Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature. " Personally, I think he should have stuck with Kwork if he wanted that pronounciation.
- ars 15y ago"it is a boson - the label given to particles that carry the forces of Nature." That's not correct. All force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers. I sent them an email telling them, maybe they'll correct it.
- ars 15y agoI guess they got my email, they updated the article and removed the line entirely (rather than fixing it). They also significantly fleshed out the article compared to 2 hours ago. The "last updated" time was not changed though. How come some papers keep a record of changes/corrections at the bottom of the article, and others just silently change it?
- dalke 15y agoIt depends on the internal guidelines. I read somewhere that some sites have a policy that a page can be updated in the first 24 hours without making a note of the change. I can't find anything to back up this memory now. I can suggest the analogy that it's like an article in the first edition of a newspaper (back in the days when newspapers would run multiple editions), which by the final edition has had more review.
- cperciva 15y agoThe new particle is made up of a 'beauty quark' and a 'beauty anti-quark', which are then bound together Or in more common terms: It's a bottom/antibottom pair. I would have loved to see the names "truth" and "beauty" catch on for the third generation quarks, but sadly "top" and "bottom" won.
- zerostar07 15y agoTBH i dislike those quirky names because they become fodder for popular media nonsense. Just like the way the "God particle" can be misunderstood for having something to do with religion.
- dicemoose 15y agoHiggs actually wanted to call it "the goddamn particle."
- daliusd 15y agoActually it was Leon Lederman who wrote book "The God Particle". Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.cern http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/30/higgs.boson.ce...
- michaels0620 15y agoThat is a great book. It's well written and touches on details that most "physics for the masses" books skip. I also regret the use of the term God Particle though. I know he was being cheeky but it is all too easy for people to grab onto something like that and believe that this is some sort of religious quest.
- zerostar07 15y agoI can't fathom the amount of physicist blood that would be shed in the crusades that would follow.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
- colinm 15y agoHow come scientists ccan find all this shit, yet can't cure the common cold??
- NolF 15y agoThe common cold is not a single virus but many many many different strands which are continually mutating. Ever gotten the flu after the vaccine? That's because the vaccine doesn't target all flu strands, merely what the developers identify to be the main strands of the flu virus for that season. These particles are very difficult to find, extraordinary amounts of electricity are required to create them for the brief period of time they exist independently. Incredibly sophisticated equipment is used to detect the signs that such particles emit, and mind boggling computational power is used to sort through the petabytes of data gathered through thousands of collisions to be able to identify a particle with sufficient confidence. Due to the unchanging nature of particles and their components, and the robustness of experiment methodology, and theoretical models to assist what one may look at, finding a particle becomes practicable.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago...and an article posted here a couple weeks ago noted the significant progress in developing a pill for viral infection, including the common cold. So don't dispair!
- dalke 15y agoOr to put it another way, there are 300 million Americans. If it costs $10 per person per cold strain per year, and there are 10 new infectious strains per year which could be inoculated against, then that's $30 billion every year. The total cost of the LHC is about $7 billion, spread over more than a decade and shared between many countries. The Apollo program, btw, cost about $129 billion in 2011 dollars.
- jessriedel 15y agoJust so it's clear, this (merely) composite particle is made of known quarks and is predicted by the Standard Model. It's basically like producing element 113 on the periodic table. The discovery of a new fundamental particle (like a Z-prime), or of a composite not in agreement with the standard model (like a pentaquark, kinda), would be much bigger news.
- shaggy 15y agoSure, discovery outside the standard model would be bigger news, but this is still very exciting, imo, for a few reasons. It shows that the LHC has real value and is working. It shows that the science is right and now it's been confirmed. It also shows that we can continually gain understanding of how everything works which makes us smarter as a whole. It may not be sensational, but it sure is fantastic to see the progress being made.
- cobrausn 15y agoI might get downvoted for this, but so be it. What value does the LHC have outside of the scientific community? It's not, as you say, 'progressing our understanding', it's more or less just giving us empirical evidence that the long-dead giants of physics were correct. It's like a very expensive unit test for reality. Is it just me, or are we, as a species, just 'spinning our wheels' scientifically? I'm hoping to see major scientific advancement that pushes us forward sometime within my lifetime, but I'm beginning to have doubts that all of the new 'super science' will ever leave the theoretical...
- mattheww 15y agoNo, measurements at the LHC really are, and will, progress our understanding. Let me give the measurement of the Higgs as an example. There is very strong evidence that a Higgs boson should exist. An observation of the Higgs boson would provide empirical confirmation of that idea. However, the fact there's a Higgs boson doesn't expand our understanding very much, since after all, we strongly suspected it was there. Measurements of the Higgs boson quantum numbers, on the other hand, provide very useful expansions of our understanding. The parameter space of possible Higgs bosons is so large that its impossible to know where it could be and different regions correspond two very different possible physics. So the measurement of the Higgs' mass, spin, couplings, and even the number of Higgs bosons are actually quantitative improvements to our understanding. The problem is that if you're not a physicist, it is very difficult to explain to you why this measurement is something more than empirical. Lay people can easily understand that a new particle has been observed, but not so much how that expands our understanding. I'd also like to point out that most of the people who came up with the ideas that are being tested are still alive. The standard model as we know it didn't really start taking shape until the 1970s.
- generators 15y agoQuestions: (1) The news of new particle found keep coming now and then. so, for a newbie, Does finding a new particle change anything ? i.e. does it change the way we think about physics. i.e. How important finding a new particle is ? (2) Could it be possible that there may be infinite type of particle and we keep finding them ? OR the way our detection system works keep sensing same particle as a different one ? (3) Is finding a new particle is intention of LHC ? If I smash one brick with another, I bound to find two brick part. Is more science involve here ? ( not in the process, I know its big deal, but in the logic. ? )
- vectorpush 15y agoWow. I'm surprised to see so many anti-science comments on HN. If you cannot extrapolate how pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge is beneficial to humanity as a whole then I'm sort of at a loss. The money spent on the LHC is a drop in the bucket (for example, the USA spends 70 times as much in one year on defense alone).
- bostonpete 15y agoI've never criticized the LHC, but couldn't your comment apply to any scientific research? Since resources are bounded, you can't automatically say that any scientific research is worth spending billions of dollars of money on. I don't think it's productive to label as "anti-science" anyone who asks sincere questions about whether LHC (or any project) is worth the price-tag.
- easy_rider 15y agoThe "problem" with science is that it's discoveries now, might not hold any value in the present time, but could be proven worthy in a later stage when we have discovered other things. Let alone the fact that when they pursue a goal to find out for example about a magical Higgs particle, there will be innovations in other side-fields of that particulair research (e.g. computing power, more advanced sensory array's etc). And these technologies can then perhaps be applied in fields that people can actually relate to in their own environment: Making a planetrip more safer by enabling sensors to be less error-prone for example.
- vectorpush 15y agoI don't think it's productive to label as "anti-science" anyone who asks sincere questions about whether LHC (or any project) is worth the price-tag. Asking questions is great, the anti-science rhetoric is the kind that suggests that research isn't worth the cost if the objective knowledge is not obviously or immediately applicable outside the lab. Science works in discrete steps. you can't automatically say that any scientific research is worth spending billions of dollars of money on. Not all researchers are created equal, so I can't automatically say it, but I'd be hard pressed to name a field of cutting edge research that I think doesn't deserve to be well funded. The reality is, science is pretty damn cheap for what it yields (e.g. the modern world). You can't really put a price on universal truth.
- Create 15y ago"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper