10 ms·
Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins
- Create 14y agoThe work at CERN is differentiated when it is performed by westerners or by people from the East: "The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X] source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264 Western discrimination is firmly in place there.
- JonnieCache 14y agoWhat That is referring to production costs for the calorimeter, which is part of the ATLAS detector, (it picks up neutral particles IIRC.) It doesn't refer to differentiating between work done by white people and non white people actually at CERN, which is what you seem to be implying?
- Create 14y agoPlease take time to read it. But here is a summary: "1the western equivalent value is 1'390 kCHF. 2the western equivalent value is 5'450 kCHF" http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost_tdr.pdf http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost... It is not from the ATLAS experiment, but of another LHC experiment -- but still within the organisation of CERN. The comment/quote is about evaluating people -- ie. by the simplest budgeting metric, labour cost (with obvious consequences for peer evaluation). It has nothing to do with colour but with peer evaluation of equivalent work, differentiated according eastern or western membership. edit: unable to reply to the comment below. But I can cite concrete case(s) in which work was performed in Geneva by both eastern and western member within the same group. China isn't a memberstate anyway.
- chris_wot 14y agoUh, it says labour costs in different countries. I.e. if the work is done in China then wages may be lower, if it's done in Switzerland then wages will be higher. There's no big conspiracy here by CERN, just different wages in different countries.
- icarus_drowning 14y agoReally, I think this might take the cake as the worst comment I've ever read on Hacker News.
- JonnieCache 14y agoHe cited a source, so I don't think it can take that particular cake.
- chris_wot 14y agoExcept he is misusing a source to come to an absurd conclusion!
- icarus_drowning 14y agoIn an attempt (presumably, I can't really know) to distract from a truly historic scientific achievement. Don't forget that part.
- Create 14y agoNo attempts, just plain facts: a reminder of those, who took their fair share in contributing to such a scientific achievement but were discriminated negatively compared to their "western equivalents" only for being born in a non-western country. The cited document (did all the downvoters also take their time and actually read the TDRs and papers in detail??? Or are they just ignorant sheep?) is a rare case of putting the facts on the ground down in a written and approved document, despite being taboo in an organisation touting "equal opportunities" and such policies. No downvotes will change the situation I warn about above, quite to the contrary: may my previous comment serve as a warning to all non-westerners at CERN for the time being.
- Create 14y agoIf you have difficulties in accepting criticism based on a factual quote from a (peer!) reviewed document, then you might consider changing your behaviour. The moment one experiences the consequences of such discrimination, things get far more real than an absurd conclusion you are alluding to.
- ErikHuisman 14y agoMr. Higgs just walked in.
- nodesocket 14y agoSorry, noob, who is this?
- tdicola 14y agoAnyone else getting no sound? edit: Sound is working now!
- JonnieCache 14y agoIt's just very quiet, you're just hearing the spillover from the room into the main mic. If you crank your speakers you'll hear people talking, but be careful when someone talks into the mic :)
- nodesocket 14y agoThey muting until it starts. ;)
- brok3nmachine 14y agoyou're right, I have sound now, thanks!=)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brok3nmachine 14y agoI only heard sound for a few seconds, while I let it run in the background for 5min or so.
- 10dpd 14y agoWhy is potentially the worlds finest discovery of the 21st century being communicated using the worst software to be cobbled together in the 20th? (Aka Flash)
- chris_wot 14y agoBecause the universe is conspiring against us.
- Brajeshwar 14y agoIt works. Flash Player is the only browser plugin yet that can do an actual streaming (not progressive download) using either Adobe's own Media Server or other similar Open Source at the back-end. If need be, that is the best form of protection against content theft so far. It is not that difficult to setup the whole streaming with lots of free and open source solutions available today. It's just a good means to a useful end. EDITS: Just as I suspected, it's using a Media Server Streaming Server. "rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/" It is also automatically streaming corresponding quality depending on the user's bandwidth. { bitrate: '1000', width: '640', file: 'cern1_900' }, { bitrate: '700', width: '640', file: 'cern1_600' }, { bitrate: '400', width: '640', file: 'cern1_300' }, So far, I haven't found a decent way to do that in HTML5 without having to encode multiple video-streams for multiple bitrates.
- 10dpd 14y agoIt works Unfortunately I was unable to listen in due to being on a mobile device....
- JacobAldridge 14y agoLatest application of the uncertainty principle - you can have 21st century discoveries or 21st century technology, but you can't have both simultaneously.
- FrameCluster 14y agoI think they are kind of busy at the CERN and have other things to do than shinny websites.
- dmvaldman 14y agoThat's Joe Incandela speaking, he taught me graduate quantum physics at UCSB. I feel awesome now :-P
- Sukotto 14y agoI'm in a place with single-bar wifi signal and the livestream is really choppy. Does anyone have something like a buffered stream on a delay so I can be sure I don't miss anything, even if I have to stop to buffer more of the stream? I have a vanilla, chrome browser, and a fairly recent VLC.
- Indyan 14y agoI am in office, and am following a live blog of the webcast. http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/07/03/higgs-seminar-live-blog-from-ichep/ http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/07/03/higgs-seminar-live-... [The Guardian one pointed out below is more informative]
- gnyman 14y agoThe guardian has one but it is not very detailed, but I guess they will have the main points not all the details of the presentations. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jul/04/higgs-boson-discovered-live-coverage-cern http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/jul/04/higgs-bos...
- humbert 14y agoTry the RTMP stream: rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900 If that's choppy, save it to disk with rtmpdump: rtmpdump -v -o cern1_900.flv -r rtmp://cern.fc.llnwd.net/cern/cern1_900 edit: alternate bitrates (thanks to Brajeshwar): cern1_900 cern1_600 cern1_300
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- korussian 14y agoWhy is the speaker in such a rush? He seems to be under a constant time-crunch. He keeps saying he's going to go over time and that he'll speed up. Didn't he practice this before? Can't he just tell us what he wants to tell us, and skip over the rest?
- jmcqk6 14y agoIf you're going to make an announcement that is going to be held up to the highest rigorous standards, figuring out exactly what to say is going to be a difficult issue. This presentation isn't for you, this is for the physics community.
- korussian 14y agoRight now, he's presenting general stuff that everyone in the room already knows, including him. It's just a summary of the status of the project up to now. He could have practiced this 6 months ago. Aaaand... at this very second he's starting on the new stuff, I think.
- robryan 14y agoSounds like the kind of content that is just very hard to condense into a reasonable amount of time. This seems super dense to me, but you can imagine to a physicist this is a high level overview.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoThat was simply nerves. He knew how much media attention was on him.
- mkramlich 14y agoNext time you do a major presentation on state-of-the-art high-energy physics experiments live to a world-wide community on what could be a Nobel Prize winning event, let us know and we'll watch you do it better. ;)
- exolab 14y agoI am having a lot of fun watching this, although I don't understand a single word of what he is saying :D
- M4N14C 14y agoThis guy is excited to get to the conclusion of the talk.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- JonnieCache 14y agoThe magic number for CMS is 4.1 sigma. That was combined across all channels I think?
- mattheww 14y agoAt the point you made the comment, the full number has not yet been shown. That's only the combined number for Higgs to gamma-gamma for 2011 and 2012 (so far).
- JonnieCache 14y agoSorry about that. He just said 5 sigma for the combined signals (I think? maybe I misunderstood again.) Nobel prizes all round!
- lostsock 14y agoCan someone please explain what 5 sigma signifies? Edit: “Evidence” usually means a 3-sigma signal, which existed last December, “Proof” would be a better way to describe a 5+ sigma signal, if that’s what the combined CMS/ATLAS data shows - http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4809 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4809
- mkramlich 14y ago> Can someone please explain what 5 sigma signifies? It means a statistically very very significant number of physicists are getting laid tonight, around the world. ;)
- kinghajj 14y agoI believe 5 sigma is the threshold for "proof" in the physics community.
- caladri 14y ago99.999% confidence.
- lancefisher 14y agoThe Monte Carlo method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method
- chadnickbok 14y agoJust announced 5 sigma.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ehsanu1 14y agoReally striking what a large percentage of the words are jargon. Sometimes I understand less than 10% of the words in a sentence. I think I might now better understand how a non-programmer feels when seeing a talk related to programming.
- nsns 14y agoThat's true for almost every field of academic research and work; around 70-80% of the words are not in any dictionary (or, if they are, their standard definition has nothing to do with their professional meaning).
- tikhonj 14y agoWhat always interested me is how the ratio of new words to repurposed words varies per field. For example, in CS we use a whole bunch of words like "string", "thread", "class", "type", "object", "arrow", "map" and "macro" to denote CS-specific concepts related at best tangentially to the words' original meanings. On the other hand, biology seems to prefer to come up with new words for their technical terminology. I wonder if this is a product of different cultures or something like that.
- repsilat 14y agoThe worst is botany. Botanists use common culinary words to describe almost entirely non-overlapping sets of plants/fruit etc. The "Tomato a fruit?" question is nothing compared to the "berry" thing. According to the botanical definition cherries, raspberries, strawberries, boysenberries and blackberries are not berries, but bananas, watermelon, avocado and pumpkin are. Nuts are worse. According botanists, peanuts, cashews, macadamias, pistachios, walnuts, almonds, pecans, pine-nuts and Brazil nuts are not nuts. According to most lay-people, though, botanists are nuts.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
- obilgic 14y agoThis is basically lecturer giving lecture to lecturers. Pretty amazing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bobsy 14y agoI've given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people. I am surprised he didn't start with: "I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this." I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian. If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed. Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.
- antonioevans 14y agoThis is for the scientific community. The scientific method is that all results should be scrutinized, tested and verified. If you want a 2-3 minute explanation. Wait for CNN.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI don't really buy that in this case. It's still high level and summarized and no one is verifying or scrutinizing anything based on that presentation alone. NASA handles these kinds of announcements well, but then they also announce cyanide-based life. So.
- antonioevans 14y agoHere easier for people to grasp : http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w0tty/higgs_boson_confirmed_at_5sigma_standard/ http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w0tty/higgs_boson_c...
- nilaykumar 14y agoWhen scientists present results to scientists, they present in a scientific way. I.e. methods, analysis, etc. There is no way a scientist can get by with just a short summary when talking to fellow researchers... it's just not how science is done.
- rangibaby 14y agoTL;DR: New boson discovered!
- Maro 14y agoCMS is at 4.9 sigma. Soooooooo close.
- ehsanu1 14y ago5 sigma is kind of arbitrary, isn't it? Just a nice "round" number. Obviously better than 4.9, but the line is fuzzy, if it even exists.
- Maro 14y agoCorrect. What really counts is independent verification, all at high sigmas: Tevatron, CMS, Atlas.
- tfm 14y agoBut then at the end he kept mis-speaking as to whether there were five Directors-General or six. Maybe they're at 5.9 sigma after all!
- duiker101 14y agocould you explain in easy terms what getting to 5 would mean? thanks
- Achshar 14y agoI am just a hobbyist, but as i understand it, 5.0 sigma is just the probability of the result being bogus. So 5 sigma is very high probability, something like one in 1.4 million. i.e. the chances of the result being wrong is one in 1.4 mil. 4.9 sigma will mean lesser probability, but i am not sure by exactly how much will that 1.4 mil number reduce.
- guelo 14y agoFinal (CMS) summary: We have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 +/- 0.6 GeV at 4.9σ significance! Atlas comes in at ~126.5 GeV with 5.0σ. That would be a confirmed discovery! Interesting that Atlas' mass is outside CMS's confidence range, though Atlas didn't have a range on theirs.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThe error bars on the mass range are typically just 1 sigma, so there's considerable overlap between the two figures (the Atlas figure is within the 95% confidence interval for the CMS figure, for example).
- Maro 14y agoThere are 2 big experiments (detectors) at LHC. This is for the CMS detector. Next up is Atlas. Clarification: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.html http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.ht...
- dgquintas 14y ago"We have observed a new boson at 125.3 +/- 0.6 GeV at 4.9 signa significance"
- rabagaz 14y agoComic sans!
- tomjakubowski 14y agoThe ATLAS presentation is set in Comic Sans. Monumental.
- timcederman 14y agoIs that comic sans?
- trafficlight 14y agoNothing says High Energy Physics like Comic Sans.
- mkramlich 14y agoDesigners vs physicists: Designer sits in coffee shop wearing his hipster outfit drinking his hipster coffee, writing incensed blog post about the outrages of Comic Sans. Physicist makes presentation on what is clearly a state-of-the-art advancement in the progress of high-energy particle physics (and thus, physics) to a world-wide community, live, and NOT a fuck was given as to what font is used. :P Much respect to the latter folks.
- nilaykumar 14y agoThank you! It seems very few people understand the immense pressure and intense atmosphere that surrounds work like this, especially in culminating times like these. Fabiola would likely rather spend her time improving the quality of her analysis, which is undeniably more valuable to the scientific community than agonizing over the font.
- lancefisher 14y agoLooked more like Chalkboard to me.
- mkramlich 14y agoI have a 5 sigma level of confidence it was either Chalkboard or Comic Sans. We'll need a real designer to chime in to present their own numerical analysis.
- modarts 14y agoSo I see a lot of people are frustrated about the impenetrable physics "jargon". I'm not exactly sure how you'd expect some sort of tldr; of potentially one of the most important scientific announcements of the last 100 years.
- unconed 14y agoProbably because the guy's presentation style is terrible, rushed, and his slides are a graphical disaster. He jumps from overload to overload, connecting with "obviously" and "as you can see". There is no overview, nothing connecting the endless series of slides. Everyone in the room is just waiting for the Higgs announcement. I gather that they wanted to include last minute data, but given that they're livestreaming this and tons of people are watching, it was a huge chance to get a decent presentation done that would at least highlight the important results clearly rather than having them be throwaway lines between jargon.
- zethraeus 14y agoThe world's most cutting edge scientific results presented with comic sans. :) (edit: The current ATLAS talk, not the first one on the CMS data)
- tikhonj 14y agoSimon Peyton-Jones, of Haskell fame (however relative such a fame may be), is also well known for using Comic Sans in his presentations. So it's not unknown in advanced CS either :).
- biot 14y agoIt's certainly an incredibly readable font, even with the webcast being somewhat blurry. A good choice.
- zethraeus 14y agoTwitter is full of bashing. I don't think it matters. The presentation is already unfriendly to anyone not in the scientific community, so presentation isn't really that important. However, as everyone else has said, it would have been lovely to have a layman's TL;DR. Perhaps that's the press conference at 11:00, and expecting it beforehand is arrogant.
- NHQ 14y agoThere is a font called Dyslexie which looks like a much subtler Comic Sans and was designed to be more readable for dyslexics. www.studiostudio.nl/project-dyslexie/
- diminish 14y agoSoon the web will move to Lobster.
- zerostar07 14y agoExactly! Take that, Valley's "Beautiful" startups ;)
- ot 14y agoThis happened already in 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vif4D-TJYQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vif4D-TJYQ They must really like that font :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- JonnieCache 14y agoSean Carroll is liveblogging from the room and has some actual interpretation of what's being said: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/07/03/live-blogging-the-higgs-seminar/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/07/03/...
- drostie 14y agoI love how we're using Hacker News here -- this is definitely not what it was designed for. What we're really doing is something like a live chat room while watching a common talk, but unlike chat rooms it can be threaded and points can be allocated. Also unlike a chat room, HN does not automatically update when we get new discussion messages, but that's a constraint of the technologies at the time it was built. It might be very interesting to try to use comet-casting or websockets to revolutionize chat in precisely that way, realtime threaded discussions. So, in addition to all of the chat constraints you have the ability to dynamically mark certain chat messages as replying to other messages, and as the noise in the chat room gets higher you can filter yourself to just "I want to follow this discussion."
- diminish 14y agoI love how HN users love to make live meta analysis; in most of the topics, some significant percentage of people are not focused much on the topic, but on observing other users' interactions and its techno-historical review. These show opportunities for future products.
- dandelany 14y agoThis is why Google Wave got me so excited - and why I was so disappointed when it was botched and silently killed. I think an app like Wave could be great for many things, including discussing a live event like this.
- tikhonj 14y agoI'm glad to hear I'm not the only one sad that Wave passed away. I really think it could have found some unique uses, but most people (and, transitively, Google) just didn't give it enough time. Isn't it open source now? I might try the open source version one of these days... Maybe I can even convince my friends to use it :).
- JohnLBevan 14y agoMy thoughts precisely. The code is still out there though - just waiting for someone to pick up where Google left off. . . http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html My plan is to try to rewrite this as a sharepoint add in, so that all those companies who install sharepoint as their "solution to everything" get something good with it; that could help grow the user base / promote belief in the technology. Then it could be openned out into allowing people to connect to hosted public services, and eventually get back to Google's original vision. ps. In honour of the subject matter, perhaps we should be calling it Google Duality?
- dandelany 14y agoSo, the magic number here was 5σ, the generally accepted "gold standard" for discovery, which would mean a 1 in 1.74 million chance that the results occurred by chance rather than being a signal. As other commenters have pointed out, the presenter originally announced a 4.1σ observation, then continued to add data from other experiments until the combined result was 5.1σ. However, right at the end, he added in some additional data which actually brought the significance down to 4.9σ... That's science - you can't ignore data just because it ruins your big presentation. IANAPhysicist, but I'd be interested to know how strict the 5-sigma discovery rule is considered - for example, could they still get a Nobel prize for a 4.9σ announcement? I suppose it's not that big a deal - the LHC is still running, and I'm sure they'll have enough data for a true 5σ announcement soon. Regardless, hats off to all involved, it must be exciting to be at the forefront of human knowledge :)
- mkramlich 14y agoYou should have waited to watch the ATLAS woman's presentation afterward. During hers, they concluded with a solid 5 sigma.
- chime 14y agoAtlas is still presenting. So let's wait and see what they came up with. 4.9σ was just from CMS. Edit: It is worth noting that 125GeV fits well within Fermilab's recent announcement: http://news.discovery.com/space/tevatron-data-detects-higgs-boson-existence-120703.html http://news.discovery.com/space/tevatron-data-detects-higgs-...
- dandelany 14y agoI think these physicists have been watching too many Steve Jobs presentations. "4.9σ... Oh, but one more thing!" ;) In all seriousness, does anyone know how common it is to do this kind of gradual reveal during scientific presentations vs. stating your basic final results in the introduction? It's kind of fun, but you could cut the tension in that room with a knife!
- 14y ago
- detay 14y agoCERN: Makes you feel stupid since 1954
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kmil 14y agoThey desperately need a designer. The color scheme,use of comic sans and broken composition make my eyes bleed.
- modarts 14y agoThey could care less about the presentation; these guys are all about content.
- Create 14y agoI am under the impression, that what you think is not entirely true: "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 Perhaps an answer to the naive question: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343?ln=en https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_(public_relations)#Techniques https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spin_(public_...
- modarts 14y agoOk, so how does that contradict my point about content over presentation?
- grumblepeet 14y agoNothing to do with the science, but it looks suspiciously like they are using Squeak to produce their slides. Maybe they are using it in some capacity to collate data?
- urbanjunkie 14y agoCool - they just showed a quick shot of Peter Higgs in the audience - he looked a bit emotional
- chime 14y agoPeter Higgs just teared up. This is amazing.
- mkramlich 14y agoI heard once that when Peter Higgs tears up, each teardrop is 126.5 GeV. And now it has been confirmed to 5 sigma. :)
- mkramlich 14y agoTL;DR: "I think we have it."
- scotty79 14y agoWhat they actually established except for mass and the fact that it's previously undetected particle? Do they know that it's a boson not ferminon? Do they know that's elementary particle?
- gouranga 14y agoPedant here. Can people please stop posting intervals in headlines i.e. "20 minutes!" It expired a long time ago and was probably too late by the time the first people read it. Please use at 12:00 UTC or something (a time).
- wqfeng 14y agoThe 404 page looks great.
- zvrba 14y agoOK, when can I order my bottle of Higgs bosons? ;-P
- tvon 14y agoMeta, but come on, "in 20 Mins"? The headline was wrong seconds after it was posted...
- chris_wot 14y agoSorry if this sounds ignorant, but were they doing some sort of regression analysis over large data sets?