Looks like the ILC will have to be built to discern what exactly this bump in the data is: https://www.linearcollider.org/from-design-to-reality/
So it's been eight years since the creation of this thread, and just as was pointed out by the skeptics at the beginning, literally nothing has come from this gigantic boondoggle. As always, we're promised the moon, sun and stars if we'll part with a huge sum of taxpayer money, and the result is nada. Nothing. Exactly what has the taxpayer gotten from this giant hole in the ground? What material benefits? None whatsoever. We're always promised that it will 'lead to discoveries that will change our lives and make new and exciting technological discoveries probable', or some such thing. And then, inevitably, the only thing that happens is we're told of magnificent new discoveries that have been achieved, but that never, ever formulate themselves into anything at all useful or worthwhile to the taxpayer that was forced to pay up for them. Hey, I've got an idea. If scientists want a giant, very expensive toy, get their own funding and stop lying through their teeth about what the taxpayer, which is considered nothing but a mark by these scientists, can expect to get. How can any reasonable person believe anything a so called scientist says if their sale pitches for their funding is nothing but prevarications?
There have been (at least) seven colossal discoveries made at CERN/FERMILAB that completely changed our understanding of the Universe, or in some cases directly led to technologies that is worth trillions of dollars to the real economy (so far): 1. The 'God particle' The physics world erupted in excitement in July 2012, when scientists using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN announced they had detected a particle that looked to be the so-called Higgs boson. In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs hypothesized the existence of a field through which all particles would be dragged — like marbles moving through molasses — giving the particles mass. Higgs thought this field would have a particle associated with it — one that is thought to give all other particles their mass. This particle became known as the Higgs boson. It was nicknamed the "God particle" after a 1993 book by physicist Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi, but many physicists — including Higgs himself — reject the term as being sensational. In 2012, after a decades-long hunt, two experiments at the LHC detected a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times as much as a proton, the positively charged particle found in the nucleus of an atom. Less than a year later, after physicists had collected two-and-a-half times more data inside the LHC, the researchers confirmed that the newfound particle was, indeed, the Higgs. The discovery of the Higgs boson represents the final piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that describes how three of the four fundamental forces — electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces — interact at the subatomic level (but does not include gravity). Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2013 for their prediction of the Higgs boson's existence. 2. Weak neutral currents In 1973, one of the first major discoveries came out of CERN: the detection of so-called weak neutral currents, inside a device called the Gargamelle bubble chamber. Weak neutral currents are one way that subatomic particles can interact via the weak force, one of the four fundamental interactions in particle physics. The discovery of neutral currents helped unify two of the fundamental interactions of nature (electromagnetism and the weak force) as the electroweak force. Theoretical physicists Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg predicted weak neutral currents in the same year that scientists at CERN confirmed these currents' existence. The theorists were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work in 1979. 3. W and Z bosons In 1983, a decade after CERN scientists detected weak neutral currents, they discovered the W and Z bosons, elementary particles that mediate the weak force. The two W bosons (W+ and W-) have the same mass but opposite electrical charges, while the Z boson has no charge. Their discovery was a major boon to the Standard Model. Using a particle accelerator called the Super Proton Synchrotron, particle physicists Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer led a team that found proof of the bosons in experiments called UA1 and UA2. The two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics the following year. 4. Light neutrinos In 1989, CERN scientists determined the number of families of particles containing what are known as light neutrinos. Uncharged elementary particles with very little or no mass, neutrinos only rarely interact with other particles, and thus are sometimes called "ghost particles." The discovery of these light, ghostly particles was made at the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), using an instrument called the ALEPH detector. The findings agreed well with the Standard Model. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings] 5. Antimatter Antimatter consists of particles that have the same mass as a particle of matter but an opposite electrical charge (as well as other properties). When matter and antimatter combine, they annihilate each other, releasing enormous amounts of energy and producing high-energy particles such as gamma-rays. In 1995, CERN scientists succeeded in creating a form of antimatter called antihydrogen, a negatively charged version of hydrogen, in the PS210 experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring. However, the antimatter collided with matter and was annihilated before scientists could study it. In 2010, CERN's Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) team created and corralled antihydrogen for about a sixth of a second, and in 2011, they maintained the antimatter for more than 15 minutes. 6. Charge parity violation One of the mysteries of cosmology is how matter exists despite the presence of antimatter in the universe, since the two tend to annihilate each other. The answer has to do with a kind of asymmetry between matter and antimatter. At first glance, the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were replaced with its antiparticle — a concept known as charge parity symmetry (CP-symmetry). But physicists at CERN were able to show that charge parity is violated. In 1964, nuclear physicists James Cronin and Val Fitch found the first evidence that CP-symmetry could be broken — a discovery for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1980. But the final evidence for the violation of this symmetry came in 1999, with the NA48 experiment at CERN, and in a parallel experiment at the U.S. particle physics facility Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois. 7. World Wide Web Particle physics aside, CERN is the birthplace of one of the world's best-known inventions: the World Wide Web (WWW). Invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, the Web was originally designed as a way for scientists at institutions around the world to share information. The first website described the World Wide Web project, as well as how to use it to access documents or set up a computer server. Berners-Lee hosted the Web on his NeXT computer, which is still located at CERN. The WWW software was put into the public domain in April 1993, and was made freely available so anyone could run a Web server or use a basic browser. And the rest, as they say, is history. Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience,Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. http://www.livescience.com/48052-cern-anniversary-big-discoveries.html And at FermiLab: Discovery of the Higgs boson Discovery of the top quark Discovery of the bottom quark Observation of tau neutrino Discovery of a quasar at a distance of 27 billion light-years Observation of direct CP violation in kaon decays Confirming evidence of dark energy http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/particle-physics/key-discoveries.html If you mean have we discovered SUSY at CERN, the answer is no. But as seen by my last post right above above, something weird is going on that most likely will not be resolved at CERN.
Physicists mourn as hinted particle vanishes in leaked LHC data Nothing to see here Everett/REX/Shutterstock By Leah Crane in Chicago For nearly eight months, physicists have been waiting for confirmation of a potential new particle that could change our entire view of physics. Now it seems the hinted particle was nothing more than a statistical blip. In December 2015, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN announced that they had each found a bump in their data at an energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV): an excess in the number of photon pairs produced inside the Large Hadron Collider, compared with predictions from the standard model of particle physics. A week after the announcement, theorists had written over 100 possible explanations; today, there are over 500. Nearly all of these papers posit the existence of a particle with a mass of 750 GeV or higher whose decay created the extra photons. Because this particle would have been outside the standard model of particle physics, it could have forced a reconsideration of how particles and forces interact. Sadly, it seems that the 750 GeV particle wasn’t meant to be. Physicists at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Chicago were due to reveal the latest data on the excess of photon pairs at 750 GeV later today, but a paper accidentally posted online last night by the CMS collaboration states that their new round of data found no extra photons. This suggests the earlier hints were just a statistical fluke... https://www.newscientist.com/articl...%7CNSNS%7C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-LHCparticleleak
The Woodstock of Physics is downtown chicago this week!!!!!!! I am going to attend a couple of events. "Beyond the Standard Model" and one wildcard one. http://indico.cern.ch/event/432527/overview
Barring a meteor strike on earth, this is a must see lecture. Hard for me to believe this is more than hyperbole, otherwise it would be all over the news. Seyda Ipek: Neutrino Masses: First Signal From SUSY! WHEN:Monday, September 26, 2016 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM WHERE:Technological Institute, F160 2145 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208 map it AUDIENCE public CONTACT pamela Villalovoz (847) 491-3644 pmv@northwestern.edu GROUP:Physics and Astronomy High Energy Physics Seminars CATEGORY:Academic DESCRIPTION: Title: Neutrino Masses: First Signal From SUSY! Speaker: Seyda Ipek, Fermilab Abstract: We know neutrinos have mass, but we don't know how they get their masses. Many models augment the Standard Model with right-handed neutrinos, either Dirac or Majorana, to generate the neutrino masses. I will show that in R-symmetric supersymmetric models, the bino and its Dirac partner the singlino can play the role of right-handed neutrinos. In this mechanism the neutrino masses are generated in a very simple fashion. I will also discuss low and high energy constraints/signatures in this framework.
What came before the big bang? Has the universe existed forever? Or was there something before it? To find out, we need a working theory of quantum gravity and a new conception of time Matthew Richardson By Douglas Heaven PAUSE. Rewind. Suddenly the outward rush of 200 billion galaxies slips into reverse. Instead of expanding at pace, the universe is now imploding like a deflating balloon: faster and faster, smaller and smaller, everything hurtling together until the entire cosmos is squeezed into an inconceivably hot, dense pinprick. Then pshhht! The screen goes dead. According to the big bang theory – our best explanation for why space is expanding – everything exploded from nothing about 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmologists have been able to wind things back to within a tiny fraction of a second of this moment. But now they’re stuck. The trouble is, our understanding of space-time, and gravity in particular, is built from Einstein’s equations of general relativity, whereas the extreme conditions of the very early universe can only be described by quantum mechanics. No one knows how to reconcile the two to take us further back. “The rules we have simply don’t work in that regime,” says Carlo Contaldi at Imperial College London. “Nothing makes sense any more.” That’s a problem for our origin story. Did time begin with the big bang? Or was there an epoch before it? Some insist that if we rewind the universe far enough, time just stops.But Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, is having none of it. “It’s a cute idea but there’s not much evidence for it,” he says. In fact, Smolin wants to see the idea that the universe has a starting point dropped entirely. We can only hope to explain why our universe is the way it is, he says, if there was something before the big bang. It’s about cause and effect; to arrive at satisfying explanations ... https://www.newscientist.com/articl...mpid=ILC%7CNSNS%7C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-BIGBANG
M-Theory imo is just the physics version of Type Theory, in particular Homotopy Type theory Quick intro to M-Theory: M-Theory is just "Type Lifting". The problem isn't with the physics, it is with our Tower of Babel where we don't see mathematics as unified whole, but as countless different fields each with its own goofy notation and abstractions. Langlands Program is a step in the right direction.