LHC confirms Higgs Boson discovery

EDIT: Ninja'd, never mind

edited 6th Jul '12 1:59:30 PM by MasterInferno

Thank you, that makes sense. Interesting that I've heard of all those particles before even if I didn't know much about them.

edited 6th Jul '12 2:00:30 PM by Kostya

The main reason we were so excited about the Higgs Boson is because all of the elementary bosons we've found fundamentally regulate the main forces, but mass and gravity were still unknowns (albeit ones we'd painted around the holes enough to have a good idea of what they'd look like).

edited 6th Jul '12 2:07:25 PM by Pykrete

I don't mean to sound offensive, and while this IS cool as hell....

Can we expect anything practical out of this? It seems every discover just elaborates on what we cant do instead of can do.

edited 6th Jul '12 2:16:53 PM by Thorn14

It takes time but we already use a healthy amount of quantum physics in computer systems today, so it's hardly "useless" information. Basic computer engineering degrees these days require quantum physics up to 2nd year (unless your university sucks balls).

Information is never useless.

Erm...depends on your focus. I have a...half-decent knowledge of the subject because I was a physics major (albeit one that was bad at quantum) before taking on CS, but I don't think our program necessitated anything beyond the basic 200-level physics and analog/digital. And while they very briefly touched on quantum in 200-level it wasn't particularly substantive until 300 hit thermal and a full-out sequence of quantum.

Maybe the EE guys had a stricter thing, but I doubt it.

edited 6th Jul '12 2:38:50 PM by Pykrete

I think Canada is a lot more progressive about requiring people to learn newer knowledge since we're on the edge of new devices that rely rather than work around quantum effects. I have a low opinion of American education with regards to computer engineering specifically because it lacks such basic things as quantum physics up to 2nd year level.

edited 6th Jul '12 2:38:43 PM by breadloaf

Honestly, my bachelor's degree in math taught me nothing at all about modern physics. We had some classical mechanics (which is a fascinating subject, by the way, and much subtler and more interesting than people generally seem to estimate), some thermodynamics, and that was it. Later I took a course in quantum computing, and I learned a little bit in that; but it was rather abstracted from the physical details — we learned about qubits and quantum transformations, not really about electrons and protons and so on.

edited 6th Jul '12 2:42:25 PM by Carciofus

Math is usually purely about math, so that's not that surprising.

I think that it's a bit of a pity. But oh well, it's yet another thing that I'll have to learn better, eventually.

The question "will we get something practical out of [physics research project X]" is always the wrong question. You wouldn't believe the number of things that NASA has invented, and none of those inventions were the result of someone asking "well, is it practical to do this space stuff?" Instead, the question was: "what kind of results do we need in order to fo this space stuff," and the answers to the challenges presented by the project were things that you and I use today. (The classic example is the non-stick frying pan.)

Same with CERN: did you know that the World Wide Web was invented at CERN by a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee? Wikipedia:

EDIT: Just to drive home the point, the link to Wikipedia didn't work initially, as it was lacking the part http://www. Both the HTTP protocol and the World Wide Web are inventions of Berners-Lee's team.

This isn't about people trying to invent things for practical purposes as the starting point. Instead, this is about highly motivated and inspired people who want to discover scientific truths about the universe, and who develop methods to carry out their research. They set a goal, and then they start climbing the steps towards that goal, and what you get from the process is the practical stuff. If you only care about the practical things, you should just try to look for distant, "useless" goals that people can strive to reach, and they'll give you the practical things as by-products.

To me, personally, the lofty goals that seem almost impossible to reach are even more important than the by-products. But even if you admire the (say) Internet more than you do the pursuit of understanding of the fundamental nature of reality, even then you should never ask: "what is this good for?" if you're talking about the goal of a long-term project. "What is this good for?" is a good question only when discussing the tools created for the individual steps in the process.

edited 6th Jul '12 3:23:51 PM by BestOf

And also, remember that lasers, when invented, was "a solution looking for a problem".

^^

Exactly. Theoretical science makes the rules clearly known and understood so that practical science can be done to figure out the actual applications for it. The two sciences go hand in hand.

We've made laws for physics based on our observations, but we don't know everything by a long shot. And the more things you can rule out or rule in, the easier it is to start on the practical stuff. Think of it like being in a pitch black room feeling your way around, that's practical science without theoretical science. When theories are established or even proven, it's like having a glowstick get places in a certain part of the room, providing a bit of light so you can see what you're trying to do just that much better, even if it's just an outline of your surroundings.

Dim light > flailing in the dark and trying to find what you're looking for. If we established a complete and utter understanding of all the rules and laws of our universe, it'd be like someone flipped a light switch, and we could do anything we wanted in the bounds of those rules and laws, and we would know exactly what those bounds were. We could know for sure what we could and could not do, and essentially know the full potential of science.

What irks me isn't that we can't figure out how we'd want to use it. What irks me is that this is a phenomenon that takes a 27 km atom smasher just to observe even after we had a very good idea what it would look like and how to get there. I mean lasers, radiation, etc. are all relatively accessible things, but this just feels kinda like the Rube Goldberg of discoveries even if it does all but confirm something very important.

edited 6th Jul '12 10:05:00 PM by Pykrete

Actually, when you look at technological progress, a lot of progress has actually been attributed to "solutions looking for a problem" throughout history. Most of the things we use have been tried before at "the wrong time" in the past. Just like there were previous failed attempts at the Internet that may surprise people.

@ pykrete

Not exactly, I mean the difficulty in trying to determine relativity affecting time differences for tuning our GPS takes satellites whipping into the low earth orbit to discover. Imagine telling that to someone in the 1920s when the seed ideas for that type of physics were just beginning. We'd barely just discovered antibiotics.

edited 6th Jul '12 10:10:56 PM by breadloaf

For one, we were already building the satellites as part of other ventures.

This is kind of missing the point again.

The people who built the LHC had one goal in mind: to carry out some experiments that had been planned previously but were impossible to carry out. They wanted to advance science, and they (and everyone else involved in the process, including the countries that paid for it all) thought that that goal was reason enough to build the LHC and do everything they've done since.

The practical things come from the things that needed to be invented just to get to the stage where the LHC could be built.

That's what I was trying to get at in my previous post: the goal is there to motivate the people who undertake the journey, and all the practical benefits come from the journey itself. That is, if you're looking at this from a practical angle.

Barkey raised a parallel point: theoretical science builds the foundation for the practical innovations that follow. It's a good point, but it wasn't the same point that I was making. Barkey is right that we need discoveries like this one to even be able to think about the possibilities.

But the thing I was trying to say was that the process of getting to this point is where you should look for the practical utility of this project. I'm sure that several new metal alloys have been invented for this project, along with new ways to build and control magnets, new ways to detect various kinds of forces, new ways to analyse different types of data, and so on.

So the question, if you're looking for utility, is not: "what use is a Higgs boson?" or "what use is a huge particle accelerator." The question you should be asking is: what kind of tasks had to be completed in new ways to design and build the particle accelerator, as well as the experiments?" That's where you find innovations that, when added together, are very probably worth more money than what went into this.

edited 6th Jul '12 10:45:41 PM by BestOf

Though there is an argument to be made about whether that's really the most efficient way of creating new innovations.

edited 7th Jul '12 1:05:08 AM by RavenWilder

It's definitely a way of getting innovations that we wouldn't have thought to even pursue if we hadn't set out to tackle such strange, enormous challenges.

There's no ability to know what is an efficient way to discover science.

I would also like to point out that the first ventures into building satellites was a colossal financial bust.

And of course, as with all invention, it's only trial and error that reveals what might be useful and what might not. And some of the latter might have unexpected uses in the future, when combined with other things.

Edison of course famously said (or was misquoted as saying at least) that he didn't fail to invent the lightbulb 100 times, rather he succeeded in finding 100 ways of not inventing it. There must be plenty of cases where failed technology, or effects dismissed as random or meaningless, turned out later to be critical to something.

Don't take offense, but do you have broad experience with research in the computer engineering field? Quantum physics is useful for a subset of academic research, but is by no means the predominant focus even in university settings. Perhaps more importantly, the overwhelming consensus at the ICQOQC in March was that physicists still are and will be in MUCH greater demand in the near future than computer engineers when it comes to quantum computing. The guy on a panel I attended from the IQC explicitly said he was advising all first or second-year undergrad computer scientists or engineers with a strong interest in quantum computing to consider changing majors. I think some of your conceptions of the computer engineering field as a whole may be biased by a particularly strong focus in Canadian universities on quantum physics and quantum computing.

Not to mention most of the computer engineer majors are focused on software instead of hardware (mostly desk clerk webmastering or database management), and there's really no reason to go into quantum for that. Hell, the only reason any of my physics background was relevant — even the stuff required in the CS major — was because I went specifically into simulation and game design.

edited 7th Jul '12 10:01:34 AM by Pykrete