... mass...quantities....

Yes.. mass quantities..

It is not an actual discovery in scientific terms, but the evidence is very, very significant.

In all probability they have managed to find it, but further work needs to be done before it can be called a formal discovery.

Nevertheless, exciting news.

In the case of the Higgs, 'discovery' is necessarily a statistical measure of confidence given that the particle decays much too quickly to be observed directly (at 125 GeV the Higgs travels the roughly the width of an atomic nucleus before disintegrating). 'Detection' is inferred by means of its decay products whose exact composition can assume any of a number of different configurations. Very elusive bugger indeed! Btw, I won a bet with a friend at CERN over Higgs' mass. He guessed 137 GeV, I guessed 125 GeV! :-)

Cool, but I will just wait for them to check that all plugs are connected this time, before I start looking for the ɐuʇı ɥıƃƃs particle. S.M.

Clicky

Thanks!

Finally! Now that that's solved, can we figure out why warm water freezes "faster" than cold water?

I think it's because all fresh water has now been microwaved at least once....or maybe the Higgs just prefers cold water...?

Bwahahahaha! Btw, saw a thread yesterday (not here) about some outfit wot sells Double-Helix Water *Now With Added Quantum* for $60/cc - and they're swamped with orders (sigh).

Stable water clusters...

A ______ and his _______ are soon ___________.

I bet anyone here can fill in the blanks.

This sounds very much like a Lyndoor™ product ripoff.....

"A combination of magnets and an LED (Light Emitting Diode) excites the patented MRET® polymer, emitting a highly effective noise-field. The low frequency oscillations activate and change the water or liquids molecular structure into a highly intelligent, bio-available water or liquid. Coupled with BIOPRO's proprietaryERT™ (Energy Resonance Technology), which imprints a vital subtle energy signature into the water."

...and why spaghetti breaks into at least three pieces?

Quirks?

SO where are the mini black holes and time jumps/parallel reality bleed over effects we were so warned about if the Hogs Boson experiment was conducted?

Or is having 1/8 of the potential energy of a flying mosquito not enough to shatter the space time thingy?

Fortunately, those all happened in parallel universes....

Yours too? God I hate conspiracies.

Why are universes always assumed to be in parallel? Why not Series Universes or Series-Parallel combinations ? Haven't these buggers ever taken Applied Cosmology? :-)

Series universes are not a good place to dwell. They only last 5 to 7 years and then get cancelled.

Yes, but then they become syndicated universes with a big bang.

True, but do you really want to live your life as a perpetual rerun?

By Universal's serial killers no doubt!

So now we finally get our warp-speed spaceships and anti gravity skateboards?

Not so fast, Louie. First we've got to get inertialess mass worked out before we even *think* of doing those right-angle turns at the speed of light.

"CERN". That's nice. Sound's really exciting. Far better than "PCS" _{(PlbMak's Carrot Shed)}...

Okay, we could say that physicists succeeded to explain in which way the several particles obtained their mass, i.e. they explained the particles' existence. I suppose that, now, they have to explain the existence of Higgs Boson itself... ...

I think that is easy (or far easier than some other fundamental questions). The Higgs field is to the Higgs Boson as the electromagnetic field is to the photon. When excited to an energy level of enough magnitude they both emit a particle (Higgs or photon).

Where it gets confusing is what are all the 12 known sub atomic particles for? It only takes a combination of 3 (Up Quark, Down Quark, and the Electron) to make up any type of known matter in the universe. So why are there at least 9 more? How do they work? Are there more that we have not seen yet?

Or they may all be manifestations of a few, as-yet unforeseen, *truly elementary* particles or something so fundamental we don't even have a name for it yet. 'Eigenparticles', if you will, out of which reality itself is constructed. All very speculative of course, but we still don't know what charge is, for example. Not really. Nor do we know what spin is, nor up-ness, down-ness, colour, nor much of anything else at this level. We don't know why some particles have the masses they have nor how to predict the masses of certain others - including the Higgs. We now know from experiment that it is close to 125 GeV but not why it has that mass and not some other value. The Standard Model is far from complete. Remember, it wasn't all that long ago that the 'elementary' particle zoo had many, many more members which today we know are not elementary in the slightest.

Maybe we could refer to the next one as the God Dam* Particle as Professor Higgs really wanted to call the newly discovered one in the first place.

I dunno. It was announced today that Steve Jobs is posthumously suing CERN on the grounds that his 'jParticle' constitutes "prior art." :-)

Not to steal CERN's thunder, but I wanted to let you know that I have also run into an important discovery by finding the elusive "Dog" Particle (see below).

The Dog Particle is thought to be responsible for giving added mass to footwear.

The real thrill is smashing two of these together at relativistic speeds where the poop hits the fan, so to speak.

Stickier than gluons, the new Dog Particle joins the family of other notable particles such as the Up Bark, Down Bark, Charmed Bark, Top bark, Bottom Bark, and the Strange Bark.

Congrats on your discovery and certainly one worthy of the Ignobel Prize!

[psst: Isn't that the LBSC (Large BullSh!t Collider) seen hovering above said discovery? Your underwriters are obviously very well-heeled! ]

Or in deep doodoo!

Ikea needs all the particles they can get so they can make more furniture.