originally posted in:Secular Sevens
[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21785205]Linky[/url]
[quote]The Higgs, long theorised as the means by which particles get their mass, had been the subject of a decades-long hunt at the world's particle accelerators.
Yet there is still some uncertainty as to whether the particle is indeed a Higgs, and if so, what type it is.
Results at the Moriond meeting in Italy suggest strongly that the particle's "spin" is consistent with a Higgs.
Teams from the two Higgs-hunting experiments, Atlas and CMS, analysed two-and-a-half times more data than were available in July in an effort to pin down not only the particle's existence, but also something about its character.
All that is conclusively established is that the particle is in the family of bosons, but researchers had been careful since July to describe it as "Higgs-like".[/quote]Yay!
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[b]k[/b]
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Most of my friends ask me what I think of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, since I'm usually the only physics major they know, and all I can tell them is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't make a single goddamned difference to the lives of anybody but professional particle physicists.
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Edited by HurtfulTurkey: 3/14/2013 11:18:33 PMWhere does the article "cement" anything? This seems like a growing trend...news outlets announcing that the discovered boson is confirmed to be the Higgs', and then specifically stating stuff like: [quote]As is often the case in particle physics, a fuller analysis of data will be required to establish beyond doubt that the particle is a Higgs of any kind. But Dr Weidberg said that even these early hints were compelling.[/quote]
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Edited by Uncle Putin: 3/14/2013 9:46:04 PMI still don't understand how you can measure the spin of something so small. It boggles my mind. Why does it even have spin? What's making it spin? How can something be spinning if it has no mass? TOO MAHNY QUESHUNS!!!
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As far as I'm aware (and as the article says) they're reluctant to call it 'The Higgs' still. They're still analysing what they've found out about this new particle before they 'cement' anything.