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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (12947)	12/6/2001 12:26:08 PM
From: FaultLine	Respond to of 281500

Oh well, another scientific theory bites the dust, I liked it -- good article (and not without it's ironies too) --k@testingahypothesis,ain'titgreat.com

To: maceng2 who wrote (12947)	12/6/2001 12:42:13 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Infering the existence of God from an incomplete theory at the fair reaches of particle physics is, uh, somewhat more speculative than the theoretical physics being considered. As to the Higgs Boson thing, offhand, I'd guess there's a good chance that Swain is overstating his case a bit. A random google link: If the answer is the Higgs boson, we can say enough about its properties to guide the search. Unfortunately, the electroweak theory does not predict the mass of the Higgs boson, although consistency arguments require that it have a mass of less than 1 TeV. Experimental searches already carried out tell us that the Higgs must weigh more than about 60 billion electron volts (GeV), or 0.06 TeV. "If the Higgs is relatively light, it may be seen soon in electron- positron annihilations at LEP, produced in association with the Z. The Higgs boson would decay into a b quark and a b antiquark. In a few years, experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron should be able to extend the search to higher masses, looking for Higgs plus W or Higgs plus Z particles in collisions between protons and antiprotons. If the Higgs mass exceeds about 130 GeV, our best hope lies with the LHC. Higher-energy electron-positron colliders, or even muon colliders, could also play an important role. sciam.com It's a long way from 130 GeV to 1 TeV.

To: maceng2 who wrote (12947)	12/6/2001 1:04:56 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: No sign of the Higgs boson It's pretty certain that a conceptual breakthrough even more radical than quantum physics was at the beginning of the 20'th century was will be needed to sort out some of this stuff. When you think of it, things we take for granted today are really so amazing nobody would have had the imagination to invent them, ever! 1000 years from now, these kinds of discoveries will be looked back on as the lasting achievements. Communism, the war in Afghanistan, the mid east conflict and all that might barely get a footnote. Western democracy... who knows?