The amount of data, hardware, software is just mind-bobbling. How much effort to filter all the 'noise' and get to the clean data. Lots of smart people working all together. It sounds really promising though. Exciting times.
So in short, they have found a "Higgs" boson however there is not enough data yet to tell if some of the statistical flucuations are normal variance or are perhaps a new type of Higgs.
?
Still huge news, if it's the latter and they can find more than one version of it then it would make life interesting for the theorists.
To say that the higgs boson is found is a bit wrong too...as explained, they have found a new partical that is consistant with predictions made by the standard model...as far as i can tell...just more testing to 100% confirm this and then I guess they can offically call it the Higgs Boson...then its dance time...
The amount of data, hardware, software is just mind-bobbling. How much effort to filter all the 'noise' and get to the clean data. Lots of smart people working all together. It sounds really promising though. Exciting times.
I'm in awe of it too but I also think of all the technicians who make it work. This thing uses a significant portion of Europe's electricity and the voltages inside the thing and the oscillation of electric fields are mindboggling so there must be a mob of top notch 'sparkies' there. Then it runs at very low temperatures so there is are cryogenic specialists. And as someone who bangs his head against lab-scale vacuum systems I'm in awe of them getting something of that size under what must be a very very good vacuum. All those seals and all that gear inside the vacuum - sources of leaks and virtual leaks everywhere. I'm stressing just imagining it.
