I have been inside physicists' groups when searching for new facts on the world of particle physics. The point of the whole exercise is to find something. Nevertheless the attitude of mostly everybody in those groups is to prove that nothing has been found. Real professionalism is exercised to prove that the Higgs is not there.
This apparent contradiction, is the well honed method developed by physicists. On the other hand when the signal is strong and clear the message is out and sometimes Nobel prizes await the principal investigators.
We are all waiting for signals from Batavia, Ill. (Fermilab), or Geneva, Switzerland (LHC).
Keep tuned.
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2 comments:
What Higgs?... ;)
Not finding the higgs, (or only finding a single higgs), can be just as important as finding one, if the Standard Model and Particle Theory are theoretically flawed at that energy scale.
Considering the problems that the cutting-edge has had over the last thirty years, do not be at all surprised if no higgs is found, becuase that energy scale is exactly where the vacuum state was reinterpreted in order to rationalize Dirac's Hole Theory with QFT. This only occurred after Dirac was unable to unify GR with Quantum Mechanics via the Dirac Equation as he had done with SR and QM.
That's where the obvious flaw is, because the series of events does not logically follow, as it is very much expected that Dirac should been able to do this.
Think about it.
The reinterpretation of the negative energy solutions is the ONLY problem, but people are too arrogant about the validity of unproven ad-hoc assumptions to even seriously look at this point.
It always comes back to the negative energy solutions and the negative mass absurdity that falls out of it, so I'll be happy to see the LHC prove once and for all that the cutting-edge is lost in a carried flaw that only gets more absurd the further that they go to try to rationalize it away, rather than to fix what's broke where it is broken!
Let em crash. Let em burn.
The way I look at the Higgs phenomenon is this.
"Elementary Particles" of spin 1/2 and 1 have been experimentally detected at accelerators. Where is the spin zero one?
Something deep is behind this.
I call it a phenomenon, because the Standard Model is a phenomenological model, and a many-body model. Robert Brout, with whom I took classes, told us that the future of field theory was in the many-body part. He taught a summer class on critical phenomena in Mexico. It is easier, he said, to study condensed matter than high energy physics. Robert Brout invented the Higgs, together with Englert, independently of Higgs, if life were fair, we would be looking for the Brout effect, not the Higgs effect.
Field theory requires/prefers zero mass particles to carry conserved charges, (e.g. the photon). Nevertheless there is a weak charge, and the W and Z are heavy instead. One way out is the existence of a scalar field that spontaneously breaks gauge symmetry, and all is good.
Unfortunately after more than forty years nothing has been found.
That is one line of reasoning from which I expect a Higgs phenomenon, not necessarily a particle, maybe just a fermion condensate, like Cooper pairs, will do the trick.
The other line is purely phenomenological, if there is no Higgs energy scale, some calculations go out the window. So many of my friends have put time and effort in those calculations, that I will be VERY surprised if the energy scale comes and goes, and nothing happens.
I am not a professional Higgs hunter, so you do not have to listen to me.
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