<story><title>Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins </title><url>http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bobsy</author><text>I&apos;ve given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people. I am surprised he didn&apos;t start with:&lt;p&gt;&quot;I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree&apos;s in Physic&apos;s. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.&lt;p&gt;If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don&apos;t know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nagrom</author><text>I am a particle physicist. The most interesting point of this announcement for me is that this is a confirmation of predictions of a very exotic particle.&lt;p&gt;The properties of subatomic particles include something called &apos;spin&apos; - that&apos;s a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we&apos;ve discovered; it&apos;s completely unlike anything that we&apos;ve seen up until now.&lt;p&gt;That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we&apos;re in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It&apos;s an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.&lt;p&gt;(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)</text></comment>
<story><title>Live CERN Higgs Announcement in 20 Mins </title><url>http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bobsy</author><text>I&apos;ve given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people. I am surprised he didn&apos;t start with:&lt;p&gt;&quot;I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree&apos;s in Physic&apos;s. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.&lt;p&gt;If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don&apos;t know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drostie</author><text>Even the Guardian reporter has admitted that it goes over her head. Heck, I&apos;m doing a Master&apos;s in condensed-matter physics and I don&apos;t understand much of the jargon.&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits.   CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they&apos;re talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.&lt;p&gt;The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say &apos;bb&apos;) and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let&apos;s say).&lt;p&gt;All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating &quot;expected&quot; curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, &quot;expected&quot; vs. &quot;actual&quot;, so that you can compare them.&lt;p&gt;On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what&apos;s actually seen and what the statistical &quot;counting&quot; errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to &quot;subtract out the noise&quot; to see the signal more clearly.</text></comment>