A few days ago I got an email asking if I knew anything about rumors circulating about folks using the Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory finally discovering the Higgs Boson – the boson responsible for giving particles the characteristic of mass. I have to admit, I didn’t, so I just did a bit of Googling.
While I didn’t find a nice peer reviewed paper pointing to Higgs, what I did find was a New Scientist article on how hints of positive detection were first noted on one blog, and then independently seen when the research was publicly released on another blog.
This is giving me a warm fuzzy feeling that when the Large Hadron Collider goes on line later this year the Higgs Boson will pop out wave its energy at the entire physics community in a way that no one will be able to deny.
This also tells me that the blog is becoming part of how our community dialogues. We discuss what we’re doing and what we’re finding in our blogs. We release our data on our blogs. We plan and dream and discuss and brainstorm, all on our blogs.
A few years ago, there was a commercial for something I no longer remember that said “Welcome to Generation D: the digital generation.” I think this is going to one of those weird situations where the characteristics of a generation are defined not by age entirely, but also by tech savvy and affluence. Generation D is not the PSP totting, SMS fluent youth, but also the PSP totting, SMS fluent 40 and 50 (and older) somethings.
And these researchers are generation D.
The world was due to end on 26th November 2007 when the CERN LMC inadvertently triggered a black hole. I rejoiced in this prospect, because the event would increase sales of my book, ‘The Ancient Order of Moridura’, with a similar theme, but then I realised that I couldn’t collect my royalties because of the destruction of the planet. Life’s a bitch sometimes!
However, the end of the world is postponed for a year because of problems with magnets – we must wait until April or May of 2008 for extinction and translation into another brane.
The Higgs boson must be laughing quietly, wherever it is hiding in interstellar space.
http://moridura.blogspot.com
A month or three ago, one of the many podcasts i listen to had an interview with a guy from Fermilab. He says that they have Higgs data. Now, there’s alot of noise in the signal. This can be reduced by collecting more data. So, it’s possible that the delay at CERN could allow the Higgs to show up with real confidence at Fermi. Or, the signal could disappear back into the noise by then.
That’s a synopsis of about a half hour of talking – which is probably a synopsis too.
An even shorter version:
Maybe.
Heisenberg may have slept here.