Anonymous Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 There you go, it was meant to be called the Goddamn particle Higgs boson: The poetry of subatomic particles The Higgs boson, which scientists at Cern appear to be homing in on after 45 years, gets its name, as everyone knows, from British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to propose its existence. But what about the other part of this great name - boson? This, in fact, is also named after a physicist, Einstein's Indian contemporary, Satyendra Nath Bose. Physicists from Russia to California have given lots of curious and sometimes poetic names to the subatomic particles discovered over the last century or so. Here are 10 of them. 1. Higgs boson / God particle The Higgs boson, proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964, is if it exists what gives matter mass. It has also been named the name God particle by American physicist Leon Lederman. "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him," Higgs told the Guardian. So "God particle" it was. 2. Quark Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the mark A fundamental particle that combines to form a range of other particles, including protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the atomic nucleus. The term was drawn from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (born 1929) in 1962. He had already come up with the sound, and was thinking of spelling it "kwork". "Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word 'quark' in the phrase 'Three quarks for Muster Mark'," he explained in his book, the Quark and the Jaguar. 3. Hadron The LHC gets going in 2009 A particle made of quarks. The name was proposed by the Russian theoretical physicist Lev Okun (born 1929) in 1962. He wrote: "In this report I shall call strongly interacting particles 'hadrons' the Greek hadros signifies "large", "massive", in contrast to leptos which means "small", "light". I hope that this terminology will prove to be convenient." It is in Cern's Large Hadron Collider, a machine in which hadrons are accelerated to high speeds and smashed together, that footprints of the Higgs boson have been spotted. 4. Boson A class of particles often associated with forces (as the carriers of the force). They obey Bose-Einstein statistics, named after the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974). The suffix "-on" is Greek, and became standard for newly discovered particles a century ago. 5. Fermion Gell-Mann gave us quarks, gluons and glueballs A class of particles which, unlike bosons, obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. They are usually associated with matter rather than force. They are named after the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) a naturalised American regarded as one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, along with Robert Oppenheimer. 6. Gluon A type of boson responsible for the strong force between quarks. The term derives from the English word "glue". It was first proposed in 1962 by Murray Gell-Mann, who suggested the existence of particles composed of a number of gluons, which he called glueballs. 7. Neutrino Enrico Fermi gave the neutrino an Italian twist Uncharged particles created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay, with a tiny mass even by the standards of subatomic particles. Neutrino means "small neutral one" in Italian. The particle was first proposed by Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) in 1930, who gave it the name "neutron". Enrico Fermi renamed it three years later, because "neutron" (from the Latin for "neutral") had by then begun to be used to refer to the uncharged particle present in the atomic nucleus. 8. Electron An indivisible quantity of electric charge, proposed in 1894 by the Irish physicist, George Johnston Stoney (1826-1911). Derived from the word "electric" (or the Latin "electrum") plus the Greek suffix "-on". 9. Meson Continue reading the main story And five more... Lepton - a type of elementary particle (examples include electrons and neutrinos), from the Greek "leptos" meaning "small" or "thin" Photon - a light quantum, the name derived from the Greek "phos" meaning "light" Skyrmion - a type of fermion proposed by British physicist Tony Skyrme (1922-1987) Proton - name given to hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920, from the Greek "protos" meaning "first" WIMP - weakly interactive massive particle A particle made of a quark and an anti-quark. The name comes from the Greek "meso" meaning "mid", because mesons, when first observed, appeared to have a mass somewhere between that of an electron, and nucleons (the particles - protons and neutrons - making up the atomic nucleus). 10. Muon One of a large number of particles named after letters of the Greek alphabet, in this case "mu". It was originally thought to be a type of meson (the mu meson, as distinct, say, from the pi meson), but was later renamed. Mesons came to be understood as particles made up of quarks, while muons are elementary particles. The scientists at Cern have cornered the Higgs boson (probably) using a detector known as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which measures the energy and momentum of muons, photons, electrons and other particles generated by the colliding hadrons in the LHC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18708741
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 Copied from elsewhere: "Abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science — a position unquestioned for generations.” - Bill Clinton to Congress in 1993 as it cancelled the even larger Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. How poetic that news of this particle's discovery will be dated July 4th.
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 there has to be a particle joke. A higgs boson walks into a church and the priest says "now this is a mass"
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 It is really incredible that things like these can be predicted so far ahead by using mathematical theories. Just re-inforces the importance of theory in modern science. Is this experimental confirmation comparable in significance to the COBE experiment ? P.S.: Will Higgs get a Nobel now ? I have one more theory. Every theory will eventually be materialized/verified - in real world or simulation :).
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 [Layman] So what does this discovery do? apart from that being a part of the textbook. What is it's practical use? I am asking coz if this was something like '"found the main protein which can kill HIV etc" then they can work on a new drug but what about this. I understand that no one would waste time' date= research and money to simply find a particle, does this change any existing theories etc [Layman] There are lots of 'enthusiast' science/use-cases doing the rounds. I liked this - now that higgs-boson is confirmed, which gives mass to matter....may be.... may be.... one day we will be able to control this particle/field.. to change/reduce/complete-turnoff the mass of anything, like space ships, and travel at speed of light and sh1t. Akshayz >> AFAIK - whenever science was questioned on "something out of nothing", the reply was to do with expansion and contraction ( more like the what came first?, the chicken or the egg ) Expansion/contraction (big-bang style) is recent thing only. Btw, off all the religions, Hindu (ancient) philosophers got quite close. endless cycles of destruction/creations. Remember that "Mahabharat" intro ( or was it "discovery of India"). "Mein Samay hoon, mujhse pehley kuchh nahi tha, samay bhi nahi" - something like that. There is no absolute "first", its a relative positional adjective. Following is the talk I was blabbering about (and mixed up with higgs-boson findings). Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss having a debate on "something out of nothing" [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0mljE9K-gY]Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss: Something from Nothing, at ANU - YouTube[/ame] Then it led me to this panel discussion [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYeN66CSQhg]2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything - YouTube[/ame] Then hit on this http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/mysteries/html/gleiser-1.html Which talks about where matter comes from, and whether/how/why it can come from nothing. [Why I mixed up: - matter and mass are different things, esp when higgs-boson has announced its arrival. Matter can be massless, if Higgs-Boson 'wishes' so.]
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 No direct "application"' date=' but the science and engineering which went behind it's discovery is going to have an impact on a lot of things in our lives.[/quote']
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 Take a deep breath, and have a sense of perspective of progress (of/by) science: When you think that 10,000 years ago we were bashing rocks together to make fire, and now we're bashing particles together to take a look at the fundamentals of the universe, it's mind-boggling. Think that less than a hundred years ago, we weren't even dealing with nuclear physics. A little over a hundred years ago we couldn't even fly. We didn't know about background radiation, we hardly had a clue about elements and how they bonded...even as a layman, I am still blown away by what we're doing now over the past century, or even over the past twenty years. Think about it. It's not even flying. 200 years ago we were closer to the stone ages than the modern age. 150 years ago we didn't have the combustion motor, or the automobile. 200 years ago we didn't even have an electric motor, the novel of Electricity was brand new. Blacksmith was still a great profession, as was medicine man, and most of the teaching was done by apprenticeship remember. It was about 150 years ago that the production line was even used. 100 years ago the assembly line was used. Imagine the first motors and engines had to be handbuilt, not out of novelity or uniqueness, but because they never thought about automating it, and never had the demand for it. Indoor toilets with out having to empty them have only been around 150 years. There's parts of Australia that continued to have outhouses up til the 70s.. that's 1970... A person can travel around the world in 24 hours if well planned. Around the world in 80 days was unique in 1880s. UNIQUE to think of a person circumnavigating the globe in under three months. HOLY ****ING **** people. We're in the future. Just think about that. take a person from 200, 150, and 100 years, and show them the present and their brains would actually explode. Not just figuratively, but they could not understand and would not even attempt to understand a cell phone, a computer, a personal computer (100 years ago the idea of a computer was an ass large abacus) 61 years ago it was thought that only a few rich people would have one even after that only a few people even considered them useful for quite a long time. Still not just our cars, but imagine highways to a 100 year old man, planes, trains, boats, and such. But you know what would be the biggest shock to our 100/150/200 year old fellows. It'd be the noise. Not the technology, not the science, not the progress necessarily. For the average person the big thing they would not be able to accept or really understand is just how noisy, and distracting our world is. How close we live to each other, how loud so many things are. They would be able to walk out of their houses and hear nature around them. We're lucky if we can get away from the city far enough to hear that nature. That's pretty ****ed up if you really think about it.
Precambrian Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 World hunger has been solved from a scientific perspective many years back. lol
Precambrian Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 there have been only two girls who opened their legs just because i happened to impress them with my intelligence... lol
akshayxyz Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 there have been only two girls who opened their legs just because i happened to impress them with my intelligence... lol ^ :hmmm: wrong thread ? Depends whether (and how many) higgs-bosons were in those legs.
Anonymous Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 Although the immediate significance of all this is just the discovery as of now but who knows what'll happen in the years to come. For some perspective, when electrons were discovered the practical applications were next to nothing but look where we are now. The whole world is run by electronics, hence fingers crossed.
Brainfade Posted July 5, 2012 Author Posted July 5, 2012 Higgs should really win the Nobel prize now, he was able to predict using pen and paper what was proven using the most sophisticated technology forty years later. Whilst the Nobel committee are it, they might as well given posthumous honour to Bose as well. Unfortunately, they don't give posthumous Nobel Prizes :-(. An oft-used example is that of Rosalind Franklin. Her work was instrumental in the discovery of the structure of DNA. But, she died in 1958, and Watson and Crick won the Nobel for it in 1962. If she were alive then, a case could have been made for her too.
Brainfade Posted July 5, 2012 Author Posted July 5, 2012 Although the immediate significance of all this is just the discovery as of now but who knows what'll happen in the years to come. For some perspective, when electrons were discovered the practical applications were next to nothing but look where we are now. The whole world is run by electronics, hence fingers crossed. Absolutely. This debate was had on ICF a few years ago, and I posted this in defense of basic research. Maybe it bears repeating now: Of what use can it be to the common man when a naturalist's RA treks to hot springs, collects samples and identifies the bacteria that live in them? None whatsoever. More appalling to some is that fact that the naturalist did this work with no noble intention of it being useful to anyone. Decades later, molecular biologists were looking for ways to develop automated methods to amplify DNA (the molecule that encodes genes). The goal - to efficiently produce large quantities of specific DNAs in the lab, allowing them to characterize the encoded genes. The problem? The DNA has to be heated between each amplification step, effectively killing the catalyst that "performs" the reaction. And then comes along a crazy dude on a biking trip who suddenly makes a connection - if we could use the catalysts that the hot-spring bacteria use to duplicate their DNA, dammit ... And so was born the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Every man who has walked free because of "new DNA evidence," every biotechnologist who has made advances in the last 15 yrs.; why, every man who has proven that the child is indeed his ... should stop and thank the naturalist who made that useless trip to the hot springs and Kary Mullis who made the vital connection on a biking trip. The fabric of all research is woven in ways that are not immediately perceived. http://www.indiancricketfans.com/showthread.php?t=111935
bulbul Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 Unfortunately' date=' they[b'] don't give posthumous Nobel Prizes :-(. An oft-used example is that of Rosalind Franklin. Her work was instrumental in the discovery of the structure of DNA. But, she died in 1958, and Watson and Crick won the Nobel for it in 1962. If she were alive then, a case could have been made for her too. yep , even Gandhi denied because of same rules.
nikred Posted July 5, 2012 Posted July 5, 2012 so this proves that God doesnt exist? You can't really prove a negative, can you?
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