Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Jubinsky on July 7, 2012 at 7:39am

Nice find! That would really make things exciting. It might lead to the unification of quantum mechanics and the Theory of Relativity.

Permalink Reply by Loren Miller on July 8, 2012 at 12:27pm

Well, first a couple questions have to be asked:

• What's the basic nature of the particle (mass, charge, spin, etc.)
• What's the behavior of the particle
• How well do these characteristics compare with the model forwarded by Peter Higgs and those who came after him.

Thing is, if this ISN'T the Higgs Boson, that may mean that the Higgs is still out there, waiting to be discovered ... OR it may mean that the standard model is out the window and time to start with a clean sheet of paper.

Whatever they've discovered at the LHC, my guess is that they'll be a while quantifying exactly WHAT they've discovered before any earch-shattering conclusions are arrived at.  The very fact that they referred to it as "Higgs-like" is a strong indicator, I would say.

Permalink Reply by John Jubinsky on July 8, 2012 at 1:18pm

I think the point of the article was that the discovery of a variation of the Higgs that was originally predicted could be more exciting than the discovery of a Higgs that was totally consistent with the one that was originally predicted. That is, a Higgs that is totally consistent with the originally predicted one would leave a lot of unanswered questions that a variation of the originally predicted Higgs might resolve. No doubt a lot of investigation of the new particle is in order before it can be called a type of Higgs but in that we don't know it is not a type of Higgs I think that anybody who isn't excited about it isn't enthusiastic about science in the first place.

http://news.discovery.com/space/what-if-particle-is-not-higgs-12070...

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