science news for the near future(Dec 13, 2011)

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/12/07/cern-higgs-seminar-liveblog/

I'd hate to saturate this blog with much science news as much as I'd hate to do likewise with a bunch of history of religion; but, seems this announcement could be . . . pretty big.

The link above is pretty low key as far as what could be announced.  They're probably still number crunching and playing double blind experiments with each other; but, as other science news channels have leaked, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4212

Quoting, "Heuer’s message to all CERN personnel says the December 13 announcements will be “significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.” Presumably they’re waiting for 5 sigma before claiming conclusive proof."  Von  Heuer is a kind of president of Cern and the Large Hadron Collider.  Bottom line, they think they've got a low energy higgs spotted.

Key word phase is 'low energy.'  Any higgs theory(and there's many different higgs theories; part of the Lhc's goal will be to determine which higgs if any) has multiple higgs.  So, when they power up the LHC this coming up march, they'll be looking to confirm this, find the rest, find more things like dark matter, extra dimensions, and surprises.

This is big for me at least.  I grew up reading and rereading Crease and Mann's "The Second Creation"; so, for me the electroweak unification experimental confirmation of early 1980s has always been the last great particle physics done.  Yes, they've done some stuff since then, but this is something that's been in the waiting for a long time.

I don't know if I've noted on this blog(I did in the previous incarnation of this blog; i posted the significant science, technology, and mathematics of all previous history; that's a lot; and I havn't felt like doing that again on this blog!); but, in the 1700s, Laplace came out with his five volume "Celestial Mechanics."  It was a generalization of Newton's principia.  Newton's principia was really about solving the kepler problem.  The Kepler problem is about deriving Kepler's three laws from Newton's laws and his inverse square law of gravitation.  Newton does more stuff in his principia like the tides, the precession of the equinoxes and so on.  Well, for a hundred years, mathematicians really developed analyses far beyond Isaac Newton - things like differential equations, calculus of variations, and some complex analyses. Lagrange generalized galileo's(I really need to review here) laws.  Anyways, Laplace generalized Newton's Principia with all this massive amounts of 1700 analyses(the mathematicians word for calculus and all its vast generalizations).  Laplace's "Celestial Mechanics" was kind of a must read back then.  Hamilton made an early name for himself by finding an error in the book(today, the book is totally obsolete; nobody reads it; i've seen two volume celestial mechanics where the mathematics is topology; that's more or less where we are today!).  Mathematicians using it and the growing astronomical data theoretically predicted that there must be a planet beyond recently discovered Uranus(uranus discovered in the 1700s).  Most astronomers laughed at that notion; theoretically predicting where a planet would be.  But, eventually, someone did!(in 1846; uranus was discovere in 1780 I just recalled).  That was the great thing done by Laplace's "Celestial Mechanics"!

I bring up the discovery of Neptune's discovery, because, seems to me that the discovery of the Higgs is similar.  It's discovery will be far more monumental of course!  The higgs to me is almost certainly to exist because the higgs is part of the Inflationary theory which was observationaly confirmed by the Cobe in the late 1980s(another major development during my life!).  I've seen some physicists and cosmologists who don't want to believe in the higgs and inflationary theory!  I believe in mathematics as this blog shows in terms of social and history theory.  And so, I'm sure some higgs theory is true!  December 13, 2011 looks to be a major announcement date for the Higgs discovery, for humanity!

---day before Dec 13 meeting update,

http://www.nature.com/news/where-s-my-higgs-1.9609

this article had a couple of good things to say; if this low energy higgs is confirmed later next year(after the next round of energy upgrades to the large hadron collider), then it could be the first experimental confirmation of string theory!