Hard News: Higgs Live!
319 Responses
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Islander, in reply to
ah, I admit that metaphor needs significant plastic surgery. More apt aphorisms welcomed. Just how freaking awesome is the Hogg’s Bison?
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When it's coralled from the wild and me & mine can stroke it gently & welcome it into our 5-dimensional tepee-without wanting to skin or eat it -I'll know we have grown up as a species!
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Well, this conversation is taking an weird and thoroughly delightful turn.
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Never heard of Hogg's Bison. Did they discover it at Fermilab?
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Islander, in reply to
Awwww!
They got a real herd of them dang things!Act-u-ally, I find that really human/humane-
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Yamis, in reply to
Sorry to be pedantic, but the correct spelling is Higgs boson. Capital ‘H’ for the ‘Higgs’ of Peter Higgs, one of the first to suggest its existence. Small ‘b’ for boson, which is just a type of particle.
Don't tell the Indians that. Boson is named after Satyendra Nath Bose.
http://io9.com/5890884/10-weird-stories-about-the-higgs-boson
6. The term "boson" comes from the name of Indian physicist and mathematician Satyendra Nath Bose
Particles come in two varieties: bosons and fermions. The Higgs particle falls into the category of bosons, named for a physicist best known for his collaborations in the 1920s with Albert Einstein. Some of the pair's work resulted in the invention of Bose-Einstein statistics, a way to describe the behavior of a class of particles that now shares Bose's name. Two bosons with identical properties can be in the same place at the same time, but two fermions cannot. This is why photons, which are bosons, can travel together in concentrated laser beams. But electrons, which are fermions, must stay away from each other, which explains why electrons must reside in separate orbits in atoms. Bose never received a doctorate, nor was he awarded a Nobel Prize for his work, though the Nobel committee recognized other scientists for research related to the concepts he developed. -
Speaking of the Higgs, there is a free public lecture at the University of Auckland on July 12, 6:30pm, by Prof Mark Kruse (Duke University), who works on the ATLAS collaboration.
http://www.physics.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/events/template/event_item.jsp?cid=495704
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richard, in reply to
Just discovering the Higgs does not directly change our current picture of the evolving universe, but it gives us lots of new questions to ask, and sharpens some of the old ones.
In particular, this is the first time we have discovered a spinless (which autocorrect just turned to “spineless”) and apparently fundamental particle. These particles (or, more accurately, the fields associated with these particles) play a key role in cosmology because they can have negative pressure, and negative pressure (think rubber bands, as opposed to a tank of gas) can cause the expansion rate of the universe to accelerate (long story, but trust me).
And the universe is accelerating today, and also apparently underwent a phase of acceleration in the very universe, just after the big bang. And we would like to know WHY (and HOW) this happens.
Just seeing the Higgs does not solve these riddles, but it does make cosmologists feel much better about building theories with spinless fields in them,
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I don't worry about how poorly good scientists present using quarky fonts like comic sans, but it scares the shit out of me watching a not so good scientist do a presentation with a really cool presentation.
It is those that get the ear of the managers and the marketers. Regrettably they are usually the type who "want to go far". Utterly regrettably......they usually end up doing so.
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Yamis, in reply to
Reminds me of the preachers who get their own TV shows, or form break away churches.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Just seeing the Higgs does not solve these riddles, but it does make cosmologists feel much better about building theories with spinless fields in them,
Thanks richard. Who knows where such theories might lead? The picture could change, phenomena could be discovered. Sounds like it's opening possibilities up, rather than closing them down - that sounds exciting.
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http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/3pyvo8.jpeg
it explains much ....
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You too can sign the petition to ask Microsoft to Rename the font 'Comic Sans' to 'Comic Cerns' in the Windows 8 OS and make it the default font for all scientific presentations.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Escargot cults...
Imagine snails working out how to predict lunar eclipses.
Who says they haven't?
I wonder how much they'd shell out for such research?
To be fair, they have been using Fibonacci sequences to put a roof over their heads for millennia...Dark musings....
Now they can concentrate on dark matter and energy - perhaps an anti-particle that is all spin and no mass (much like Parliament) is out there... and to keep the supersymmetry and nomenclature relative the dark equivalent of Higgs' boson should be called Black Pete! -
Scott Chris, in reply to
I don’t care what anyone else thinks, but I am still quite keen on the idea of cold fusion.
Substantial progress has been made in this field albeit under the guise of the rebranded initialism LENR. Nasa scientists, no less have been trumpeting recent breakthroughs:
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Regarding the near certain discovery of the Higgs boson – little known fact:
Texan farmer Jethro Nedreck claims that he was the first to discover it back in the 1950s when he cross-bred one of his hogs with a bison.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
but it scares the shit out of me watching a not so good scientist do a presentation with a really cool presentation.
It is those that get the ear of the managers and the marketers.
and in the ears of the politicians
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Russell Brown, in reply to
but it scares the shit out of me watching a not so good scientist do a presentation with a really cool presentation.
It is those that get the ear of the managers and the marketers.
and in the ears of the politicians
Doesn't that suggest that it's in the interests of good scientists to communicate effectively?
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Are there many presentational rockstars at serious conferences? And how are they regarded?
I've been thinking about this. And I'm still not sure I know the answer. Yes there are some people who really do "give a good talk" but that isn't quite the same as being presentational rockstars.
Kary Mullis (Nobel for PCR) gave a riveting talk for 2 hours on how HIV hasn't been proven to cause AIDS. Without a single visual aid.
I also have absolutely vivid memories of seeing videos showing how auxin (a plant hormone) moves in the little cluster of cells at the top of the plant that subsequently grow out into everything you see. But I'm not sure the rest of the talk was a masterpiece of presentation.
When we say "gives a good talk" we are generally combining content with presentation in the evaluation.
Basically the talks that have stayed with me have done so because of the data not the presentation.
That said I have come out of a talk and said to friends "that is how NOT to present that data" and yet still been impressed by the data.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Doesn’t that suggest that it’s in the interests of good scientists to communicate effectively?
Sure. I do get the value of being good at presentation. But if I get money for another FTE I'm going to spend it on a tech or scientist who can generate more data not on someone who can make the presentation pretty.
If I had enough money (snort) yeah I'd consider spending some of it on getting support for improving presentations. The problem is that you frequently end up with a burgeoning marketing group that spends more time on new business logos and rebranding the institute than helping scientists make their talks just a bit better.
Should scientist get to go on courses that teach them how to use the tools better?Sure. But if I only get to travel overseas to one conference in 5 years I'm damn well not going to a photoshop course!
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Doesn’t that suggest that it’s in the interests of good scientists to communicate effectively?
It's worth noting that what you guys all assume is an easy thing, that is, seeing how a presentation could be made better, just isn't that easy for some people. It really doesn't come naturally to some people who are in other areas very talented.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
If I had enough money (snort) yeah I’d consider spending some of it on getting support for improving presentations. The problem is that you frequently end up with a burgeoning marketing group that spends more time on new business logos and rebranding the institute than helping scientists make their talks just a bit better.
And that's perhaps the nub of the problem. Money goes on marketing rather than actual technical skills.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Money goes on marketing rather than actual technical skills.
But that’s what marketing folks are trained to do. It’s hard to blame them. they know how to make a logo, that’s easy. That have no idea how to retain the scientific content in a poster while making it look good, for them that’s hard.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
I also have absolutely vivid memories of seeing videos showing how auxin (a plant hormone) moves in the little cluster of cells at the top of the plant that subsequently grow out into everything you see.
But auxin is amazing! You could fascinate people over auxin in a bar with a pencil and a napkin.
ETA: By 'napkin' I obviously mean 'serviette'. I dunno WTF is happening to my class roots.
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Ross Mason, in reply to
Doesn't that suggest that it's in the interests of good scientists to communicate effectively?
Yes. But understand. The "unpresenters" would say: "My talk was understandable to my peers. I find that sufficient for me."
I DO have to tell you we have some "Presentation Skills" seminars doing the rounds at the moment. ;-)
Bart mentions talks he has been to. That is not the problem with the "Comics of Cern". It is the non science folk (and reporters) who are watching and trying to understand - and probably having a little difficulty given the questions asked at the news conference along the lines of "What should I write about this event in my paper?" - thus they concentrate on the how rather than the what.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
a pig in a poke...
Texan farmer Jethro Nedreck claims that he was the first to discover it back in the 1950s when he cross-bred one of his hogs with a bison.
I thought that recently this had proved to be merely a Bluffalo...
"- )
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