a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by mk
mk  ·  4866 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nowhere Left to Hide: the Higgs boson.
I love this!:

Both of the LHC fluctuations are at what's known as the two-sigma level - in other words, it's two standard deviations away from just being random chance - while the Fermilab result is one-sigma. Two-sigma means there's better than a 95% chance that there really is something at those energy levels, but even 95% isn't terribly convincing to the physics community. A discovery needs to reach five-sigma levels of certainty, or 99.99994% certain, before it can be considered a discovery.

I went from physics to biology, and it makes me sad what passes for convincing in the biological science community.

Personally, I am betting that there is no Higgs. My guess is we are going to find something else here that further confounds our current model of matter. A physics prof of mine once said something to the extent of: "Consider that mass and gravitational potential are always proportional. Why? We have no reason for this." My gut tells me that mass and gravity are one in the same. Not that particles acquire mass by interacting with a field, but that mass is a relative characteristic, -the quality of interaction of particles.





phyllotaxis  ·  4865 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I suspect you will then find these topics an interesting read: http://knol.google.com/k/einstein-was-wrong-falsifying-obser...

TL;DR: not only is the "Standard" model flawed, but it is substantially so the further we research it.

martin  ·  4527 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Will the announcement tonight only compound an alright flawed model?
mk  ·  4864 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Thanks for this. This itself would be a fantastic post. I've always wondered why a bigger 'to do' wasn't made about our inability to detect gravitational waves. My guess is that it's because gravitation is a faster-than-light quantum condensate-like phenomenon. Not so sure about electric cosmology though. As for the Pioneer probe, it is likely to be anisotropic radiation of its battery. (http://hubski.com/pub?id=2422)