Scientists Discover New Particle- Likely Higgs

Higgs discovery

CERN has announced latest findings on the search for the Higgs boson. Experiments confirm a 5 sigma excess, sufficient to qualify as a "discovery" of the new particle.

More on the Higgs Boson

Below is an extended description of the Higgs Boson (and field) by Dr. Ed Copeland of the University of Nothingham and Sixty Symbols. The interviews also include discussion of who will receive a Nobel Prize if the Higgs is discovered:

 

Brian Greene on the Higgs at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week


In this clip from NOVA’s The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene, Peter Higgs himself explains the origins of the hypothetical elementary particle that could help explain how matter was created:

Watch The Higgs Particle Matters on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Evidence mounts that CERN has discovered the Higgs

Science News reports that a video briefly available today on the CERN website appeared to confirm that the European physics lab has discovered a new particle — most likely the long-sought Higgs boson.

 "We've Observed a New Particle" 

CERN has scheduled a major announcement for tomorrow, and anticipation has been building that this announcement will reveal either the discovery of the Higgs Boson, or evidence strongly pointing to the Higgs. 

Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, says in the video "It may in the end be one of the biggest discoveries, or observations, of any new phenomenon that we've had in our field in the last 30 or 40 years."

 Per Wikipedia: "The Higgs field is a quantum field that fills all of space, and explains why fundamental particles (or elementary particles) such as quarks and electrons have mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state. The existence of the Higgs boson is predicted by the Standard Model to explain how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry (the Higgs mechanism) takes place in nature, which in turn explains why other elementary particles have mass."  

Higgs Boson
 

What is the Higgs Boson?

Roger Penrose: Forward to "A Computable Universe"

Foreword to A Computable Universe: Understanding Computation & Exploring Nature As Computation
  by Roger Penrose
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, UK

The Future of Scientific Simulations: from Artificial Life to Artificial Cosmogenesis

We argue that a simulation of an entire universe will result from future scientific activity. This requires us to tackle the challenge of simulating open-ended evolution at all levels in a single simulation. The simulation should encompass not only biological evolution, but also physical evolution (a level below) and cultural evolution (a level above). The simulation would allow us to probe what would happen if we would “replay the tape of the universe” with the same or different laws and initial conditions. We also distinguish between real-world and artificial-world modelling. Assuming that intelligent life could indeed simulate an entire universe, this leads to two tentative hypotheses. Some authors have argued that we may already be in a simulation run by an intelligent entity. Or, if such a simulation could be made real, this would lead to the production of a new universe.

 The Future of Scientific Simulations

Scientific American: The Case for Parallel Universes

The Case for Parallel Universes

 "Multiverse proponents Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark offer counterpoints [to previous criticisms of multiverse theory], explaining why the multiverse would account for so many features of our universe—and how it might be tested."

 

Scientific American: How a plan for a faster than light communication device led to a breakthrough in understanding quantum mechanics

Scientific American has an interesting blog post on Nick Herbert's attempt to create a faster than light communication device several decades ago that led to the discovery of the "no-cloning theorem": which states an arbitrary or unknown quantum state cannot be copied without disturbing the original state. 

The Faster-Than-Light Telegraph That Wasn't

 

Space elevator

Brian Greene: Welcome to the Multiverse

Brian Greene has an article in Newsweek about the possibility of a multiverse.

   Welcome to the Multiverse