CERN Scientists Looking for the Force

An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"

Re:Here's a question: what if it's not there?

[Pojut]

If there is no Higgs Boson, oh well...the collider has many other uses that can help move our scientific development along.

Christ I sounded like a politician right there...but it's true.

In Other (Real) News

[DynaSoar]

SciAm, Discover and Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log on MSNBC have all covered CERN's history and present project(s; there's two different Higgs experiments being built), and managed to do so without the silly-assed references to God particles, The Force and Star Wars. Is it too much to hope for that /. will someday stop putting out stuff written for adolescent mentalities and tastes? Probably so, since it's getting worse instead of better.

Re:such a thing as "overpopularising" science

[The Ancients]

Perhaps so. Another way of looking at it is that they're trying to explain the article in such a way that allows more individuals - and motivates more individuals - to actually take an interest in, and have a chance of understanding this.

Also, from what I understand from reading the articles, technically they are correct (if a little simplistic). Both affect all particles, living or inert.

Re:Midichlorians don't explain the force

[Opportunist]

ILM did it.

Yes, we all hate the midistupidans. Let's get over it already. We won't convince Lucas to cut them out of the new trilogy, so either endure it or refuse to watch it.

Sorry, but it's really getting old. It's a friggin' movie. Well, two trilogies, but it's not a religion for crying out loud. I'm with Sir Guinness here, who told a fan that he'll only sign his autograph if he won't watch the movie ever again. It's a movie. A fantastic movie (I'm talking Ep IV and V and to a lesser extent VI here), but still just a movie.

Yes, the second trilogy (I-III) can't hold a candle to the old movies, neither in quality, nor script, nor acting. So they weren't great. Ok. I didn't like the change in pace one bit, but it's still Lucas' movies. Not mine. I may say that I don't like it. But when I keep repeating that over and over and over and over even after the movies have been out for near a decade, I start to look like some kind of fanboy without a life.

For the sake of Pete, get over it already!

(Yes, I have plenty of karma to burn, now mod me Troll and keep whining about midiwhatever)

Re:What?

[novakyu]

Er, photon has sufficient momentum to kick other things around. Normally, momentum is given by p = gamma * m * v (gamma = 1 for v much less than c), but for particles with m = 0, this is wrong and momentum is now given by p = E / c (where E, for photons, is given by h*f).

Unless you are going to invoke "relativistic mass" (fewer and fewer physicists use this term—mainly because a relativistic mass is the same damned thing as relativistic energy, given the correspondence between mass and energy), photon has no mass.

Nevertheless, my sibling posters are right, and the source of gravity (the source term in the Einstein equations, analogous to the electric charges in Maxwell's equations) is the stress-energy tensor (not simply rest mass of particles) and photons do contribute to that.

Don't Be So Rude!

[physicsnick]

Even though you're right, you should be modded troll. There's no reason to be so rude to someone who is obviously interested in the subject. Saying things like this:

To those don't understand physics: please stay off physics-related discussions

is the best way to keep people out of physics, and to keep the general public terrified of nuclear power, wireless communication, power lines, etc. Be encouraging if you want people to stay interested.

Re:Midichlorians don't explain the force

[raygundan]

Why does this bug people so much? Why is it so offensive that a large, organized Jedi order might know something specific and technical about the operation of the Force that was lost and replaced with mysticism after their fall? "High Science Becomes Magic After Apocalypse" is a staple of sci-fi.

Re:Space doesn't curve

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Be careful what you deem to be only a mathematical model. Murray Gel Man insisted his theoretical quarks didn't really exist. But lo, and behold they do. You certainly can't say that space-time doesn't exit and isn't curved, without some proof to the contrary or a separate theory that replicates all of the results of the current one, without introducing concepts that are even more bizarre. In general, as many other non-crack addicted posters have posted, there is a conflict between Einsteins general relativity and theories in particle physics. This should help sort out some things in particle physics, but it won't really be the missing link between the two realms