So they haven’t actually found the Higgs boson, they only have found where it is not.

So that is akin to a major, newsworthy story?

Uh…OK.

If that is anything like me saying I have discovered millions of dollars. Not, actually, but since I know where the millions of dollars are not (as in my ban account)…

It what?

Amounts to the same thing as actually having it?

Huh.

1) Who knew 2)I must be sure to call my banker in the morning to let him know that I am really loaded…

Him and my bill collectors will be thrilled to hear it, I’m sure.

[via Telegraph] But at a press conference on Monday, the physicists in charge of the Large Hadron Collider said that they had only established where the Higgs boson was not to be found, and that its location continues to elude them.

However they added that as the amount of data created by the atom-smashing experiments increases, they now expect to know whether or not the most-wanted particle exists within 18 months.

If it is tracked down, it will explain how particles come to have mass and provide the final piece in the Standard Model of physics that was first set out in the 1970s, while if it turns out not to exist then the textbooks could be ripped up.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), told reporters: “I would say we can settle the question of the Higgs boson, the Shakespearean question ‘to be or not to be’ at the end of next year.” [Read More]

It’s not the fact at what they haven’t NOT found that’s the real story here, but what they plainly haven’t found, at all, you know,…

By not actually finding, what they have been looking for, nor not finding it where it’s not either.

[via New Scientist] The Higgs boson is still missing – but perhaps we should be more worried about what else the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found yet.

That’s the main message to come out of a conference in Grenoble, France, this week, where physicists have gathered to chew over the first results from the world’s most muscular particle smasher, sited at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

Finding the Higgs would complete the “standard model”, our best stab yet at explaining the fundamental particles and forces of nature. But we already know that some weighty questions, such as the relationship between the strengths of different forces in the cosmos, or the nature of the dark matter thought to make up about three-quarters of its mass, lie beyond the standard model’s scope. To answer these questions, physicists look to a grander construction known as supersymmetry.

Supersymmetry proposes that every particle predicted by the standard model has a meatier cousin that turns up only at extremely high energies. But the LHC has not found any such super-particles. “Squarks” and “gluinos”, partners of the standard-model quarks and gluons, have been ruled out at energies up to 1 teraelectronvolts (TeV), according to an analysis of the LHC’s first year of collisions.

No simple models

That is just the range in which the simplest family of supersymmetric models predicts these particles should be found. More energies and more complex models remain to be explored, but “the air is getting thin for supersymmetry”, says Guido Tonelli of the LHC’s CMS collaboration. At the same time, there is no sign yet of gravitons – particles that transmit gravity and are essential for a quantum theory of the force – below an energy of 2 TeV.

The missing particles leave some physicists wondering whether they have been asking the right questions up to now. But Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s director general, counsels against hasty conclusions. With the machine still ramping up to full power, the LHC has produced just one-thousandth of the data it eventually should deliver. “Something will come,” he says. “We just have to be patient.” [Read More]

Physics, gotta love this stuff…

Except when you don’t, but just because love is NOT there, it just means you know where it’s not, NOT that it doesn’t exist at all.