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Higgs boson

Can the Higgs boson give believers their multiverse? Shot and chaser

The obvious difficulty is that the multiverse drags in inconceivable complexity in order to solve comparatively common, minor issues of the sort that science always faces. People don’t think of that approach as a solution unless they have a vested philosophical and emotional interest in the idea. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on why some are upset that the Higgs boson “refuses to misbehave”

Rob Sheldon: What Blekman didn't say, but Sabine Hossenfelder does, is that there are not "tens of thousands" but rather an infinite supply of wrong theories. That should keep particle physicists employed until at least the 23rd century or until the oceans rise 30 feet, whichever comes first. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on recent claims of dramatic new Higgs boson findings

Sheldon: This required analysis of thousands of decays and Terabytes of data crunching. So it is a triumph of data analysis to be able to see this rare decay against the more common route to stability, but neither unexpected nor revealing of physics "beyond the standard model". Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder on the future of particle physics

Hossenfelder: The standard model works just fine with that number and it fits the data. But a small number like this, without explanation, is ugly and particle physicists didn’t want to believe nature could be that ugly. Read More ›

Particle physicist: Please quit calling the Higgs boson “the God particle”!

As a matter of fact, we don’t often hear the Higgs called the “God particle” now that it’s been clearly identified and given Peter Higgs’s name. That was more common before. It’s almost like something else is bothering Dorigo but we won’t speculate. Read More ›

Cosmologist: String theory is incompatible with dark energy

Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally incompatible with our current understanding of “dark energy” — but only with “dark energy” can we explain the accelerated expansion of our current universe. Timm Wrase of the Vienna University of Technology quickly realized something odd about this conjecture: it seemed to be incompatible with the existence of the Higgs particle. His calculations, which he carried out together with theorists from Columbia University in New Read More ›