I've given up. Considering how this is supposed to be a big announcement which is probably important for a number of reasons that may affect a lot of people. I am surprised he didn't start with:
"I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this."
I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.
If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.
Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.
I am a particle physicist. The most interesting point of this announcement for me is that this is a confirmation of predictions of a very exotic particle.
The properties of subatomic particles include something called 'spin' - that's a fundamental quantum mechanical property. The higgs boson is the first elementary (i.e. not made of other particles) spin-less particle that we've discovered; it's completely unlike anything that we've seen up until now.
That the model that we have constructed can accurately predict its existence and the way that it decays without having observed anything like that beforehand is a huge confirmation that we're in the right region of model space. Today seems to be a huge confirmation that out understanding of physics is not fundamentally broken.
That's why its important; the prediction is like attempting a 5-point dive and nailing it pretty much perfectly. It's an impressive confirmation of 50 years of theoretical work.
(The anarchist in me would have preferred them not to find anything, I must admit. That would have been much more interesting, as the standard model came tumbling down... :-)
There will be time for popularization for the laymen. It is not now. It's more important that the knowledge be transmitted accurately and completely, than it is to give a reader's digest for the laymen. We'll have to wait until all of the discovered information is processed, and then summarized. Making a summary early on in the discovery is likely to contain errors. It's also better handled by people other than physicists working on the project.
The standard model predicted it and it was found. That's a major win for the standard model, which is the result of many years of theoretical work, as said above - it was able to predict something completely new, something that was never observed before.
I'm not deep enough in the field to see what questions could be answered, and we will see, but it's always a good thing to be able to rely on your model of the world.
So - this is not about other questions in the first place, it's about the validity of the standard model. We can continue from there.
(A common title for talks etc is "Physics beyond the Standard Model".)
I'm curious what you mean by "pretty much." Did the Standard Model predict 125 GeV?
I'm asking because I've seen a few casual descriptions of this Higgs as a "lightweight." I'm assuming that means it's not as heavy as expected?
EDIT: "If the mass of the Higgs boson is between 115 and 180 GeV, then the Standard Model can be valid at energy scales all the way up to the Planck scale (1016 TeV)."
This isn't exactly my field, but as I understand it a Higgs of 125GeV implies a supersymmetric model with relatively light squarks and no excitingly novel features. Basically, a small adjustment to the standard model that allows for one more family of heavy quarks and not much else.
Even the Guardian reporter has admitted that it goes over her head. Heck, I'm doing a Master's in condensed-matter physics and I don't understand much of the jargon.
What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are actually probably the simplest bits. CERN operates a particle accelerator -- this means that the LHC basically smacks subatomic particles into each other at absurdly high speeds to create infinitesimal explosions with tremendous amounts of energy (these are the TeV, GeV numbers that you see -- they're talking about the amount of energy that was concentrated in the explosion). The explosion essentially disrupts the underlying fields of the universe so much that new particles can be created or destroyed, but if you excite the Higgs field to its quantizing particle, it tends to immediately decay into other things.
The other things are subatomic particles, including quarks (the letters u, d, c, s, t, and b for up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom -- you may have heard him for example say 'bb') and bosons (he talked a bit about W W* and gamma-gamma; gamma rays are light while W bosons are, well, a little more complicated let's say).
All of the stuff he says about Monte Carlo and so on is about creating "expected" curves from the Standard Model. You want to have two curves, "expected" vs. "actual", so that you can compare them.
On the base axis usually there is energy -- this is the energy of the explosion. There are usually two curves from Monte Carlo which tell you what you expect to see. Then there are data points with error bars which tell you what's actually seen and what the statistical "counting" errors are, how weak the signal is. Usually there is then a follow-up graph where they have tried to "subtract out the noise" to see the signal more clearly.
I feel like the statistics going on here is almost as fascinating as the physics. Well, they technically are the same, but so intriguing to see people hooping and hollering at 5.0 sigma.
This is for the scientific community. The scientific method is that all results should be scrutinized, tested and verified. If you want a 2-3 minute explanation. Wait for CNN.
I don't really buy that in this case. It's still high level and summarized and no one is verifying or scrutinizing anything based on that presentation alone.
NASA handles these kinds of announcements well, but then they also announce cyanide-based life. So.
When scientists present results to scientists, they present in a scientific way. I.e. methods, analysis, etc. There is no way a scientist can get by with just a short summary when talking to fellow researchers... it's just not how science is done.
I understand that. I don't understand why announcements of this significance are done like this.
Its like NASA landing on the moon without video and presenting geology findings based on the rocks. Sod that. The people want to see VIDEO! They want to live the moment. I thought this could be one of those moments where something significant was discovered which I may be asked about in many years time. A "this changes everything moment." The way it is presented though may be just that for scientists. For everyone else though.. who cares when the announcement is this technical.
Surely I wasn't the only person wondering if we are not closer to the hover board? That would have been a nice way to start.
Screenshot of hoverboard
"For the leymens tuning in. Our discovery means this is / is not closer to being made."
This isn't an announcement. There's no press. This is CERN doing us a courtesy and letting the public see a presentation they were going to give anyway.
The ATLAS lady has what I think must be the worst set of powerpoint slides I've ever seen. Epically bad. Pretty amazing.
Even if you are working at CERN running the equipment, there's no way you could absorb all the info on each of those slides in the 10 to 15 seconds she shows them. They might as well have pictures of frolicking kittens on them.
Clearly you don't understand how much time pressure these people are under. If you were at CERN you would realize how intense the atmosphere has been in the past 2 weeks.
Also, focus on the content - if you're caring so much about the presentation, then you probably don't understand enough of the physics to comment on the content.
Seems like a lot of it is just comparing more recent data to last years data. I'm sure they have spent plenty of time looking at last years data, so they can probably understand quite a bit at this pace.
This, unfortunately, is not even that bad when compared to the litany of bad, overloaded, eye-scorching powerpoint presentation I usually sit through in research group meetings, conferences, and more. Maybe all intro courses in STEM should include a course on communicative design.
That'll happen, someone will explain it in "layman" terms about why/how this is fundamentally important. That's probably not going to be done at this announcement though, but hopefully in the aftermath by the media reporting on the announcement.
"I know a lot of people are tuning in without degree's in Physic's. Let me break it down for you in Leymens terms. We are fairly certain we have discovered this. It is important because of that. Now let me get onto why we think this."
I get that this talk is not meant for me. However, it is important - apparently. Its on the front page of Guardian.
If this is an announcement of great importance and it is 98% mumbo jumbo aimed at high end Physicists or whatever then.. I don't know. Its another chance to get people interested in science that has been missed.
Note: I am not saying the whole talk should be dumbed down. I am just saying a 2-3 minute prefix for those who do not understand a single word for the first 20 minutes of the presentation.