Science
Related: About this forumWill scientists at CERN announce discovery of "The God Particle" Wednesday?
The talk on the web is that physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider are set to announce probably discovery of the Higgs Boson, frequently referred to as "the God Particle" (The scientist who came up with that term has regretted it ever since!).
There's a good article for the general reader at Discovery News: Higgs Boson Hunt: "We've Discovered Something":
Scientists are saying 'strong evidence' rather than "We've got it!" That's partly because scientists like to be exact in their language rather than 'hedging their bets' as the rest of us usually do. What they've really found are a number of 'events' showing up in particle counters for the ATLAS and CMS experiments attached to the LHC that cluster around the energy levels predicted for the Higgs.
Like I said, scientists like to be exact in their language - 5 sigma exact!
I recommend you follow the links in the article to find more information about both the Higgs and the Large Hadron Collider.
Edited to add: There's another view of the discovery of the Higgs at Wired.com: How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Breaks Physics, which has some interesting discussion of the Higgs Boson, the Standard Model of Physics and Supersymmetry.
caraher
(6,279 posts)Since i don't have a horse in this race, I'm perfectly happy for LHC not to find evidence of supersymmetry. If nothing else, it would be a slap in the face to a smug theorist I know who liked to say that all that's left to do in physics was determine the mass of the Higgs and discover the supersymmetric particles (which, of course, had to exist). Wait, maybe I do have a rooting interest...
Warpy
(111,332 posts)and whatever is announced on Wednesday, some of them will get their faces righteously slapped.
I don't have a horse in this race, either, just a part of my brain that regards all this stuff as utterly fascinating and amazing that "bang two rocks together" physics has come this far, at all.