 |
| Image Source: Symmetry Magazine (link below) |
It bugs me when someone says "that's how it works 'in theory'" or "it's just a theory, not 'fact'."
"A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation." Wikipedia is about as succinct as you can get. I underlined the keys, and a more adroit point is the Pythagorean Theorem: for right triangles - 45-45-90 and 30-60-90 - it works every time. That's how something works in theory: it is substantiated in experiment, repeated, verified results within a reasonable margin of error; legitimate journal publication after passing an editorial board and ruthless peer review. Conspiracy/Provocateur and other such "theories" are neither: they are merely loudmouthed opinions.
The ATLAS and CMS experiments on the Large Hadron Collider were designed to be partners in discovery.
In 2012, both experiments reported evidence of a Higgs-like boson, the fundamental particle that gives mass to the other fundamental particles.
ATLAS reported the mass of this new boson to be in the mass region of 126 billion electronvolts, and CMS found it to be in the region of 125. In May 2015, the two experiments combined their measurements, refining the Higgs mass closer to 125.09 GeV.
This particular analysis focused on the interaction of the Higgs boson with other particles, known as coupling strength. The combined measurements are more precise than each experiment could accomplish alone, and results establish that the Higgs mechanism grants mass to both the matter and force-carrying particles as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.
Symmetry Magazine: Combined results find Higgs still standard, Katie Elyce Jones
No comments:
Post a Comment