Omg, this is so kewl! I can tell, even though I have no idea what they're talking about!

One thumbs up. Next, We need a Proof. Good lookin' out guys.

The autotrophs began to drool.

well don't everyone get your tailfeathers regalled...as a "footprint" the analysis assums the level of when we were figuring out Meson particles from a ' bubble trail' (that's like late 60's). I still believe the problem is in unreliable math.

can't blame em for such fuzzy rational...big titles and such self esteem at stake...

...CERN can always name some new 'shards of glass'...that's usually worth money.

Some people have no respect. No kudos to this snooper and her editor. Wait for it as they have requested.

This is pretty spectacular news. Imagine a world where the vast majority of the population actually followed and appreciated stories like this instead of how Justin Bieber's hair is currently fluffed.

Hmmm, this particle is 130 times the mass of a proton, and yet it gives mass to said proton. They will have to do some pretty tricky explaining so I can understand how that works.

In other words, I expected the Higgs Boson to be much smaller in mass than any particle with mass, and that it would simply attach itself to the proton to give it mass. Based upon this revelation, I wonder if the HB creates mass through the field it generates. If so, then since fields have different strengths in different locations, then a proton would have different weights depending upon where it is in the field.

Or maybe this is one of those weird quantum mechanical things such that the HB creates an underlying uniform field and interacts with protons or whateve as they move through the field, but not with light which doesn't have mass.

At any rate, I predict determining the properties of the HB will allow us to develop anti-gravity devices of a sort within the next 20 years. If we could shield a proton from the HB, then perhaps that would cause it to be weightless!

Hmm, I also seem to recall that weightless things move at the speed of light, so if a proton were made weightless, what would happen to it? Maybe this will lead to a different way to create fusion power or a very efficient propulsion system with 100% conversion of mass to energy?

At any rate, science beats politics any day!!

Thanks for the video Alan Boyle!

Once again I wonder WHY WHY WHY did they cancel a similar program in the USA that was to be in Texas. It only cost a paltry $10 billion and they cut it because it was "too expensive". Well hell, that's only cost of a couple of weeks of those wars in the Middle East. The USA has REALLY SCREWED up it's priorities in wasting money in wars and not in science and infrastructure. No wonder China is kicking our butts in the scientific realm, as well as even India and Russia. We will look upon those wars as the turning point in our history where the USA almost went over the brink into becoming a minor power. But hopefully we are finally seeing the light and putting the brakes on this turning away from science!

I hate to get political, but our research programs, Nasa, and anything else that has to do with science is on the back burner since the powers that be are controlling the masses by the dumbing down of our citizens,,,such a pity,,,,Let me predict that it will be science that finally proves there is a God,,,,

Have a happy and healthy 4th everyone!

With this being possibly as big as the discovery of quarks 30-40 years ago; what advancements did quarks lead us to? Just trying to find the practical applications of this big discovery.

I hope this news announcement will not go the way how the neutrino speed gets bumped.

If it is the Higgs, it is no where near earth shattering. It is interesting like this: some early experiments with deep inelastic scattering indicated that indicated that there were 3 generations of quarks and then in 2009 it was confirmed that it had been observed in 2 separate experiments.

If it is the lowest energy sparticle, then we are talking about something revolutionary.

"Its discovery could open the way to new frontiers in physics, such as the study of extra dimensions and supersymmetry." It's also possible to assume the Higgs function does not involve those things.

Personally, as a physics and chemistry major with graduate degrees, I can't explain certain behaviors of subatomic particles without assuming extra dimensions or even extra universes exist. But I'm also aware of how well "Occam's Razor" has applied to the advancement of scientific theory.

Occam's Razor basically says if there are two plausible explanations for something, the simplest one is most likely true. A good example is the complex explanation of wheels traveling on wheels to explain the motion of planets around the earth, but when the Sun was put at the center, the motion became much more simple and was well described by the 3 simple planetary motion laws of Johannes Kepler.

With subatomic particles, we have to go back to J.J. Thomson and the discovery of the first subatomic particle, the electron. Thomson knew there had to be a position subatomic particle to cancel out the charge but never isolated it. Consequently he developed a "Plum Pudding Model" of the atom where the electrons were small pieces of fruit and the positive part was the pudding - bigger and harder to isolate. But the behavior of electrons in different atoms made Thomson's model assume complex rules which became relatively simplified when Rutherford's famous gold-foil experiment figured out there was mostly empty space in the atom with negative particles around a dense positive center.

Today, theories for the behavior of subatomic particles is becoming more and more bizarre to explain what appears to be bizarre behavior. For example, if electrons are fired at a wall they can't penetrate except for two small slits in the wall, and there are detectors all along the opposite side of the detector to measure any penetration, the electrons don't pile up where the two openings are alone. They also register at other locations where they can't possibly get through in a wave-like pattern. That leads to the question does a particle always have some wavelike nature to it? We know that light, when stopped, doesn't weigh anything and must be all-wave, no-particle. But when it's moving it bends (diffracts) through transparent objects of different optical density as if it was a particle with width.

As you get to particles smaller than the electron and approaching the lack of mass of light, you get ever more bizarre bits of behavior.

But they're only bizarre because we don't understand them. A train whistle will sound as if it has a higher pitch to someone at the station it's approaching than someone on the train. That phenomenon was once a mystery. But ever since Doppler figured out why, it's become an easy calculation for high school physics students and easy to understand that the wavelength is made shorter, therefore the frequency of the waves (pitch) becomes higher.

Eventually, I think someone's going to figure out a behavior of matter that doesn't involve tiny one or two dimensional strings vibrating in space and in multiple other dimensions. Then, just as when Neils Bohr came up with the first modern explanation of the electron layers around the nucleus of the atom. Not all top physicists like their universes stringy and supersymmetric: on "The Big Bang Theory," Leslie Winkle broke up with Leonard Hoffstetter because she didn't want her children to grow up believing, as Leonard does, that the universe is "stringy."

"Its discovery could open the way to new frontiers in physics, such as the study of extra dimensions and supersymmetry.' It's also possible to assume the Higgs function does not involve those things."

The _Mick

It certainly doesn't. The discovery, if later confirmed, merely fills up the missing in the Standard Model. String theory, with all its exotic baggage, will remain just that - a dream theory.