Unca Cece does a good job today of helping us understand “What is the God particle?”. But what he doesn’t say is how the LHC is intended to find the God Particle? That is, is there some way to extend his nifty analogy so that we can understand what the LHC will do that will demonstrate the existence of those groups of people?
Good point. Would it be something like this…
“We’re going to take one Obama, accelerate him up to thousands of miles an hour, and slam him into another Obama. Then we’re going to examine the remaining Obama-bits and see if they’re actually clusters of political groupies.”
I like that, it makes perfect sense. I know a lot of Republicans would like to see that happen.
As kind of an aside or a bit of an extension, if you will, I got to thinking about if we did resolve TOE, what then? What else would there be to know after TOE?
What happened before the Big Bang. 
They could have just gone to see Ted Turner. He owns the largest boson herd on the planet.
i’d love to know too. A lot of particle physics discoveries are often made through indirect observations - a spin that was off, a small amount of “missing” mass, etc. By comparing these indirect observations to mathematical models, you may become certain that something exists even if you never see it directly. Check out Higgs boson - Wikipedia for some ways that might allow an estimate of mass indirectly.
Something related in last Sunday’s comics:
http://d.yimg.com/a/p/uc/20090301/lft090301.gif
Well, at the mass scale currently looked at (>170 GeV, I believe), the Higgs is expected to decay mainly into pairs of W or Z-bosons (the mediating particles of the weak force), so that’s what’s going to be looked for – Z or W-pairs originating at a common locus. Of course, neither Z nor W are observable directly, so one would have to look for their decay signatures in turn – Ws can for instance decay into lepton/neutrino or up-type/down-type quark pairs, and Zs decay into fermion/antifermion pairs (electron/positron, for instance). Here’s a simulated Higgs event, though it’s for a slightly different decay branch than I’ve mentioned, which is dominant at lower Higgs mass scales (<140 GeV), decay into a bottom quark pair.
I unfortunately don’t know how to turn this into a nice, politically relevant analogy, though. 
:smack:Talking about missing the obvious. Thanks for kickstarting my brain for me.
Actually, a ToE would probably tell you just exactly why asking the question of what was before the Big Bang isn’t really one you can meaningfully ask (take the ‘what’s north of the north pole’-example), if it’s a complete, i.e. especially background independent (meaning that it doesn’t take a background spacetime as a given, but contains it as a solution), ToE. 
Sounds like the 24-hour cable news media’s reaction to just about anything Obama does. They can turn one speculated event into two observable events and three more speculated ones. Pundits shouting at each other on so-called news shows is a perfect analogy for the energy and chaos of a particle collision of any sort.
How’s that? 
Very good try, but with detector physics, you can usually figure out what’s actually happened given enough data; that’s not generally the case with news media.
A more serious answer to this question is that the ToE would be a starting point, not the finish of anything. Look at all the physics and engineering that came out of relativity and quantum mechanics. A ToE would spur on creativity like that only much more so, because instead of having incomplete tools that failed at critical points, we’d have a complete tool that gave the proper explanations. It would be the dawn of a new age of physics.
And there are hundreds of giant questions that aren’t answerable by the ToE because they fall outside of its purview. (Remember, its not really a Theory of Everything - it’s a theory that explains the four (possibly five) fundamental forces.) It won’t answer questions about, say, convection and fluid mechanics that drive today’s theorists crazy. It won’t answer all the mysteries of cosmology. It won’t give us new sets of nanotools. It’s not going to do much for biology and chemistry and geology. Most mathematicians won’t care at all.
Science is orders of magnitude huger than this one question, critical though it might be. A ToE would be wonderful, but thinking that it ends anything misses a big point.
No, a better analogy might be this:
“Banks and other financial institutions interact with each other via ‘letters of credit’, unseen virtual instruments that can exist briefly by borrowing money out of TheFed, provided the money is paid back again before a maximum amount of time passes. By pumping trillions of dollars of money into a stimulus accelerator, economists hope to confirm the existence of actual visible letters of credit.”
Also, serious question: if the Higgs particle is how particle physics treats the subject of mass, then how does this relate (if at all) to the General Relativity view of mass, and does it contribute anything towards the unification of GR and Quantum Mechanics?
The Higgs mechanism is used to incorporate the fact that particles have mass into the Standard Model of particle physics. (The Standard Model is based on quantum field theory, which is essentially quantum mechanics combined with the Special Theory of Relativity. Of course lots of smart people worked for decades to figure out the details of how they fit together.) The Standard Model is an extremely well tested theory that explains how particles interact via electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, but it doesn’t incorporate gravity. Our current understanding of gravity is based on the General Theory of Relativity.
In short, we need the Higgs mechanism just to complete the Standard Model, but even if we find the Higgs boson we still won’t know how fit together the Standard Model with our understanding of gravity.
Still, the properties of the Higgs could tell us something about physics beyond the standard model. For instance, one popular extension of the standard model is supersymmetry. Supersymmetry make some predictions about the Higgs – in fact, it actually requires that there are multiple Higgs bosons. Supersymmetry doesn’t tell us how to formulate a quantum theory of gravity either, but it is a necessary ingredient in at least one potential theory of quantum gravity, namely string theory. However, proving supersymmetry wouldn’t prove string theory – it’s necessary but not sufficient.
I think trying to extend the analogy is just going to confuse the matter. Actually, the LHC is easy to understand if you don’t sweat the details:
(1) One kind of subatomic particle is the proton. They’re the positively charged particle you find in the atomic nucleus. Because they have an electric charge, you can effect them with electric and magnetic fields.
(2) The LHC uses magnets and such to send protons flying around and around some giant ring-shaped tunnels. Once they get going fast enough, it smashes them into each other.
(3) When fast moving particles collide with each other, they can turn into other particles. There are many different particles they can turn into, and it’s somewhat random which ones you get – although there are rules saying which ones are possible.
(4) The heavier the particles you hope to produce, the faster the particles you started with had to be moving. The Higgs boson is fairly heavy, but with the LHC we finally have a particle accelerator large enough and powerful enough that it should be able to make the Higgs. (Actually, previous accelerators have presumably made some Higgs bosons, but you need to make a lot of them to have a decent chance of detecting them.)
(5) Heavy particles tend to decay into lighter particles. Again, it’s not that they’re made of the lighter particles, it’s just another case of one particle changing into another. We can’t directly detect the Higgs, but it can decay into things we can detect. So the LHC will be looking for the particles that they Higgs produces when it decays. (It can decay in more than one way, so there are various things to look for.)
(6) Like I said, smashing protons together can produce other particles besides the Higgs, and many of these can decay into the same stuff as the Higgs. The key is to look at how many of those decay products we see, and then subtract the amount that we would expect to be produced by those other particles that aren’t the Higgs. If even after substracting that stuff out there’s still enough left over, we can conclude that we also managed to produce some Higgs bosons.
Does that make sense? If not, let me know what you’re hung up on and I’ll try to elaborate.
So you’re saying the Higgs incorporates the property of mass, but not gravity as a force?
Exapno Mapcase pretty well said it right. Knowledge is fractal; the more we know, the more we find what else there is to know. John M Ford, the science-fiction writer wrote a poem (I wish I could find it) wherein Man solves a mystery and God says, “Okay, you’ve got that answer. Now here’s another riddle for you.”
I am confident that it will be a process that will end only with the heat-death of the universe.
Yeah, it doesn’t directly relate to gravity so far as I know. The mass of a particle is a measure of how much energy it has when at rest (as well as a measure of its resistance to an applied force). The Higgs mechanism explains where this rest-energy comes from in quantum field theory. A theory of gravity like GR tells us that this energy content results in a force, but that’s not part of the Higgs mechanism (and we don’t know how to synthesize GR with quantum field theory).