Higgs boson

And some people think CERN is trying to bring the second step in that cycle.

They got a taste of what they were looking for when they found the Higgs boson in 2012.

And we all know how that discovery changed our reality.

Now they want to grab the very soul of the universe.

What if these are not just feelings? What if, for the last 18 years, we have already been living in an altered timeline, and shutting down the machine has only lifted the veil? The 27-kilometer tunnel beneath Geneva is the most powerful machine ever created by humanity.

Since 2008, protons have been accelerated there to nearly the speed of light and collided with energies not seen since the Big Bang.

In 2012, the Higgs boson was discovered.

The world applauded.

And some people think CERN is trying to bring the second step in that cycle.

They got a taste of what they were looking for when they found the Higgs boson in 2012.

And we all know how that discovery changed our reality.

Now they want to grab the very soul of the universe from another dimension.

What if these are not just feelings? What if, for the last 18 years, we have already been living in an altered timeline, and shutting down the machine has only lifted the veil? The 27-kilometer tunnel beneath Geneva is the most powerful machine ever created by humanity.

Since 2008, protons have been accelerated there to nearly the speed of light and collided with energies not seen since the Big Bang.

In 2012, the Higgs boson was discovered.

The world applauded.

Years later, that same approach helped particle physicists break matter into smaller and smaller pieces until arriving at something apparently irreducible.

From the reductionist instinct came quarks, leptons, and the Higgs boson.

Their catalogue blueprint, the standard model, remains one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history.

But reductionism has its limits.

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Discovery is the fuel of scientific progress, but how do discoveries happen? In 2012, the world rejoiced in the announcement by CERN that the Large Hadron Collider had finally detected the Higgs Boson.

It was a momentous day, the crowning achievement of modern particle physics.

The Higgs boson had been predicted half a century beforehand and indeed had represented the central goal of the $5 billion LHC.

Decades of tedious planning, fundraising, building and analyzing culminating in this grand moment.

But when the day finally came, there was also a tinge of disappointment.

As technically impressive as this feat was, it didn't fundamentally alter our view of the universe.

In a way, that day, we actually learned very little.

It was a big day in particle physics and one of the biggest scientific triumphs in decades.

The last piece of the standard model was discovered, the Higgs boson, a unique particle responsible for giving fundamental particles their mass.

With all the hoopla, you would assume the scientists must have seen or somehow measured the particle.

But no such thing happened.

First, the protons collide with the same energy, but in opposite directions.

The combined momentum is roughly zero.

This means that if you create a Higgs boson in the accelerator, it will be roughly stationary in the particle beam.

It's difficult to detect something that doesn't move because the detectors only pick up particles that fly away from the collision.

exciting.

What constant comes next? Electron mass, Higgs, gravity?

Well, if you look at the compendium, There are actually many other constants buried in there that are just waiting to be released.

So, masses fall out of it.

It's

possible.

Chain theory also has opinions about just 4-3 and 4-4, which correspond to terms that the Yukawa coupling and the Higgs boson, the only known scalar boson, are normally taught respectively as couplings between conventional matter particles and the Higgs field and then the Higgs itself.

In the language of chain theory, even 4-3 and 4-4 are actually treated as being co-equal to the strong interaction and the other standard model forces.

And so when you're talking about someone today who goes like, oh, well, it's like you hear that all the time with like the ancient structures, people and, you know, like what caused like the impact theorists and all this kind of stuff, like across every domain, there's somebody somewhere that goes, oh, well, you know, I've got this novel theory and.

really really really hard to falsify maybe even impossible to falsify but this is better than your theory that survived all the scrutiny it's like well you you got to earn those stripes just because you don't get the result in your lifetime doesn't mean that it's that there's some structural thing that's angled against you particularly in some deep conspiracy of knowledge gating and all this kind of stuff it's like that that's the structure we have for disseminating knowledge it takes a long fucking time Like, who's the guy, Higgs, the Higgs boson, right? Like that guy was ridiculed for decades.

And then finally someone said, oh, actually he's right.

Oh, okay, cool.

Proving the existence of Yang-Mills is one of the things that was announced yesterday.

So why is this important? As a warning, everything I'm about to say is just my opinion, but I think this discovery is in the same league as the discovery of the Higgs boson or of the direct detection of gravitational waves.

In all of those cases, the discovery itself wasn't especially surprising.

We expected the Higgs boson to exist, we expected gravitational waves to exist, and we expected Yang-mills to exist.

But the discovery opens the door to asking new questions that we don't know much about.

So particle physics is in a bit of a pickle these days because many of the experiments that we would need to discover new physics require such high energies that we may never be able to build a big enough particle accelerator to get it done.