Guardian, AP, etc: The LHC recapitulates old physics, ready for something new, and already there’s talk of new machine
The Tracker has not looked at physics news for awhile; now is the time for amends. There are reports of various sorts this morning.
At The Guardian in the UK, Ian Sample is among the first to bang out of the gate with news where the Higgs boson is NOT (according to results from the US Tevatron machine, announcedat a Paris meeting). Also weighing in, at AAAS Science Now, Adrian Cho helps scotch rumors that the Chicago gang had ambushed the LHC on its way to glory. Cho also provides news of a sort – that the Tevatron’s management already is shifting its gaze away from one last triumph with that machine and toward its next big machine, called NOvA. In a separate dispatch, Cho reports that CERN not only will shut down the LHC for repairs and mods for all of 2012, but it will idle the rest of its big physics machines as well.
Similarly pouncing on the Fermilab triangulation of Higgs’s whereabouts is Science News, where Ron Cowen reports the dragnet points toward the elusive particle as less massive (and hence easier to find) than some models suggest, and that evidence also favors supersymmetry – ie new physics for the next standard model. Cowen walks a fine line between the unworthy and the curious, citing “intriguing, but not statistically significant” results from the Tevatron.
Other physics news in general (and some special) media:
- AP – Emma Vandore: Big Bang investigators want new smasher ; Nothing really novel here, or evidence that physicists are being impulsive. It is about the long-discussed International Linear Collider that, rather than contra-rotating racetracks of colliding particles, would spray them straight at one another kind of like rifles pointed down each other’s bores.
- CNET DeepTech blog – Stephen Shankland – LHC firing on all cylinders, but no HIggs boson yet ; Lots of detail here, including a nicely-done rendering of the LHC’s recapitulation of old physics on its route toward something new.
- SymmetryBreaking – Katie Yurkewicz : LHC results: Not just the same old thing ; This outlet is an inhouse magazine (SLAC and Fermilab), but works like a news outlet – and provides here a good “outside” analysis of what the latest data mean.
Grist for the Mill: Int’l linear collider ; CERN Press Release ;
