Recent content by calgarian

2 hour "technical" seminar 1 hour "layman" press conference

I have a question which is probably pretty basic. If the Higgs field is everywhere, why are Higgs bosons so fragile that they decay before they reach the detectors?

Thanks for the explanations! Interesting stuff.

Thanks! Why are the yellow and green bars not lines like the muons and the hadrons? What types of particles are these? Also, I'm assuming the longer lines means more energy just like the higher bars?

Hmm ... so does this mean that the Higgs will be produced from a combination of the energy released in the collision and stuff that makes up the protons? I was getting the understanding that that they would just pop up "magically" out of pure energy (again, I am not a physicist :-p)

Can someone give a brief primer on what information is conveyed by an image like that? I've seen similar images but I have no clue what the images are saying. I imagine the length and direction of the lines means something?

I'm really not sure what point you are arguing, kloptok. The point I am making is that as a non-physicist I had been confused as to what the LHC is doing because of articles like the one I quoted. The author makes it sound as if we will find the Higgs boson in "the scattered remains" of the...

The author of the article used the term "debris" to describe something that the experiment is designed to record, as opposed to being uninteresting and obstacles as you describe them.

I came across this quote in an article about CERN's search for the Higgs boson: Based on the responses ITT, am I correct in concluding that the bolded part is misleading or poorly worded at best? My new understanding is that they will not be looking at debris, as that term is normally used...

Yeah I realized afterwards that my title sucks. I guess I am asking a more general question of how energy gets converted into specific types of mass like a Higgs boson. As I say above I am having difficulty of how you go from a "general" form of mass in energy to, from the CERN professor's...

So how will CERN's LHC produce a Higgs boson I saw a video where a professor said "So you do it by ... using e=mc^{2} ... you collide some protons at huge energies, so that's giving you energy, and that energy gets converted into the mass of all possible new particles that there can be"...

Interesting stuff. Thanks for all the replies. So this must mean that the same temperature feels warmer to us at sea level compared to high altitude. I'm curious if anyone knows by how much. For example, if someone accustomed to sea level moved to Denver (5000 ft), what temperature would an...

I see what you're saying. But I would think that at equal temperatures the fewer air molecules at higher altitude are moving faster than the larger number of slower moving air molecules at lower altitude. If this is true, why would net heat transfer be different?

Is temperature "different" at altitude? I know the boiling point of water is lower at higher altitude. But a friend of mine says that temperature in general is different at altitude. So, if the cooking instructions say to bake something at 425, he says you should set the temperature of the oven...