Interviews: Ask Physicist Giovanni Organtini About the Possible Higgs Boson Disc 170
Giovanni Organtini of Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics (well, Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) has agreed to answer questions about the recent observations of a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson. Dr. Organtini is part of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. He is careful to note that while the researchers "[believe] that this new particle, with a mass 125 times that of a proton, is the famous Higgs boson," they "need to study that new particle more deeply in the next months to be conclusive on that. Organtini likes free software (he's written Linux device drivers, too) and has his own physics-heavy YouTube channel, mostly in Italian. Please confine questions to one per post, but feel free to ask as many as you'd like.
The Best of the Worst Science Reporting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Article title (Score:3, Funny)
"Interviews: Ask Physicist Giovanni Organtini About the Possible Higgs Boson Disc"
Is the Higgs Boson disc-shaped or is Timothy too lazy to use the preview button before posting ?
Re:Article title (Score:4, Funny)
"Interviews: Ask Physicist Giovanni Organtini About the Possible Higgs Boson Disc"
Is the Higgs Boson disc-shaped or is Timothy too lazy to use the preview button before posting ?
No, what he meant was that Organtini is going to put a bunch of Higgs Bosons on a DVD and sell them to people who want them. This is your chance to ask questions before you buy, such as:
How many bosons will be on the disc?
Will I be able to view them on Linux?
Why not just make them available for download?
Re:Article title (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think Higgs Bosons will catch the interest of the mass market.
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I don't think Higgs Bosons will catch the interest of the mass market.
I'm confident this will be the year of Higg's Boson Desktop
Re:Article title (Score:4, Funny)
And we were only one character away from discussing the "Higgs Boson Disco"!
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What everyone wants to know.... (Score:1)
What does the Higgs Boson taste like?
Disc (Score:4, Informative)
How much do you hate people who say "disc" instead of "discovery" and lead halfwits everywhere to believe the Higgs particle is disc-shaped somehow?
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and lead halfwits everywhere
I think you mean to say laymen.
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To a particle physicist, most laymen are halfwits. Folks in that profession usually have a bit higher IQ than the general public, and certainly more education.
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It looks there wasn't enough room for it- I think /. limits the length of the headline.
Personally I would have reworded it.
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My wit feels halved today. I honestly thought there was a disc shape involved.
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First time I came across the usage. Thought someone was being dumb, was just me. Thanks.
Also today first time came across the new word copyvios (copyright violations, thanks wiktionary).
Language is evolving very quickly this week.
Open Data? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Open Data? (Score:4, Informative)
ATLAS generates 23 petabytes of raw data per second. A large computer cluster near the detector identifies which events to store amounting to 100 megabytes per second which is around 1 petabyte of data per year. (Straight from wikipedia)
The actual analysis of the data requires multiple large computer clusters world wide. I believe the data is available to anyone with the expertise and knowledge required to do any meaningful data analysis. Oh and having a spare cluster sitting around with nothing to do probably helps as well.
Money, time and effort (Score:3)
Secondly analysing the data is a huge effort. You have to understand many varied and subtle detector effects related to how the detector was
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Then there is the cost of storing and making available the petabytes of data an experiment like ATLAS generates each year. Who is going to pay for the network, disks, servers etc to make this all available not to mention the development of a simple event format and the processing needed to generate and fill it.
Taxpayers? The same people who funded most of the research in the first place?
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I haven't been able to find torrents of the data available on these tests. Why is that?
The data set is enormous, torrents are mere trickles compared to the amount of data that the LHC generates. Also someone (or some team) who has spent decades on the project to get to the point where data is coming out should (in my opinion) have the right to publish first, provided they do so in a timely manner. Data is the lifeblood of science but the glory goes to whoever is first to analyse it correctly. The LHC is "team science" working on carefully selected questions, independent teams produce and anal
The future of the Higgs (Score:5, Interesting)
While I know it is rather early to comment, what do you think the future applications of today's research into Higgs Boson will be?
Don't be afraid to be a little bit sky-high. I for one am already fantasising about space ships propelled by manipulation of the Higgs field on a local scale.
I'm only asking because, a century ago the electron was discovered and nobody was quite sure what to do with it. And it runs the world.
Is it higgsy? (Score:5, Interesting)
What success or failure factors can/should/will be used to determine whether or not the new particle is actually the higgs, or something else unexpected?
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Also, of the tests that were conglomerated to get to the 5 sigma value, how similar were those tests to each other, and how does that speak to the robustness of the results? What I mean is, is this just a glimpse at a corner of something that is jutting out where a corner of the higgs would jut out, or are we seeing more than one corner of it?
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Disproving Super Strings is the first thing that came to my mind. That would be a relief!
Obvious... (Score:1)
The question on everybody's mind, of course, is ...
will it blend?
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Dunno. You can't explain it.
Yes, I feel much of the shame for memeing.
(Insert socially awkward penguin)
When Does the Particle Hunt End? (Score:5, Interesting)
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mass for a mass-giving particle (Score:4, Interesting)
What does it mean to say a particle that gives all other particles mass...has mass itself?
Re:mass for a mass-giving particle (Score:4, Interesting)
The Higgs mechanism is what gives particles mass, not to be confused with the Higgs boson ;)
Two different things, named the same because of how related they are.
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How related are they? Is it like the electron and the electron-field (the cosmological term/concept)?
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Intuitive physics breaks down, so I'll try the best I can to explain this.
In quantum field theory, stuff goes down differently, very differently. The fundamental things (entities, stuffs) are fields. You're perhaps intimately familiar with one of them, the EM field. And I'm sure you know about wave-particle duality, so this next part may make sense. Photons are thought to be oscillations in the EM field. But of course, go into the details and things get loopy.
A proposed ubiquitous Higgs field is one of
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In real laymen way to explain it is it's named the Higgs field so it kind of fits in the family of things like magnetic fields or gravitational fields.
Re:mass for a mass-giving particle (Score:4, Informative)
This is slashdot, so I'm going to assume I can at least share some "mathy" parts of it (not really the whole thing).
The Higgs Field is represented by two complex numbers. It is a field, therefore, it has a value in every point in space, kind of like how the temperature across the world varies depending on where you are. In that example, the "temperature field", I'd guess, is represented by a real number at every point.
Now remember that each complex number can be written as two real ones given the form:
z = a+bi
therefore, technically, the Higgs field is not just two complex numbers but it can be thought of as four real numbers. So think of it as being a bundle field with four numbers for each point. Each number, turns out, becomes a particle.
So there are four particles that come out of the Higgs field. Three of them turn out to be components of the Weak bosons (W+, W-, Z_0), as needed to explain why they have mass while photons don't. But there is one field left. This is identified as a new boson, the Higgs Boson.
So, the Higgs Boson is actually just _part_ of the Higgs Field. It isn't like the photon, which is the particle of the whole EM field. Oddly enough, the Higgs Field itself is massless, I think. But the Higgs Boson recieves mass the same way the other three Weak bosons recieved mass, by the Higgs Mechanism.
Really, you can get all woowy with the conceptual part of the Higgs Mechanism but it really is just a neat math trick that I can't really explain here. Essentially, you start with a mathematically description of the particles with mc^2=0 (remember Einstien's equation, E=mc^2 for the energy stored in mass), ie, the particles are massless. After the math trick involving the Higgs Field (not just the Higgs Boson!) you obtain a term that looks like mc^2, so it's like the mass term arises spontaneously without having to put it in there a priori. Hence how we say the particle has "acquired" mass: We started out modeling out particles as massless but all of a sudden, the math tells us it has it.
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Cool! What's the relevant number system? I'd have to google, but I think the name's quaternions or something like that. (Clifford algebra, maybe?)
I'm glad you took a second to break it down to the brass-tacks. Thanks!
Higgs Boson=42? (Score:3)
Despite the reference to the Higg's Boson as the "God Particle" in popular science journals and mainstream media, just how important is this discovery as far as weak interactions, gravity, etc., are concerned? Is this discovery going to change the face of quantum chromodynamics as we know it?
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Well, since the Higgs was apparently discovered at approximately the energy predicted by the existing theory my first guess would be no, it won't fundamentally alter the theory that predicted it. On the other hand I seem to remember there were some significant inconsistencies as well (charge maybe? Seems like something was off by a factor of 2 or so). If those inconsistencies prove to be real and not experimental noise, that could be the beginning of some serious re-thinking, especially if none of the c
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what, like warp drive?
I read a theory in a Trek novel (one of the early crossover ones I think - Strangers From The Sky?), which explained the arrowhead symbol as a function of mass, energy and velocity. Basically it went something like: as you approach the speed of light, the amount of energy required to push a mass approaches infinity. If you can change the mass to something less than zero, then the amount of energy required to accelerate past C becomes less than infinite, hence attainable.
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(We do not have this, the Higgs mechanism does not describe, validate, imply, or even reference exotic matter, and none of this has anything to do with anything)
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I wish I was stoned/drunk enough to know what the hell you were talking about...!
Applying the discover in engineering & tech (Score:5, Interesting)
Dr. Joe Incandela of UC Santa Barbara and CMS director said recently of the CERN Higgs results:
"This is so far out on a limb, **I have no idea where it will be applied**, We're talking about something **we have no idea** what the implications are and **may not be directly applied for centuries**."
(source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/04/stephen-hawking-and-higgs-boson-bet_n_1650024.html [huffingtonpost.com])
My questions: Do you agree that the direct application of the findings are as nebulous and abstract as he describes?
Please discuss the implications of your answer and how they relate to the economic choices of how humans use their scientific resources.
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Who ever perfects shooting mass-bearing particles first (i.e. protons and up), will have first dibs on the next generation of particle weapons. Imagine how much more effective a laser would be at destroying things if instead of firing pure energy it was firing a similarly coherent mass beam.
That ought to fund physics for another thousand years...
Look back 50-100 years (Score:2)
Particle detectors and physics of 50 years ago are now revolutionising medicine as doc
I *heart* science data (Score:2)
Hi AC, thanks for the response. I'd suggest re-reading my question, however. It seems you think I am trying to 'say' that LRC was a bad science investment. I think ALL scientific data is valuable...even erroneous data can be very valuable.
First, I'm asking, not telling here. I'm quoting and asking a question. No bias. I want to know **if** this scientist thinks what you are saying I am saying.
I don't know! That's why I asked...the quotation from Dr. Incandela (awesome name) provided the basis for my questio
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"All the technologies you enjoy (TVs, internet, cell phones, automobiles, AC, etc.) were based on research that likely seemed frivolous at the time"
absolutely incorrect:
television - was an application of an electron gun technology that was not derived at all from any 'finding' of a new particle....the tech and science for it was there for at least 50 years
internet - laughable...no discovery in particle physics initiated the ARPANET research whatsoever
"""
What a load of non sequiturs! Whoever you are respo
clarification please (Score:2)
hi fatphil, thanks for the response.
I would like to address your 'question' but I was hoping you could restate it for me.
Please start from my original post that posed the question for the scientist, then the first AC reply, then my reply to him, then yours, etc. so I can see your logic.
Also, quotations help. Thanks I'll try to respond for you b/c I really think you are missing the point of my question.
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no clarification, no answer (Score:2)
Well, fatphil... :/ this is quite a turn of events...it saddens me that you are incapable of communicating yourself sufficiently to ask me your question about my question...
however, this phrase did make me laugh: "simply a key-hole analysis"....that is another way of telling me that you're just reacting and your analysis is not thought out
you also mention a 'straw man' fallacy...nice job!
that IS a type of fallacy! in order for you to claim I have made it, you need to show how my original question to the sci
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Should I Expect More Theories or Less Theories? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I read some Brian Greene in high school and have since become a little flustered with string theory ... or rather the many variations.
What? You mean the idea that we are all points in a 2D information plane and that our perceived realty is just a holographic illusion doesn't make perfect sense?
Elaborate models with a thousand knobs to tune so it matches any possible experimental observation don't sit right with you?
You some kinda anarchist or something?
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'more' and 'less' don't need theories; we already have software implementations.
where does a proton get its mass? (Score:3)
The initial call for questions included a factoid that I had somehow missed in all the other layman summaries: "He is careful to note that while the researchers '[believe] that this new particle, with a mass 125 times that of a proton, is the famous Higgs boson,' they 'need to study that new particle more deeply in the next months to be conclusive on that.' "
I'm totally not familiar with the details here. For some reason I was expecting that the boson would be a much smaller thing, in the same scale as quarks or even strings, and that other particles including the proton would owe their structures to this. If the Higgs "explains" mass, to me that implies it is responsible for mass. How would you explain the mass of other massive particles like the proton? Or is comparing it to a proton not really accurate?
Re:where does a proton get its mass? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm betting they're talking mass-energy when they refer to the particle's mass, that's the norm for particle physics, and one of the reasons masses are measured in GeV (technically GeV/c^2) instead of molar-masses or something as is done in chemistry.
Basically there are three distinct phenomena that all go by the name "mass" since, in all experiments to date, they are invariant with respect to each other.
(1) mass-energy: e=mc^2, how much energy would you get out if you annihilated the particle
(2) inertial mass - F=ma, how much an object resists acceleration from a force
(3) gravitational mass: f = G * m1*m2 / r^2, this is the gravitational "charge" that determines how strong the force of gravity between objects is, highly analogous to electrostatic charge though much weaker, to the point of being essentially undetectable in particle accelerator experiments.
From what I understand the Higgs field is probably responsible for the latter two, however the first is still an inherent property of the particle itself.
Oh, and incidentally top quarks are actually even more massive at 171GeV, and Bottom and Charm quarks are both pretty beefy at ~4.2 and 1.3 GeV, respectively, versus the puny 2.4 and 4.8MeV of the Up and Down quarks that make up normal matter (which actually gets most of it's mass from gluons) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#Classification [wikipedia.org]
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The theory is the existence of the Higgs field and calculations predicted that under a set of conditions the Higgs Boson can exist.
So this is just one way of confirming the existence of the Higgs field.
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Very rough and simple version: When particles interact with the Higgs field they get mass, the Higgs field is related to but distinct from the Higgs Boson. I'm not entirely sure on the details how the two (the field and the particle) are connected though.
Funding impacts (Score:2)
Prior to the possible discovery announcement, the LHC was often called one of the last big science experiments of our generation--- big science being a casualty of recession budgets. Do you think this discovery might persuade governments to invest more in big/expensive/multinational investigations?
Wrong Mass? (Score:1)
What's the future of particle physics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Once this particle is examined, and let's assume it's the elusive Higgs, is there a continuing reason for large particle accellerators?
Basically, I'm asking in ignorance. If this confirms the standard model, what do you see for discoveries of this nature in the.future?
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You can't ever confirm a scientific theory, but you can fail to disprove it.
There are still other theorized particles that no one has directly observed/created in a lab. One such: the graviton. Last I knew, the hypothesized mass of the graviton was prohibitively large (aka: we might need astronomically sized accelerators to generate them in a lab).
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Just like you can never confirm the theory of evolution right? Sounds like you really like to just make stuff up and post it. It's theorized that the graviton is massless, but it sounds better to make grandiose statements, doesn't it.
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Question - Pragmatics (Score:4, Interesting)
In regards to the discovery of the Higgs Boson, what is an example of a practical application of this discovery. I find that physics is best explained with real-world examples.
Feynman diagrams (Score:1)
Using only Feynman diagrams, can you describe the best way to make fettuccine Alfredo?
Mass 125 times that of a proton? How? (Score:1)
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I think it has to do with the equivalence between mass and energy, at the fundamental, quantum level.
See, they increased the energy on two protons beyond 125 GeV (where 125 GeV is the energy-equivalent of 125 protons, give or take). In any one collision at that energy there exist a number of possible results, and one such result was a particle with a mass of 125 protons. Via observing how that particle interacted with the universe (for as long as they could observe it) they deduced it's nature and whether i
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The energy equivalence of a single proton is (google) about 1 GeV (938MeV = 0.938 GeV ~ 1 GeV).
ref: http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?mpc2mev [nist.gov]
Full Disclosure: Calculating particle masses based off the component quarks would leave me confused, too.
Inertial mass vs. gravitational mass (Score:5, Interesting)
The Higgs boson is famously associated with how particles acquire a 'mass'. But mass is, in itself, an interesting property. As I understand it, the Higgs boson is only associated with inertial mass. If this is so, do you expect gravitational mass and inertial mass to be always the same? If so, would you speculate on the mechanism that ensures this is true?
Beyond the standard model (Score:2)
Cutting-edge science and science fiction (Score:3)
Higgs and the Ether (Score:4, Interesting)
Would this then be best described as an ether, only instead of matter traveling through the ether, matter is manifestations of the ether (fields) itself. Would this also than mean that the motion of matter is not a physical movement of a "particle" but instead the transfer of the "excitement" of a field from one spot of the field to another?
And what, if any, implications does this disocvery have for unifying gravity or other areas of physics?
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This is a great question, and I wish it had been modded higher. It's related to my question, but I didn't work the 'ether' angle in. Though quantum mechanics already has a kind of ether in the concept of space being foamy (particles popping into existence only to immediately disappear all the time in the midst of otherwise empty space). This just extends that ether so that mass exists as a consequence of it instead of just charge.
I, for one, am excited... (Score:2)
Significance of Higgs Boson mass? (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understand it, a Higgs Boson compatible with the standard model could have been found at a range of different masses, and the search for it has involved searching the possible mass range until it was either discovered or not.
Assuming that this new discovery is indeed the Higgs Boson as predicted and compatible with the standard model, what is the significance of the particular mass that it has been found to have? Are there any macro-scale predictions that depend on its mass?
Symmetry breaking in fields (Score:3)
It is my understanding that the higgs mechanism requires some sort of spontaneous symmetry breaking for the proposed higgs field to yield scalar mass.
Is this somehow related to symmetry breaking in other fields in the Standard Model (e.g., Spin0/hypercharge)?
Also, might there be a whole spectrum of scalar properties like mass that might exist from symmetry breaking in other Standard Model fields that might be discovered that could explain currently un-unifyable parts of theoretical physics (e.g., matter/antimatter ratio, gravity, dark energy, etc), but still within the general framework of the Standard Model? Or is the Standard Model essentially doomed with respect to these currently un-unifyable observations?
How do you feel about... (Score:4, Interesting)
SSC (Score:4, Interesting)
Had the superconducting supercolider (SSC) been completed in the USA in the 1990s, would it have found this particle? Even with a 20 year technology advantage, LHC has taken some time to get there.
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The SSC would have taken protons to 20 TeV, for 40 TeV collisions, six times that of the LHC. It might have found new particles predicted by some variations of the Standard Model
what are the next incremental follow-ons? (Score:4, Interesting)
I also heard there could be a family of Higgs bosons, so we may look for others?
Higgs Boson mass vs. Top Quark Mass (Score:3)
Higgs field (Score:2)
What next for LHC? (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming that this new particle is in fact the Standard Model Higgs boson, what more can we expect to discover with CMS? Is there any new physics you expect to be within the reach of CMS? Or this is pretty much the end?
I know this question is unanswerable, but your best guess would make me happy. I'm actually very worried by the prospects of running out of (falsifiable) theories to test...
dumb question (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nonsense, photons have zero rest mass but non-zero relativistic mass. E=mC^2 will give you that relativistic mass given the photon's energy.
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nonsense, relativistic mass is a very real thing with real world consequences.
could governments make a higgs weapon? (Score:2)
and how can we stop them?
Why is the Standard Model still being used... (Score:2)
This may sound really dumb but.... (Score:4, Interesting)
... the answers to the dumbest questions are sometimes the most interesting :) I understand that the Higgs is responsible for giving mass to all the other particles, then it must be *everywhere*. Why is it so difficult to detect? Why does it take such a staggeringly powerful supercollider to find what ought to be as common as the electron or proton?
Also, I can't help but to visualize particles as something like billiard balls while I'm aware they're only mathematical abstractions from our point of view and that experiments like the double-slit experiment refute the billiard-ball model... is there a way to visualize the Higgs to make the answer to my previous question easier to understand?
Analogies to magnetic and electric fields (Score:3, Interesting)
FAQ on the Higgs Boson (Score:2)
Some silly questions (Score:2)
Please pardon my deep lack of understanding. If any of these questions are worthy please provide your ideas on them.
First, I read the following "Just as the electromagnetic field is higher near heavily charged particles, the Higgs field should be higher near heavy particles. For instance, near a Z boson—an object that accelerators should be able to produce in great abundance in the near future—the Higgs field is changed. The Z boson is unstable. When it decays into lighter particles, the disturb
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Been reading a bit too much Nietzsche have we? Haha.
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...don't you think he'll punish you for using your talents to suck resources away from survival and toward some unnecessary dalliance?
You sure have funny notions about God. What he'll actually be angry about is not spending the money and talent on anti-abortion, gay-healing, and other sex-control campaigns.
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That's an excellent question, and the answer according to Standard Model is that the Higgs boson has no spin, is its own antiparticle, is CP-even, and has neither electric nor color charge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson [wikipedia.org]
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the so-called "laws of physics" are man-made constructs. Many have exceptions or are general guidelines (e.g. Ohm's Law vs. real materials which are not linear and some even have opposite properties of Ohm's law. So we alter the "laws of physics" all the time with new discoveries or better models.