STRANGEST NEWS STORY OF THE DAY ?

NEW YORK TIMES 
July 26, 2010 
Teams of Physicists Closing in on the ‘God Particle’ 
By DENNIS OVERBYE
 
A thousand physicists working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., reported in Paris on Monday that they had not found the “God particle,” yet. But they are beginning to figure out where it is not. 

[MY QUESTION - DID ALL 1,000 PHYSICISTS GO TO PARIS] 

Its mass — in the units preferred by physicists — is not in the range between 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts, according to a talk by Ben Kilminster of Fermilab at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris. 

[MY QUESTION - HOW CAN A GUY NAMED "KILMINSER' GET PAST AIRPORT SECURITY] 

And so the most intensive particle hunt in the history of physics goes on. 

[MY QUESTION - DON'T THE VARIOUS PARTICLES TURNED UP UNDER MY COUCH CUSHIONS COUNT FOR ANYTHING?] 

Over the last decade physicists working on two separate experiments at Fermilab have combed the debris from a thousand trillion (1 with 15 zeros) collisions of protons and anti-protons looking for signs of the Higgs boson, which is said to be responsible for imbuing some other elementary particles with mass. Rumors fanned by a blogger that the Higgs, dubbed the “God particle,” by former Fermilab director Leon Lederman in a book of the same name, had been detected reached all the way to Gawker last week and focused attention on the Paris conference, which also featured a speech by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. 

[MY QUESTION - IF THOUSANDS OF PHYSICISTS ARE EXPERT AT "COMBING DEBRIS" CAN'T A FEW OF THEM BE DIVERTED TO THE GULF OF MEXICO? NOT ALL, BUT JUST A FEW?] 

[MY QUESTIONS: WHAT DID PRES SARKOZY ADD TO ALL THIS IN HIS SPEECH? AND OWING TO HIS STATURE, DOES SARKOZY STILL HAVE TO SIT BACKWARDS IN THE OFFICIAL LIMO? 

The new results, combining the data from two separate Fermi experiments, DZero and C.D.F., narrow the range in which the Higgs, if it exists, must be hiding. Physicists had previously concluded that it must lie somewhere between 115 billion and 200 billion electron volts. By comparison a proton, the anchor of ordinary matter, weighs in at about a billion electron volts. 

[MY QUESTION: DON'T YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT IF HIGGS EXISTS BEFORE YOU CAN KNOW IF HE IS HIDING? (I'M JUST SAYING)] 

A new competitor is about to enter the hunt. Physicists from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the most powerful accelerator in the world, announced that their machine, which started operating at half power in March, with 3.5 trillion electron volt protons, had rediscovered all of particle physics, most recently the top quark, and thus the table was set for it begin to look for new physics as well as the Higgs. The new collider has registered about 1.5 billion collisions, but with more energy at its disposal it hopes to catch up to Fermilab in a year or so. 

[MY QUESTION: WILL THE "NEW COMPETITOR" BE SUBJECT TO THE BANKING REFORM LAW JUST PASSED?] 

[MY 2ND QUESTION: SHOULDN'T A SENTENCE THAT CONTAINS THE PHRASES "REDISCOVERED ALL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS" and "LOOK FOR NEW PHYSICS" ACTUALLY BE TWO SENTENCES? AT LEAST?

[MY 'NOTHER QUESTION: SHOULD'T EVERYONE GET OVER HERE, SINCE BOTH THE "TOP QUARK" AND THE "NEW COLLIDER" BOTH LIVE IN MY TOWN AND EVEN ON MY STREET!? 


COPYRIGHT NY TIMES 2010