This why I have faith in science. The man once said, give me a big enough lever, and I can move mountains. Well the LHC at CERN is just such a lever.

Once we understand WHAT imparts mass to matter, then we can then understand how to GOVERN mass. Interstellar flight? NO problem.

not nearly that easy, but it's a step in the right direction.

I don't think she's at CERN anymore. The Doc probably knows more (or maybe not...).

Anyway when I saw the news about that this morning my first thought was, hmm if we could create and manipulate Higgs fields we can change the effective mass of things, Mass Effect, literally!

if we remove the mass from something, wouldn't that also require us to remove the energy?
that sounds like a complication. like it might take equal amounts of energy to do. or maybe even a way to extract energy. but that implies permanent effect, whereas simply removing the higgs field doesn't seem such a huge idea.
maybe mass is only equivalent to energy as a convenience. like, it happens to be true, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. that could make more sense. photons have no mass, but momentum and energy.
I wonder what would happen if we removed mass from an object. I can imagine it suddenly speeding away in a direction at the speed of light
but if it hit an object without mass and therefore momentum, would anything even happen?
confusing idea.

if we remove the higgs field, wont matter just disintegrate into waves and stuff?
that's the idea I'm getting. energy without mass is a wave.

could end up being used as a weapon of mass destruction. imagine you needed a little energy to remove the higgs field of a few particles. then, the particles decay and release more energy, which is used to remove the higgs field of the surrounding particles, and a chain reaction is made. might be devastating. all though this is all extremely off the top of my head, and I'm not close to being an expert on it lol

The key to achieving FTL travel is contol of mass. Before you can control something you need to understand it.

remove the mass, things turn into waves. it's not as simple as you think if you think FTL travel will now be easy if the higgs boson is confirmed. we haven't even made effective cosmic radiation shielding that's lightweight enough yet. the best they have in theory so far is a complex hybrid electric and magnetic field system combined with storing fuel around the ship (so the liquid hydrogen and stuff will absorb ions)

whatever happened with that neutrino they observed to travel faster than light?
I recall there was some controversy surrounding reproducibility of results.

forgot to plug something in or something to that effect lol
it was really a much more complicated situation than it was made out to be. imagine having to get things so detailed that you have to account for things like how quickly the signal the neutrino induces can travel, how quickly it can cause an effect big enough to be recorded, etc. even that makes it sound simple. you end up with quantum mechanical issues involving electrodynamics.

News from Wired Science:

The discovery of the Higgs boson is finally here. Early in the morning on July 4, physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced they have found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs.

“As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer. “It’s a historic milestone today. I think we can all be proud, all be happy.” Both CMS and ATLAS, the two main LHC Higgs-hunting experiments, are reporting a boson that has Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) with a 5-sigma significance, meaning they are 99.999 percent confident of its existence.

At the first mention of 5-sigma by physicist Joe Incandela, who presented results from one of the main Higgs-searching efforts at the LHC, the audience burst into applause. “It was really a magnificent moment to see the reaction from the community,” he said later in a question and answer session. “Emotionally it didn’t really hit me until today because we have had to be so focused, and so much work to do.”

Though CERN scientists are making sure to be cautious about over-interpreting their data, the results are impressive and historic, and today will likely go down as the day the Higgs discovery was announced.

“This boson is a very profound thing that we have found. This is not like other ordinary particles,” Incandela said. “We are reaching into the fabric of the universe like we’ve never done before. It’s a key to the structure of the universe.”

First hypothesized in the 1960s, the Higgs boson is the final piece of the Standard Model, the physics framework explaining the interactions of all known subatomic particles and forces. The Higgs has been the subject of an extensive two-decade search, first at the European Large Electron-Positron Collider, then the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, and finally at the LHC. Finding the Higgs within the predicted energy range is a major vindication for the Standard Model.

“I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge,” physicist Peter Higgs, the particle’s namesake who first theorized the existence of the particle, said in a statement.

The Higgs is certainly the most important discovery in the field for a generation. The last of the Standard Model’s 16 particles to be found was the top quark, discovered at Fermilab’s Tevatron in 1995, while many physicists would point to the detection of the W and Z boson in 1983 as the field’s most recent monumental finding. And considering that it is gives rise to the mass of all other particles, the Higgs may well be the most important new particle found for years to come.

Discovering the Higgs boson is not likely to radically change life for most people — it will not lead to better communications devices or fancy new electronics. But knowing its characteristics will bring physicists a better understanding of nature. The Higgs is important because it is the manifestation of the Higgs field, which is thought to permeate all of space and interact with all other subatomic particles. This interaction leads to the different mass for each elementary particle. Some particles, like protons, are slowed by this field, like a tennis ball going through molasses, and are relatively heavy while others, like electrons, shoot rapidly through like BB gun pellets, making them light.

To search for the Higgs, the LHC has been smashing together protons at incredibly high speeds, counting out the many elementary particles created from these energetic slams. Heavy particles, like the Higgs boson, almost immediately decay into simpler fragments.

What physicists have been searching for are characteristic decays that indicate the existence of the Higgs. Since the process is somewhat chaotic, it takes a long time to sift through the results and determine which decays are indicating which particles.

That’s why particle physicists use statistics to interpret their results, proving that a small excess of certain decays is not just a coincidence. In December, the LHC had collected enough data to ascertain that some events were pointing to the creation of Higgs particles at 125 (GeV) with a 3-sigma significance, meaning they had a 0.13 percent chance of happening by chance. What they have been waiting for is the stringently high bar of a 5-sigma result, which has only a one in 3 million chance of happening randomly.

During their talk, the LHC spokespeople stressed that their results are preliminary and will require further analysis to ensure the new particle is the Higgs boson. Yet plenty of other physicists are willing to call the Higgs a Higgs. “Many commenters out there are right in pointing out that no matter what CERN says, the world today will know that the Higgs boson has been discovered,” wrote particle physicist Tommaso Dorgio on his blog.

With the Higgs basically announced, scientists now move into unknown territory. Many physicists are hopeful that some properties of the boson will turn out different than predicted under the Standard Model. If this is the case, it could indicate the presence of new physics such as supersymmetry that would build on the Standard Model and fix certain problems with it.

“I would be delighted if this new state is a Higgs boson, but perhaps not the Standard Model Higgs boson,” physicist Fabiola Gianotti of the LHC’s ATLAS experiment said after the announcement, with an apology aside to Peter Higgs. “Because this will open the road to something else.”

Scientists have been waiting a long time for this moment, said theoretical physicist Mark Wise from Caltech. Whereas before all they could do is build models that seemed correct based on inference, there may soon be real data to confirm or deny their theories.

“The rubber has hit the road,” he said. “Which is important because physics isn’t about theoretical speculation, it’s about how nature behaves.”

As yet, there have been no indications for physics beyond the Standard Model and the latest Higgs results are very consistent with the theory. This is problematic since some physicists had expected to see some interesting or new particles by now yet nothing has yet appeared. Some researchers are hoping details of the Higgs properties will point to the place they should look.

“What would be the worst scenario, is if the Higgs boson turns out to be exactly what’s in the present theory, and there’s no hint of anything else,” said Wise.

But there is still hope. After this year, the LHC will go into two years of shutdown to do repairs. When it comes back online, it will be at much higher energy, able to probe far more interesting places.

In particular, many scientists are looking out for any particles that could correspond to the dark matter seen in galaxies throughout the universe. The ordinary protons and electrons that make up most things on Earth are outnumbered five to one by this dark matter. Perhaps the LHC can uncover exactly what this matter is in 2015 and 2016, when it runs at full capacity.

“If I had to place a bet, it’s during those times we might make another big discovery, that might be as big or even bigger than the Higgs,” said physicist Beate Heinemann of the University of California, Berkeley, who works on one of the LHC’s Higgs-searching experiments, ATLAS.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/