Ain't no sunshine but maybe a hint of dawn

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2577

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And she always gone to long anytime she goes away, hay

Wonder this time where she's gone
Wonder if she's gone to stay
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And this house just ain't no home
Anytime she goes away (anytime she goes away)

Bill Withers, 1971

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2577

Edited version (see comment) I re-edited this because a commenter (which see) pointed out that the articles today can be fit together than I did at first.

The article referenced above says that the ATLAS project at CERN has found, with 95% confidence that between 140 and 300 Gev, there is no Higgs. String theorists made their first strong prediction about the mass of the Higgs. String theory has not been useful in making such predictions so far. They predicted that the Higgs would show up at 125 GeV.

It may or may not be there. There are 2.5 standard deviation hints that it is there but such hints have turned out to be wrong before.

So the anticipated sunshine of seeing Higgs and SUSY particles at CERN has not yet risen.

This lack of definitive particles leaves big questions in the Standard model unanswered. Some of these questions are:

1. How do particles get mass?
2. Why is the Standard model off in one of its predictions by a factor of 10 to the 120th while getting lots of other things right?
3. With the apparent non-existence of SUSY (she is not just dead, there is no body at all), what should the extension of the Standard model be and what experiments will prove that this extension is a correct extension.

As Lisa Randall said in "Warped Passages" the lack of finding of the Higgs or SUSY particles would mean that entire careers of a number of theoretical physicists will have been spent chasing a mirage. On the other hand, Randall says that after the depression passes for these theorists there will be a lot of work to do since physics and the universe is clearly even more weird than physicists thought it was.

Stay tuned.

Bill Withers song is still fun whether Higgs and SUSY are real or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIdIqbv7SPo


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/science/tantalizing-hints-but-no-direct-proof-in-search-for-higgs-boson.html?_r=1&hp

More articles (see above)

I would like it if someone could explain why, after so many collisions, there are only hints of the Higgs, not strong evidence.

In assessing the situation, please keep these well-known shortcomings of the Standard Model of particle physics firmly in mind.

1. The Standard Model is primarily a heuristic model with 26-30 fundamental parameters that have to be “put in by hand”.

2. The Standard Model cannot predict the masses of the fundamental particles that make up all of the luminous matter that we can observe.

3. The Standard Model did not predict the existence of the dark matter that constitutes the overwhelming majority of matter in the cosmos. The Standard Model describes heuristically the "foam on top of the ocean".

4. The vacuum energy density crisis clearly suggests a fundamental flaw at the very heart of particle physics. The VED crisis involves the fact that the vacuum energy densities predicted or measured by particle physicists (microcosm) and cosmologists (macrocosm) differ by up to 120 orders of magnitude (roughly 10^70 to 10^120, depending on how one estimates the particle physics VED).

5. The Planck mass is highly unnatural, i.e., it bears no relation to any particle observed in nature, and calls into question the foundations of the quantum chromodynamics sector of the Standard Model.

6. Many of the key particles of the Standard Model have never been directly observed. Rather, their existence is inferred from secondary, or more likely, tertiary decay...

The above is a comment from the NYT article.

Here is another song that might fit

They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn
But you wouldn't know it by me
Every day's been darkness since you been gone.

"Meet me in the morning" Bob Dylan