Higgs Boson Discovered

[Airbrush]

Stephen Hawking already conceded that he lost his bet that the Higgs would never be discovered.

 

What are the implications to cosmology? Any spinoffs like atomic energy? Or is it just the satisfaction of knowing the standard model is correct?

 

"Wednesday’s announcement was also an impressive opening act for the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest physics machine, which cost $10 billion to build and began operating only two years ago. It is still running at only half-power."

 

"The December signal was no fluke, the scientists said Wednesday. The new particle has a mass of about 125.3 billion electron volts, as measured by the CMS group, and 126 billion according to Atlas. Both groups said that the likelihood that their signal was a result of a chance fluctuation was less than one chance in 3.5 million, “five sigma,” which is the gold standard in physics for a discovery."

 

"Finding the missing boson was one of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider. Both Dr. Heuer and Dr. Gianotti said they had not expected the search to succeed so quickly."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/science/cern-physicists-may-have-discovered-higgs-boson-particle.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

[space noob]

Knowing the standard model is correct is an impressive feat, nothing more important will be discovered in our life time,

This is a huge step forward, now that we have the knowledge that the standard model is correct certain theories can be abandoned and some can be advanced further, it will allow us in cosmology to apply it to knowledge of the big bang, eg know we can add the fact that the God particle was also created then,

Trust me this is an incredible discovery,

We (i think i can only speak for myself here but i think most people here will say they did too) knew it had to exist or the universe would be unstable without it, we had to find it to prove it