Daily reminder that the Higgs Boson would have been found in the 90s had Congress not cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993. It would have been 3 times as powerful as the LHC.
>>7690908
>USA
>Accomplishing anything of value
>>7690908
Taxes
How would the discovery of the Higgs boson have accelerated scientific progress?
>>7690908
Congress said we could afford either the International Space Station or the Superconducting Super Collider. Hollywood doesn't make a lot of movies about particle accelerators so the choice for those who like getting re-elected was obvious.
>>7690908
Daily reminder that the SCC was scrapped so that more American astronauts could watch snails have sex in weightlessness on the ISS.
>>7690934
The higgs field is apparently what gives matter it's mass so if we can figure out how to manipulate it we could potentially do all kinds of cool shit with it.
>>7690934
Higgs boson production is a background to processes which may produce other particles physicists are looking for, such as the lightest supersymmetric particle, dark matter, or another type of Higgs boson.
Also, since the SSC would have been more powerful than the LHC, it's possible that there are new particles achievable at SSC energies but not LHC energies. It could be decades before we have a machine that could reach SSC energies.
>Texas
>Caring about science
>inb4 TI Instruments
This should not be a surprise to you.
>>7690934
This has to be b8, but if a discovery gets like 16000+ citations, one can easily imagine it must be incredibly significant even if you know nothing about high-energy physics.
https://inspirehep.net/record/12291/
https://inspirehep.net/record/11883/
https://inspirehep.net/record/1124338/
https://inspirehep.net/record/1124337/
These are among the most highly-cited papers in HEP ever.
>>7690977
Wow! If it had been discovered in the 90s, we would have gotten 30000+ citations by now! Just think of it... 14000+ more science! That's a LOT of science. 14000, that is. Lots of science. Surely more than, say, 10000 science. 4000 more. Science!
>>7691042
Well someone's butthurt.
>>7691042
With that much science we'd be way further ahead in the tech tree and wouldn't have to worry about Gandhi getting to nukes first.
>>7690965
>The higgs field is apparently what gives matter it's mass
Nope. The Higgs mechanism is what gives certain bosons mass, pretty sure it was originally devised to explain why the W+/- bosons had a mass when they should theoretically have been massless.
>>7690977
That's not a particularly fair assumption considering how much sensationalist garbage media buzz the entire process has been. You're clearly piggy backing off this buzz to disguise the fact that you have no idea and are unable to answer the man's question.
>>7691054
You're thinking of electroweak symmetry breaking, which uses the vacuum energy of the Higgs to explain why below a certain energy threshold the W+/- and Z bosons have mass while the photon does not. The masses of fermion fields are also explained by Yukawa couplings, which is the strength of interaction between fermions and the Higgs field.
>>7691059
Not him, but citations are just a rough display of a discovery's impact. That so many other papers have cited the Higgs papers shows that's where the efforts of many scientists are now.
>>7690958
No surprise nothing meaningful has been done in space
The US wasted all the money on meaningless shit
>>7690908
Thanks, Clinton.
>>7690958
Yeah, they needed that money for 200-million dollar fighter jets that can't even do a barrel roll and hellfire missiles for blowing up goats and brown children.
>>7691290
We got Tang.
