The hunt for the higg's boson reminds me of the attempts to measure the speed of the earth using light beams. Everything we thought we knew about physics told us that we should be able to measure the speed the earth was orbiting by measuring the difference in speed between two beams of light. When the experiments failed, the response was develop more precise measuring techniques, and more perfect mirrors. It wasn't until Einstein that people realized these failed experiments were not failures at all, but evidence that the universe doesn't work quite how we thought. The hunt for the Higg's Boson, and the "failure" to find it after all these years just seems like a reminder that empirical evidence > theoretical models. Just because the math seems elegant doesn't mean it necessarily applies to the universe we are living in.<p>Of course, they may find the Higg's boson tomorrow, and then my little theory about them being wrong would be proved wrong, but that's science for you.
"""The Higgs boson's nickname comes from its importance to the Standard Model; it is the sub-atomic particle which explains why all other particles have mass."""<p>That's not the story I heard: Leon Lederman named the hypothesized Higgs boson the "God particle" as a joke, because its effects were everywhere yet nobody had ever seen it in the flesh--not because it was in any way powerful or dangerous or numinous or terrifying.
The growing number of elementary particles reminds me of the epicycles-upon-epicycles in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. The question is when are we going to have our "Newton moment" and figure out that they're all just manifestations of one elementary particle or string or something else?
Can anybody explain how they get the number of <i>five</i> Higgs particles?<p>If they count one doublet as 4 particles, two doublets would be 8 particles, right?
This theory would tend to suggest that there are indeed several undiscovered particles<p><a href="http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/how-a-surfer--1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/how-a-surfer--1...</a>