Thought I'd throw this out there, just for correctness and because excitement seems to be skewing the details. The Higgs Boson has not been conclusively found.
A boson
seems to have been found in the 125-127 GeV range and it has, at this moment, unknown properties though the results
seem consistent with what is expected with
one of the several Higgs possibilities. It will be another several years of more tests, more data analysis, and more studies before we have conclusive data on whether this is indeed the Higgs or a coincidental impostor (which is still fine, as that would mean we found something cool and unexpected, and we'd have to see what its ramifications are/would be). The tests were to five sigma of statistical significance so you can bet your bottom dollar that at the very least *something* is there but what that is is still a bit of a toss up but favor the Higgs though the chances of other *things* is most certainly non-zero (though you have a better chance of winning the lottery while being finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow while getting impaled by a magical unicorn made of sheer asskickery
).
As for the ramifications... there are many for the Standard Model, good ones, but the Higgs isn't going to magically solve FTL limitations* and turning off *mass* to nullify gravity (which overlooks the fact that while turning off the Higgs mechanism for an elementary particle might be feasible, doing it for a quantum mechanical ensemble of holy-shit-10-to-the-32 particles, will probably be tricky...) isn't exactly going to be beneficial for airplanes (or much of anything).
*Think of the (supposed, likely unlikely) tachyon case. It has negative mass and thus must always move at a speed that is greater than the speed of light. If you magically gave it positive mass, it would have an issue in that its speed is still greater than c but its mass is now also greater than zero. All sorts of bad things happen, in particular because your momentum becomes larger than mc.
Whats more is that, as of current massless discoveries, anything massless must be traveling at the speed of light (negative mass tachyons MUST be above the speed of light to satisfy current physics) but the only forces that are applicable to such an object are refraction (force exerted ON a massless body) and radiation pressure (exerted BY a massless body) (and virtual particle exchange between elementary particles in the forms of certain bosons). Long story short: Not sure how you'd accelerate (let alone decelerate) since you're probably not going to be wanting to refract through matter (would be messy) to change your velocity. (Also, massless objects have predefined momentum (such as the photon, being massless, has a momentum but not one found through p = mv), so I have no idea what "turning off" mass would do to something composite (proton, people, planets, Persian kings). Would it instantly gain a predefined momentum (perhaps the momentum it had when it stopped having mass) or would it be forever stuck with zero momentum?... you may explode.
)
Quote:
Originally Posted by mangamuscle
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Dark Matter is getting confusing for me. Every few months I see a new report purporting a discovery and then, latter, a new report baffling the pants off of everyone with a discovery that brings to question current dark matter understanding or previous dark matter results. (It was about a year ago when they had the report on two clusters which passed through each other without any of the expected dark matter effects (ie the center of mass was not where it should have been... at all).
Dark matter has been "found" for a while now, though. Wikipedia has an entire chart of observed support.