Monday, 10 January 2011

No Bosons for America

Today Facebook and blogs are abuzz with the news that the operation of the Tevatron will not be extended beyond the financial year 2011. At first sight this may appear a short-sighted decision. If Tevatron continued until 2014 and doubled the luminosity acquired so far it would have a good chance to snatch the Higgs boson, possibly the biggest prize in particle physics in this century. So why backing down now? Why slaying a goose that is about to lay a golden egg? Of course, the real reason for closing the Tevatron is not the operation costs (peanuts) or the competition from the LHC (for a light Higgs, the Tevatron could get there first). The real reason is much more profound. The real reason is the fundamental law that I pointed out some time ago, which is known as Pauli's other exclusion principle:
Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe.
This law has been tested in multiple instances, and has been established beyond all doubt. Evidently, the policy makers read blogs and are aware that any attempts to discover the Higgs boson at the Tevatron would be doomed from the start. Conversely, the DOE decision to shut down the Tevatron is yet another proof that Pauli's other exclusion principle is the fundamental law of nature that can never ever be violated.

16 comments:

  1. Unknown10 January 2011 at 23:39

    Have you published this result in the literature, Jester? An Ig-Nobel prize might await!

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  2. Jester10 January 2011 at 23:42

    Yeah, it's my most significant contribution to particle theory so far :-)

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  3. Ervin Goldfain10 January 2011 at 23:49

    C'mon Jester, don't be shy! It should be called the "Jester exclusion principle (JEP)"...

    But how about exotic anyons? Would they evade JEP?

    Cheers,

    Ervin

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  4. Anonymous11 January 2011 at 01:30

    From what I understand of human evolution, the photon was likely first observed in Africa.

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  5. Anonymous11 January 2011 at 01:42

    JJ Thompson was American?

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  6. Jester11 January 2011 at 02:04

    It proves Great Britain is not Europe, at the fundamental level

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  7. Jester11 January 2011 at 02:22

    Einstein's interpretation of the photoelectric effect is commonly considered as the discovery of the photon. This was done...guess where :-)

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  8. Anonymous11 January 2011 at 07:25

    Sooooo the neutralino will be found in the Azores?

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  9. Jester11 January 2011 at 10:56

    Pauli's other exclusion principle predicts there is no supersymmetry at the TeV scale, as fermions cannot be discovered in Europe. Abandon all hope, the principle cannot be violated :-)

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  10. Anonymous11 January 2011 at 19:44

    Maybe it will be the opposite of split and only the scalars are light. It has to happen somewhere in the landscape, right?

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  11. Anonymous11 January 2011 at 21:01

    you forgot the Thompson's electron!

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  12. Jester11 January 2011 at 22:00

    I did not. See comment 6 ;-)

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  13. Vladimir Kalitvianski12 January 2011 at 18:02

    Is Higgs a boson? There are coherent states of Higgs? There is a Bose-condensate of them?

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  14. Anonymous12 January 2011 at 18:35

    Well ther surely is a condensate for it, that's the whole point of the higgs mechanism. However, I'm not sure if it is correct to compare it with a BEC.
    AK

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  15. Anonymous16 January 2011 at 22:30

    You should team up with Holger Nielsen :-)

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  16. Selim14 June 2011 at 17:55

    I don't think you can exclude SUSY at the LHC scale; they might only find the sleptons...

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