Higgsteria - How to interpret the mass spectrum graph

The seminar on the 4th of July held at CERN in Geneva - despite the use of Comic Sans font - gave very interesting news to the Physics community.

ATLAS and CMS, two experiments from LHC, both discovered a new particle (5-sigma level is a requirement for a discovery) at 126 GeV in the mass spectrum.

Jargon apart, if you are not a physicist, you can read info about the Higgs boson (such as what is the Higgs, what is a boson, how does it give mass to other particles...) pretty much everywhere nowadays.

What many people may wonder is: what is this 5σ? And what about this 95% confidence level (CL)? But, most importantly, what is 126 GeV?
In this post I will give you an idea, with simple language, about these concepts and you will be finally able to understand this (not-so) mysterious graph.

Natural selection and prime numbers

The adults [of periodical cicadas] live for a few weeks, but the 'juvenile' stage (technically 'nymphs' rather than larvae) lasts for 13 years (in some varieties) or 17 years (in other varieties). The adults emerge at almost exactly the same moment, having spent 13 (or 17) years cloistered underground. Cicada plagues, which occur in any given area exactly 13 (or 17) years apart, are spectacular eruptions that have led to their incorrectly being called 'locusts' in vernacular American speech. The varieties are known, respectively, as 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas.
Now here is the really remarkable fact. It turns out that there is not just one 13-year cicada species and one 17-year species. Rather, there are three species, and each one of the three has both a 17-year and a 13-year variety or race. The division into a 13-year race and a 17-year race has been arrived at independently, n fewer that three times. It looks as though the intermediate periods of 14, 15 and 16 years have been shunned convergently, no fewer than three times. Why? We don't know. The only suggestion anyone has come up with is that what is special about 13 and 17, as opposed to 14, 15 and 16, is that they are prime numbers. A prime number is a number that is not exactly divisible by any other number. The idea is that a race of animals that regularly erupts in plagues gains the benefit of alternately 'swapping' and starving its enemies, predators o parasites. And if these plagues are carefully timed to occur a prime number of years apart, it makes that much more difficult for the enemies to synchronize they own life cycles. If the cicadas erupted every 14 years, for instance, they could be exploited by a parasite species with a 7-year life cycle. This is a bizarre idea, but no more bizarre than the phenomenon itself. 

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

The eye's complexity

The light-sensitive cells ('photocells') are not the first thing the light hits, but they are buried inside and facing away from the light [...]. The first thing the light hits is, in fact, the layer of ganglion cells which constitute the 'electronic interface' between the photocells and the brain. Actually the ganglion cells are responsible for preprocessing the information in sophisticated ways before relaying on it to the brain and in some ways the word 'interface' doesn't do justice to this. 'Satellite computer' might be a fairer name. Wires from the ganglion cells run along the surface of the retina to the 'blind spot', where they dive through the retina to form the main trunk cable to the brain, the optic nerve. There are about three million ganglion cells in the 'electronic interface', gathering data from about 125 million photocells. [...] As you look at the fine architecture of the photocell, keep in mind the fact that all that complexity is repeated 125 million times in each retina. And comparable complexity is repeated trillions of times elsewhere in the body as a whole. The figure of 125 million photocells is about 5,000 times the number of separately resolvable points in a good-quality magazine photograph. The folded membranes on the right of the illustrated photocell are the actual light-gathering structures. Their layered form increases the photocell's efficiency in capturing photons, the fundamental particles of which light is made. If a photon is not caught by the first membrane, it may be caught by the second, and so on. As a result of this, some eyes are capable of detecting a single photon. The fastest and most sensitive film emulsions available to photographers need about 25 times as many photons in order to detect a point of light.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

5 "must-see at least once in a lifetime" Celestial events

Most of the travellers choose their destinations based on the wonders of the world. Some of them, choose them for the wonders of the universe.

There are some beautiful celestial events that are visible only on certain locations on Earth at certain times. Their rarity and poor availability, combined with their beauty, drives people to travel to be able to see them.

Here is a list of 5 events worth seeing at least once in a lifetime. For each one of them I wrote a blog post on their nature and how and when to find them:

1. Aurorae
2. Solar Eclipse
3. Midnight Sunset
4. Milky Way
5. Meteor Shower

Enjoy.

1. Aurora

Aurorae are one of the most impressive views of a night sky and they are very famous to be an event that not all the skies can host.
They happen around the polar regions, both in the northern and southern hemisphere taking respectively the more common name of northern and southern lights.
The curvy movements and the lightness with which they fly across the sky is a really hypnotizing and fascinating sight that cannot leave even the most apathetic man without a "wow" out of his lips.

[This is a post which is part of the series: 5 unmissable celestial events]

2. Solar Eclipse

Solar eclipses are natural phenomena that occur when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, obscuring the latter.
This event is so unnatural that it astonishes and amazes not just humans, but many others living creatures. Studies have shown that animals react strangely to solar eclipses. Their behaviour is driven by the absence of sunlight where there should be and, in fact, depending on the animal, they usually prepare to sleep.

 [This is a post which is part of the series: 5 unmissable celestial events]

3. Midnight Sunset

The midnight sun is a quite surreal phenomenon happening in very northern or southern latitudes, nearby the polar regions. It is nothing more than having the sun out in the sky, only, at midnight!
What is stunning, though, is that (it depends on the latitude and the season) the sun does not set, but remains still on the horizon before rising again and giving sleepless "nights" to visitors.

 [This is a post which is part of the series: 5 unmissable celestial events]

4. Milky Way

A starry sky is always a very relaxing and touching view, and often, if we spend some time to contemplate it, when our eyes are well adapted to darkness, we could spot some steady "white clouds" between the stars.
Fortunately that is no premonition of rain, because those clouds are well beyond the Earth's atmosphere. That is the Milky Way, no less than the very galaxy we live in!

[This is a post which is part of the series: 5 unmissable celestial events]

5. Meteor Shower

Seeing a falling star is a peculiar event. Its rarity permitted the birth of the popular conception of expressing a desire when seeing one. But maybe this habit founds more solid roots in the fact that people nowadays spend a very little time looking at a night sky, than on the rarity of the event itself.
Millions of meteoroids are in orbital collision with the Earth every day and we should thank our atmosphere that only a tiny percentage reach the ground with much smaller sizes than the original object. On certain seasons the frequency of falling meteors is so high that the event is called meteor shower. But why the Earth is tormented by these intruders?

 [This is a post which is part of the series: 5 unmissable celestial events]

Moonset and Jupiter again

Same telescope as in the previous post, different situation: waxing moon.
After some time wasted (the temptation to point the telescope to the ground and spy innocent people from the top of my house is unimaginable) I convinced myself to watch the orange setting moon a little nearer (20mm eyepiece):

 

And after I proved that Jupiter's moons (obviously) move and then (indirectly) that gravitational laws are true. As you can see in the pictures below, with the same telescope (20mm eyepiece) the moons have a different configurations and it agrees with Stellarium. (mouse rollover to circle the moons):

Stellarium (mouse rollover to name the moons):

I've seen what Galileo saw

Clear sky, Tramontana (a Northern wind known to be very dry in Southern Italy), new moon, neighbourhood lights off: perfect occasion to dust off my brother's telescope and do some night-sky observations.

A refracting telescope, 10cm objective lens and two 34mm and 20mm eyepieces; not so bad for the Moon and planets.

I tried to spot some stars but they were too faint because of that damn light pollution, so I decided to see one of the most luminous astral bodies in the Northern Sky: Jupiter.
After some focusing, I spotted Jupiter with its prominent lighter-hued zones.
But I also noticed what at first sight I thought were some refractions/reflections. There were smaller dots aligned near Jupiter, with different brightness. They were too strange to be some optical effect, so the second assumption was: the Jupiter's moons!
That dots were quite far from Jupiter, in my opinion, to be its moons so I wasn't so sure about that, but they were four (as the Galilean moons), aligned and with different sizes.
I took a picture with my phone (one of the most difficult things in my life, but I was determined to take it) and the result is a very fuzzy and dirty image. Unfortunately the view through the telescope was much clearer and defined, but it can get the idea across (click on the image to enlarge):

After reversing and some photoshopping (or better "gimping"):

Then I immediately checked with Stellarium what kind of bodies they could be, whether Jovian moons or stars. This is the screenshot:

Fascinating.