RE: What were you doing on July 4th 2012? - Happy Higgs boson discovery day!

[eniolw]

The Higgs boson provides the last missing particle of the Standard Model, and its existence thus confirms several of the conceptual limitations of the Standard Model.

Interesting. BTW, I thought the graviton is also part of that model but that hasn't been found yet. It's a coincidence I was talking about it yesterday.

Comments

[lemouth]

The graviton is not part of the Standard Model, in the same way that gravity is not part of it. There are two reasons behind this.

• We don't have any theory of quantum gravity. There is a lot of research on this, but the answer is not there established.
• Gravity effects are negligible by tens of orders of magnitude at all energy scales currently probed. Therefore, they won't affect predictions for anything observable today.

For the second reason, the direct observation of a graviton is thus not something we could do today.

I hope this clarifies.