Defining Higgs-Boson: The Celestial Mechanics of The God Particle...

"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Higgs Mechanism:

"Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion - the clustering of the field around the particle - generates the particle's mass. The idea comes directly from the physics of solids. Instead of a field spread throughout all space a solid contains a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms. When an electron moves through the lattice the atoms are attracted to it, causing the electron's effective mass to be as much as 40 times bigger than the mass of a free electron.

The postulated Higgs field in the vacuum is a sort of hypothetical lattice which fills our Universe. We need it because otherwise we cannot explain why the Z and W particles which carry the weak interactions are so heavy while the photon which carries electromagnetic forces is massless.

The Higgs Boson aka The God Particle:

Now consider a rumour passing through our room full of uniformly spread political workers. Those near the door hear of it first and cluster together to get the details, then they turn and move closer to their next neighbours who want to know about it too. A wave of clustering passes through the room. It may spread to all the corners or it may form a compact bunch which carries the news along a line of workers from the door to some dignitary at the other side of the room. Since the information is carried by clusters of people, and since it was clustering that gave extra mass to the ex-Prime Minister, then the rumour-carrying clusters also have mass.

The Higgs boson is predicted to be just such a clustering in the Higgs field. We will find it much easier to believe that the field exists, and that the mechanism for giving other particles is true, if we actually see the Higgs particle itself. Again, there are analogies in the physics of solids. A crystal lattice can carry waves of clustering without needing an electron to move and attract the atoms. These waves can behave as if they are particles. They are called phonons and they too are bosons. There could be a Higgs mechanism, and a Higgs field throughout our Universe, without there being a Higgs boson."

"I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics." -Albert Einstein (New York Times Magazine, 11.9.1930).

- David Miller ( Article: "Politics, Solid State and the Higgs," Dept of Physics and Astronomy, University College, UK, 2000s. Image: -Woman as Higgs Mechanism, 1930s).

The Dark Matters: Colliding & Annihilating In Space...

"Is this the dark side speaking?

A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now. Maybe...

“Nobody really knows what’s going on,” said Gordon Kane, a theorist at the University of Michigan. Physicists caution that there could still be a relatively simple astronomical explanation for the recent observations. But the nature of this dark matter is one of the burning issues of science. Identifying it would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of nature and the Einsteinian dream of a unified theory of physics.

The last few weeks have seen a blizzard of papers trying to explain the observations in terms of things like “minimal dark matter” or “exciting dark matter,” or “hidden valley” theory, and to suggest how to look for them in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, set to begin operation again outside Geneva next summer. “It could be deliriously exciting, an incredibly cool story,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has been churning out papers with his colleagues. “Anomalies in the sky tell you what to look for in the collider.”

On Thursday, a team of astrophysicists working on one of the experiments reported in the journal Nature that a cosmic ray detector onboard a balloon flying around the South Pole had recorded an excess number of high-energy electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, sailing through local space. The particles, they conceded, could have been created by a previously undiscovered pulsar, the magnetized spinning remnant of a supernova explosion, blasting nearby space with electric and magnetic fields. But, they say, a better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space.

“We cannot disprove that the signal could come from an astrophysical object. We also cannot eliminate a dark matter annihilation explanation based upon current data,” said John P. Wefel of Louisiana State University, the leader of the team, adding, “Whichever way it goes, for us it is exciting.”

The results came on the heels of a report earlier this fall from Pamela, a satellite built by Italian, German, Russian and Swedish scientists to study cosmic rays. Pamela scientists reported in talks and a paper posted on the Internet that the satellite had recorded an excess of high-energy positrons. This, they said, “may constitute the first indirect evidence of dark matter particle annihilations,” or a nearby pulsar.

Antimatter is rare in the universe, and so looking for it is a good way of hunting for exotic phenomena like dark matter. Another indication that something funny is happening on the dark side of the universe is evident in maps of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Those maps, produced most recently this year by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, show a haze of what seem to be charged particles hovering around the Milky Way galaxy, according to an analysis by Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Adding to the mix and mystery, the European Space Agency’s Integral satellite detected gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way, suggesting the presence of positrons there, but with much lower energies than Pamela and Dr. Wefel’s experiments have seen. What all this adds up to, or indeed whether it all adds up to anything at all, depends on which observations you trust and your theoretical presumptions about particle physics and the nature of dark matter. Moreover, efforts to calculate the background level of high-energy particles in the galaxy are beset with messy uncertainties. “The dark matter signal is easy to calculate,” Dr. Kane said. “The background is much harder.”

Dark matter has teased and obsessed astronomers since the 1930s, when the Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky deduced that some invisible “missing mass” was required to supply the gravitational glue to hold clusters of galaxies together. The idea became respectable in the 1970s when Vera C. Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her collaborators found from studying the motions of stars that most galaxies seemed to be surrounded by halos of dark matter.

The stakes for dark matter go beyond cosmology. The most favored candidates for its identity come from a theory called supersymmetry, which unifies three of the four known forces of nature mathematically and posits the existence of a realm of as-yet-undiscovered particles. They would be so-called wimps — weakly interacting massive particles — which feel gravity and little else, and could drift through the Earth like wind through a screen door. Such particles left over from the Big Bang could form a shadow universe clumping together into dark clouds that then attract ordinary matter.

The discovery of a supersymmetric particle would also be a boost for string theory, the controversial “theory of everything,” and would explicate the nature of a quarter of the universe. But until now, the dark matter particles have mostly eluded direct detection in the laboratory, the exception being a controversial underground experiment called Dama/Libra, for Dark Matter/Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes, under the Italian Alps, where scientists claimed in April to have seen a seasonal effect of a “dark matter wind” as the Earth goes around its orbit.

The sky could be a different story. Dark matter particles floating in the halos around galaxies would occasionally collide and annihilate one another in tiny fireballs of radiation and lighter particles.

Dr. Wefel and his colleagues have been chasing sparks in the sky since 2000, when they flew an instrument known as ATIC, for Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, around Antarctica on a balloon at an altitude of 23 miles, looking for high-energy particles known as cosmic rays raining from space.

The Nature paper includes data from the first two balloon flights. It shows a bump, over theoretical calculations of cosmic ray intensities, at energies of 500 billion to 800 billion electron volts, a measure of both energy and mass in physics. One way to explain that energy bump would be by the disintegration or annihilation of a very massive dark particle. A proton by comparison is about one billion electron volts. Dr. Wefel noted, however, that according to most models, a pulsar could generate particles with even more energy, up to trillions of volts, whereas the bump in the ATIC data seems to fall off at around 800 billion electron volts. The ATIC results, he said, dovetail nicely with those from Pamela, which recorded a rising number of positrons relative to electrons, but only up to energies of about 200 billion electron volts.

Reached in China, where he was attending a workshop, Neal Weiner of New York University, who is working with Dr. Arkani-Hamed on dark matter models, said he was plotting ATIC data gleaned from the Web and Pamela data on the same graph to see how they fit, which was apparently very well. But Piergiorgio Picozza, a professor at the University of Rome and the Pamela spokesman, said in an e-mail message that it was too soon to say the experiments agreed. That will depend on more data now being analyzed to learn whether Pamela continues to see more positrons as the energy rises.

Moreover, as Dr. Kane pointed out, Pamela carries a magnet that allows it to distinguish electrons from positrons — being oppositely charged, they bend in opposite directions going through the magnetic field. But the ATIC instrument did not include a magnet and so cannot be sure that it was seeing any positrons at all: no antimatter, no exotic dark matter, at least at those high energies. But if he is right, Dr. Wefel said that the ATIC data favored something even more exotic than supersymmetry, namely a particle that is lost in the fifth dimension. String theory predicts that there are at least six dimensions beyond our simple grasp, wrapped up so tightly we cannot see them or park in them. A particle in one of these dimensions would not appear to us directly. You could think of it as a hamster running around on a wheel in its cage. We cannot see the hamster or the cage, but we can sort of feel the impact of the hamster running; according to Einsteinian relativity, its momentum in the extra dimension would register as mass in our own space-time. Such particles are called Kaluza-Klein particles, after Theodor Kaluza and Oscar Klein, theorists who suggested such an extra-dimensional framework in the 1920s to unify Einstein’s general theory of relativity and electromagnetism.

Dr. Wefel’s particle would have a mass of around 620 billion electron volts. “That’s the one that seems to fit the best,” he said in an interview. The emergence of a sharp edge in the data, he said, “would be a smoking gun” for such a strange particle. But Dr. Arkani-Hamed said that Kaluza-Klein particles would not annihilate one another at a fast enough rate to explain the strength of the ATIC signal, nor other anomalies like the microwave haze. He and his colleagues, including Dr. Weiner, Dr. Finkbeiner and Tracy Slatyer, also of Harvard, drawing on work by Matthew Strassler of Rutgers, have tried to connect all the dots with a new brand of dark matter, in which there are not only dark particles but also a “dark force” between them.

That theory was called “a delightful castle in the sky” by Dr. Kane, who said he was glad it kept Dr. Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues busy and diverted them from competing with him. Dr. Kane and his colleagues favor a 200 billion-electron-volt supersymmetric particle known as a wino as the dark matter culprit, in which case the Pamela bump would not extend to higher energies. Dr. Wefel said he had not kept up with all the theorizing. “I’m just waiting for one of these modelers to say here is the data, here is the model,” he said. “Fit it out. I’m not sure I’ve seen it yet.” Dr. Picozza said that it was the job of theorists to come up with models and that they were proliferating. “At the end of the story only one will be accepted from the scientific community, but now it is too early."

Sorting all this out will take time, but not forever. “With so many experiments, we will soon know so much more about all of this,” Dr. Weiner said. “In a year or two, we’ll either not be talking about this idea at all, or it will be all we’re talking about.”

- Dennis Overbye (A Whisper, Perhaps, From the Universe’s Dark Side, NY Times, 11.25.08. Image: -Loomis Dean, "Shadows Of The Junior Astronomy Club Peering Through A Telescope, Greeley,CO, Life Magazine, 1955 ).

Origins Of An Infinite Universe? A Fractal Conversation...

THE PREMISE: "Galaxy Map Hints At Fractal Universe":

Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. One key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. If there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe. A lot is at stake, and the matter distribution has become a source of impassioned debate between those who say the distribution is smooth and homogeneous and those who say it is hierarchically structured and clumpy, like a fractal.

Nearly all physicists agree that on relatively small scales the distribution is fractal-like: hundreds of billions of stars group together to form galaxies, galaxies clump together to form clusters, and clusters amass into superclusters.

The point of contention, however, is what happens at even larger scales. According to most physicists, this Russian doll-style clustering comes to an end and the universe, on large scales, becomes homogeneous. But a small team of physicists, including Francesco Sylos Labini of the Enrico Fermi Centre in Rome and Luciano Pietronero of the University of Rome argue that the data shows the opposite: the universe continues to look fractal as far out as our telescopes can see...Article Continues Here

THE DEFINITION: Fractal |ˈfraktəl| Mathematics

Noun: A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic. -New Oxford American Dictionary, 2008.

THE CONVERSATION:

VioletPlanet: Fascinating article. You must educate me. In layman’s terms what does this mean? What is the concept of a fractal universe?

IvansArmy: Usually, Fractal is used when referring to a fractal system. In layman's terms a fractal is a part of a system or a whole (singularity) which in itself possesses all the information necessary to create a singularity or a system of its own. The most obvious fractal example is Nature. You have a seed or a singularity which grows into a plant with a stem and the off-shoots. The leaves or branches divide into their own singularities; then you can say that we are fractals of our parents since we literally come out of them and contain their DNA.

In mathematics there are fractal equations which may be represented as fractal graphs. One of the key characteristics of these graphs is that you may "zoom" or scale into the graph indefinitely with new geometric structures being created by the equation into infinity.

You may see how it becomes very intuitive to view the entire universe as an infinite, complex, fractal structure. This is not really any groundbreaking idea, but it's only recently that our "modern" science is coming to terms with reality and shedding some old abstract ideas about the nature of existence. These ideas are mainly influenced by a specific point of view held in the West that we (as self-conscious beings) are observers separate from the universe in which we exist. This point of view is not necessarily directly expressed but is more a state of self-consciousness which observes the universe but is not aware of its own state and therefore has fundamental hang-ups in its perception of itself and everything around it.

VioletPlanet: So...Quantum Physics is definitely true in this case. We are all connected and the universe is the seed.

IvansArmy: We are all...the universe. To be connected to the universe assumes that in some way we are "other" and therefore need to connect to it. We just are...IT. There is nothing but the universe so "we" cannot be other from...IT.

VioletPlanet: But didn't the universe ever have a beginning...hence "the seed?" Or has it always been infinite or shall we say immortal? Is it possible for anything to be immortal?

IvansArmy: Death and life are very relative concepts. There is a birth and a death of the ego or what we think of as...I. However, the line between life and death becomes blurred when you ask... what is the exact point of differentiation in time between the two and who is doing the measuring? For the purposes of convenience, we say someone is born on the day they come out of mother's womb. However, does this mean that the previous day that same person was not alive? When does life start? Is it during Gastrulation when bases of all the rest of the tissues are created? Or is it upon fertilization of the egg? Or is it when the spermatozoa are created in the testicles of the father and the ovum in mother? Or is it the birth of the mother and the father? We could say that life and death are complements of each other or duality of being. Therefore, immortality as the western dualistic and moralistic philosophy might view it...does not exist because it implies absence of death, which is absurd since we see things die daily.

Another problem with "immortality" is that it implies a concept of linear time which is purely an abstract human concept created for utilitarian purposes. We forget that just like the number 3, or the equator line, time as we perceive it...is purely an abstract human construct and the true reality of time is inconceivable purely through the linear data-processing of our mind. In this sense, when we talk about immortality what is usually implied is a constant unchangeable measure of time which is divorced from the universe in which it exists and therefore is non-existent.

Scientists are a part of our culture and they view the world through the "lens" of the Ego or the finite "I." This is logical to them: I (the Ego) have a beginning and an end. Therefore, the universe must have a beginning and end. Yet, when you were born your body did not come out of nothing but was constructed with atoms of numerous elements which were utilized by other systems (bodies of your parents) to assemble you. When you die your body does not disappear into thin air but is dissolved back into the environment. The molecules and atoms are recycled into other life forms, particles of dust, soil, plants, etc. Therefore, it's not possible to claim with any degree of certainty that the universe had a definite beginning before...which it did not exist. I am not saying there was no big bang or a similar happening, but it's false to assume the universe's non-existence prior to the happening. Universe is immortal purely in its existence.

VioletPlanet: Life and death on earth parallel life and death within the universe, the death of stars, planets, black holes are dead etc. Therefore, the inter-connectedness makes sense. We would mimic that which created us. There is an order to things...which is infinite. The earth is one gigantic cell within the universal body. The cycle the universe offers us is cyclical: life, death, life, death etc. However, all cells die. We know when we die on earth that our bodies become fertilizer. However, if the earth were to die, would it regenerate into something else? Would that something else be alive or dead or a better word....functioning? What fertilizes the universe? I totally agree re: man-made time construct but if the universe's structure is cyclical at what point was the circle constructed? At what point did the circle begin?

IvansArmy: Trying to answer that question is like chasing a ghost. It's entirely relative to who is observing. If we say we're "observing" and we concluded that we're the universe then it's us "observing...ourselves," hence the impetus to ask the question: when did I begin. Postulating that question divides us from our true existence. It implies we are something other than ourselves observing that "other" in Euclidean time and space. The problem is impossible to solve since it requires "othering" from the universe in order to observe it which creates an abstract reality. Ultimately, even if there is a logical answer, I believe a much more relevant and question is: Why is this answer so important?... or even better, Who wants to know?

VioletPlanet: But yet everything must begin...begin from what?

IvansArmy: Why must there be a beginning, and how do you define beginning and end?

VioletPlanet: A singular point of origin...everything originates from something else. Endings are just new beginnings. In other words, has it been scientifically proven that the universe is infinite or is there something greater and more vast than the universe? If the fractal article is correct then by your own description and the picture you sent me of the cauliflower, an origin must exist. Notice the base of the cauliflower and notice the top of the cauliflower. There are two distinct points.

IvansArmy: You have just answered your own question. Science cannot with any certainty prove its major theories about the universe, hence the theories. Origin of something does not necessarily mean...a beginning.

VioletPlanet: Good Answer.

- Amanda Gefter ("Galaxy Map Hints at Fractal Universe," NewScientist.com, 6.25.08. Image: Fractal Cauliflower, 2008).

In Space: The Presence of Divinity...

"The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window every 2 minutes I saw the earth, the moon, the sun and the whole 360 degree panorama of the heavens. It was a powerful overwhelming experience.

Suddenly, I realized the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft and the molecules in the bodies of my partners were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. It was an overwhelming sense of oneness...a connectedness. It wasn't THEM and US. It was...That's me!...That's all of it! It's all one thing! This was accompanied by an ecstasy...a sense of "Oh My God!" Wow! Yes!...an insight...an epiphany. The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . . The knowledge came to me directly."

-Edgar D. Mitchell, Ph.D ( Former member of NASA Astronaut Corps from 1962-1972. Piloted the lunar module during the Apollo 14 mission, from January 31 to February 9, 1971 and is the 6th man to have walked on the Moon. The capsule touched down on the Moon on February 5, 1971, at 8:37 GMT in a hilly area called Fra Mauro. The Apollo 14 crew was also made up of Admiral Alan B. Shepard and Colonel Stuart A Roosa. In 1973, freshly retired from the space program, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), an organization created to initiate and finance research programs on the nature of consciousness. IONS is an organization renowned worldwide. -Institute for Research On Extraordinary Experiences (INREES) Image: -L.Gordon Cooper: Pilot Charles Conrad Jr. photgraphed inside Gemini 5 cockpit while orbiting Earth, 1965).

Orson Welles & Howard Koch: On Mars..."Isn't There Anyone On The Air?"

"ANNOUNCER: I'm speaking from the roof of the Broadcasting Building -- I'm speaking from the roof of the Broadcasting Building, New York City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as the Martians approach. Estimated in last two hours three million people have moved out along the roads to the north -- Hutchison River Parkway still kept open for motor traffic. Avoid bridges to Long Island -- hopelessly jammed. All communication with Jersey shore closed ten minutes ago. No more defenses. Our army wiped out -- artillery, air force, everything wiped out. This may be the last broadcast. We'll stay here to the end.

People are holding service here below us in the cathedral. Now I look down the harbor, all -- all manner of boats, overloaded with fleeing population, pulling out from docks. Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New Year's Eve in city. Wait a minute, the -- the enemy's now in sight above the Palisades: five -- five great machines. First one is crossing the river. I can see it from here, wading -- wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook. A bulletin is handed me: Martian cylinders are falling all over the country -- one outside of Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis, seem to be timed and spaced. Now the first machine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city's west side. Now they're lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out, black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They're running towards the East River, thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke's spreading faster. It's reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it's no use.

They're -- They're falling like flies. Now the smoke's crossing Sixth Avenue...Fifth Avenue...a hundred yards away...it's -- it's fifty feet....

OPERATOR FOUR: 2X2L calling CQ. 2X2L calling CQ. 2X2L calling CQ. New York. Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone...2X2L --

PIERSON: As I set down these notes on paper, I am obsessed by the thought that I may be the last living man on earth. I've been hiding in this empty house near Grover's Mill -- a small island of daylight cut off by the black smoke from the rest of the world. All that happened before the arrival of these monstrous creatures in the world now seems part of another life, a life that has no continuity with the present, furtive existence of the lonely derelict who pencils these words on the back of some astronomical notes bearing the signature of Richard Pierson. I look down at my blackened hands, my torn shoes, my tattered clothes, and I try to connect them with a professor who lives at Princeton, and who on the night of October 20th, glimpsed through his telescope an orange splash of light on a distant planet. My wife, my colleagues, my students, my books, my observatory, my, my world -- where are they? Did they ever exist? Am I Richard Pierson? What day is it? Do days exist without calendars? Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?

In writing down my daily life I tell myself shall preserve human history between the dark covers of this little book that was meant to record the movements of the stars. But to write I must live, and to live, I must eat. I find moldy bread in the kitchen, and an orange not too spoiled to swallow. I keep watch at the window. From time to time I catch sight of a Martian above the black smoke. The smoke still holds the house in its black coil, but at length there's a hissing sound and suddenly I see a Martian mounted on his machine, spraying the air with a jet of steam, as if to dissipate the smoke. I watch in a corner as his huge metal legs nearly brush against the house. Exhausted by terror, I fall asleep."

-Howard Koch ( Radio Adaptation of H.G. Wells classic Sci-Fi novel,"The War Of The Worlds," directed by and starring Orson Welles with the Mercury Theatre On The Air. CBS radio broadcast began at 8:00 PM, Halloween Night, 10.30.1938. Image: "Sunset On Mars," Photograph taken by the Mars Rover on the planet Mars. Mars Rover Exploration Mission, NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell, 5.19.2005).

THE HOAX: Thousands of people were fooled into believing that Invaders from Mars had landed in New Jersey. They mistakenly believed the show was a factual newscast. "Contemporary newspapers reported that panic ensued, with people fleeing the area, and others thinking they could smell the poison gas or could see the flashes of the lightning in the distance. Studies by unnamed historians "calculated" that some six million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were genuinely frightened. Within a month of the broadcast, there were up to 12,500 newspaper articles about its impact, while Adolf Hitler cited the panic, as "evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy." -Wikipedia.

Welles's adaptation is arguably the most famous radio dramatic production in history.