CERN physicists find hint of Higgs boson

^{Genesis 1.1-5: The First Day}

¹In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ²The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

³And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. ⁴And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-higgs-boson-20111214,0,7076752.story

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

December 14, 2011

 

Physicists find 'tantalizing hints' of Higgs boson 'God particle'



Higgs candidate event from the ATLAS experiment. A proton-proton collision in the ATLAS detector, the bright green rods illustrate two detected photons produced in the high energy collision. These could be the result of a Higgs boson being produced and decaying into two photons.

Two teams of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva say they detected 'tantalizing hints' of the elusive Higgs boson, or 'God particle,' but no definitive proof.

Physicists announced Tuesday that they had detected "tantalizing hints," but not definitive proof, of the long-sought Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is crucial to physicists' understanding of why mass exists in the universe.

Two large teams of scientists based at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva separately saw what they believe are telltale tracks of the maddeningly elusive particle in the aftermath of about 400 trillion proton collisions carried out since January.

Neither group had solid enough evidence to announce an official discovery, they reported. But the fact that both teams generated similar results — and that those results were in good alignment with the predictions of theoretical physicists — indicated that scientists may be closing in on the Higgs at last.

"It's looking very good," said UC Davis theoretical physicist John Gunion, who was not involved in the experiments but has been following them closely. "What's really important is that both teams see the same thing."

The results were presented Tuesday afternoon in a packed auditorium at the Large Hadron Collider, which is operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The collider sends beams of protons hurtling toward each other at nearly the speed of light. Two massive detectors, known as ATLAS and CMS, analyze the subatomic particles released by the collisions. Certain patterns are thought to indicate that a collision has produced a Higgs boson.

Both teams reported possible Higgs sightings that suggested the particle has a relatively light mass, somewhere around 125 billion electron volts.

But the margins of error for those sightings were still considerable: The ATLAS team said its calculations came with a statistical significance of about 2.3 sigma and the CMS team said its was about 1.9 sigma.

Once the teams' results are carefully combined, the significance could rise above 3 sigma, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll said. Physicists require a significance of at least 3 sigma before considering a finding "evidence," and they need to reach the 5-sigma threshold to declare they've made a "discovery."

Data from additional experiments will allow both teams to narrow their margins of error and determine whether the Higgs signal is real, said Fabiola Gianotti, a physicist on the ATLAS team.

"By the end of 2012 — sooner, if we are lucky — we should be able to have the final word," Gianotti told those gathered at CERN.

In a post on the Cosmic Variance blog, Carroll compared the news to "rushing to the tree on Christmas morning, ripping open a giant box, and finding a small note that says 'Santa is on his way! Hang in there!'"

The CERN results have been eagerly anticipated by physicists hoping to find experimental support for the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that explains how subatomic particles interact to make up the building blocks of the universe.

But an important piece of evidence supporting the Standard Model never materialized: the Higgs boson. It is the particle associated with the so-called Higgs field, an energy field that gives mass to particles through a process known as the Higgs mechanism. (All are named for University of Edinburgh physicist Peter Higgs, one of several scientists who proposed the idea during the 1960s.)

If the theory is correct, scientists should be able to detect the Higgs boson, or multiple Higgs bosons, by smashing subatomic particles together at high energies, simulating conditions in the early universe.

Older particle accelerators, including the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., were able to narrow the range of possible masses for the Higgs, but they weren't powerful enough to find the particle. The search was one of the primary reasons for building the $5-billion Large Hadron Collider.

Whether additional data prove or rule out the existence of the Higgs boson next year, scientists said, there are many years of physics research left to conduct at the collider.

If the particle is there, researchers will investigate its properties. If the particle isn't there, "then something else has to show up in our experiments," said Markus Klute, an MIT physicist who works with the CMS team.

Either way, he said, "we start a new chapter in Higgs physics."

eryn.brown@latimes.com

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57342044-264/cern-physicists-find-hint-of-higgs-boson/

by Stephen Shankland

December 13, 2011 6:33 AM PST

These red lines show how the LHC's Atlas experiment registered the arrival of four particles called muons. They could have been the byproducts of a short-lived Higgs boson--or they could have been more humdrum events. CERN's LHC particle accelerator will continue smashing protons into each other to spot the statistical significance that means the Higgs really has been found. (Credit: CERN)

Researchers at the CERN particle accelerator have found "intriguing hints" of the Higgs boson, a moment of major progress in years of previously unfruitful searching for the elusive subatomic particle.

The search for the Higgs boson is the top priority of CERN's massive and expensive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Its Atlas experiment showed a statistically suspicious increase in activity that indicates the Higgs could be pinned down with a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, and showing some important agreement, its independent CMS experiment found a possible result nearby at 124GeV.

"We observe an excess of events around mass of about 126 GeV," CERN physicist and Atlas leader Fabiola Gianotti said in slides presented today at a CERN seminar to physicists who applauded her results. That equates to about 212 quintillionths of a gram; by comparison, a proton is more than 100 times lighter with a mass of 0.938GeV.

Her small sentence carries big import for physics. That's because the Higgs boson, thought by some to endow other particles with mass, is a key missing ingredient in physicists' understanding of what makes the universe tick. It's predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, but no one has been able to confirm its existence or nature.

"The Higgs could be the first link in a chain of discovery. This is what we hope," said Guido Tonelli of the Universita degli Studi di Pisa and leader of the CMS project, in a news conference after the seminar. Another year of continued data gathering should be enough to provide a conclusive answer on this particular matter, the physicists said.

Gianotti called the findings "beautiful results" at the seminar, but stopped well short of declaring victory because there's not enough data for statistical certainty. "It's too early to draw definite conclusions...We believe we have built a solid foundation on the exciting months to come."

Finding the Higgs boson is essentially a matter of checking for a variety of events--or their absence. The LHC's detectors have been gradually ruling out ranges of possible mass for the Higgs boson.

"The window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller," and today we saw "intriguing hints" of its possible nature, said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "We have not found it yet. We have not excluded it yet. Stay tuned for next year."

Inside the Large Hadron Collider (photos)

The Higgs boson isn't observed directly, but rather is detected by extremely rare side effects of collisions between protons smashing into each other. To increase the likelihood of collisions, the LHC operators have been gradually increasing the beam intensity.

CERN physicist Fabiola Gianotto describes scientific results

from the Large Hadron Collider's search for the Higgs boson.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Gianotti also said the CMS results predict with a 95 percent confidence level that the Higgs boson has a mass between 115.5GeV and 131GeV.

Another experiment, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), also helped narrow down the possible mass of the Higgs boson. Its results showed with a 95 percent confidence level that the particle can't be between 127GeV and 600GeV, Tonelli said.

The CMS experiment also found "a modest excess of events" that could be evidence of the Higgs boson between 115GeV and 127GeV, Tonelli said in a presentation at the seminar. "The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs hypothesis in the vicinity of 124GeV and below, but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive."

One of the big mysteries that physicists hope to plumb with the Higgs is an idea called supersymmetry. The Standard Model predicts a wide range of particles, of which the Higgs is the last to be pinned down. But with supersymmetry, each of the conventional elementary particles in the standard model, including the Higgs, has a companion. If there's only one Higgs boson, it's part of the Standard Model. But with supersymmetry, there have to be at least five Higgs bosons. Supersymmetry would double the number of particles to resolve physics problems in a similar way that the prediction--and later discovery--of antimatter did decades ago.

If the Higgs boson weighs about 125GeV, it would match many physicists' general expectations--but also carry some importance. That's because it's at the light end of the range of possibilities, and physicists believe a particle that light needs another particle from the sypersymmetry collection to anchor it.

"Our expectation is that you have something heavy. It could be something related to SUSY," Tonelli said, referring to the nickname for supersymmetry theory. "Or maybe not," he added.

The CMS, or Compact Muon Solenoid, is not what most people would call compact. It's one of the two general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider with which physicists hope to detect the Higgs boson. (Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

When it comes to mass, physicists liken the Higgs boson to groupies at a party. Heavy particles interact strongly with Higgs bosons, equivalent to a lot of people swarming a celebrity and making it harder for the famous person to start moving and, once moving, harder to stop. Particles with little mass are those that interact weakly with Higgs bosons, making them more fleet-footed.

"A heavier particle is nothing more that one than has more interactions with the Higgs particle as it passes through the vacuum," said Lawrence Sulak, chairman of Boston University's physics department.

If the Higgs boson is precisely measured in the next year, the LHC can be used to look further down the same pathway, Tonelli added, possibly finding supersymmetric particles--"if they are in the energy range of the LHC."

Such particles would likely be vastly heavier--many thousands, perhaps millions, of GeVs, he said.

That would be quite a coup: supersymmetric particles are a possible explanation for dark matter, material that in the universe outweighs the ordinary matter of which we're made but that generally interacts with ordinary matter only through gravitational pull.

To find harder particles, CERN plans an LHC upgrade that will let protons be smashed together at twice today's energy level. "Hopefully we'll explore a large region of masses," Tonelli said. And then, the supersymmetry work can begin in earnest. "A lot of parameters are still open, a lot of SUSY models are still open and are waiting to be excluded or confirmed," he said.

The LHC is a huge, phenomenally complex instrument built in a circular subterranean tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference. It can accelerate protons fast enough that, when they collide, they reproduce energy levels found only in the earliest moments of the universe after the Big Bang.

Updated at 7:26 a.m. PT and 10:44 a.m. PTwith further detail.

Fabiola Gianotti's conclusions about the LHC's Atlas experiment results about the search for the Higgs boson

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Guido Tonelli's conclusions about the LHC's CMS experiment results about the search for the Higgs boson.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The Higgs-Boson God Particle Found

<sup>Genesis 1.1-5: The First Day

1</sup>In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ²The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

³And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. ⁴And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scientists May Have Observed Elusive

Higgs Boson "God Particle"

Higgs boson, aka the "God particle," is trending as physicists at the CERN, which operates the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, announced they may have finally glimpsed the elusive elemental particle critical to our understanding of how the universe works. Named after Physicist Peter Higgs, the subatomic particle is seen as the lynchpin to explain what gives mass and gravity to all other particles, thus allowing matter to interact the way we observe it. The hunt for Higgs boson has been going on for decades. Scientists at the CERN say the latest evidence is not a definitive discovery but that the data is "exciting" and suggests that with further statistical analysis, they should know within a year if the theoretical Higgs boson actually exists.

Higgs boson: scientists close in on 'God particle'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/13/scientists-higgs-boson-god-particle?fb=optOut

Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk

Tuesday 13 December 2011 04.07 EST

Discovery would rank among most important scientific advances in 100 years

and confirm how elementary particles get mass

Scientists are expected to announce they may have caught their first glimpse of the Higgs boson, a curious subatomic particle long thought to underpin the microscopic workings of nature.

Hundreds of physicists will crowd into a seminar room at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, on Tuesday, to hear the latest in the hunt for the particle, while thousands more are expected to watch online.

The Higgs boson, or so-called God particle, has become the most coveted prize in particle physics since it was postulated in the mid-1960s. Its discovery would rank among the most important scientific advances of the past 100 years and confirm how elementary particles get mass.

Higgs boson hunt – finding the so-called God particle has been a major goal for the

£10bn Large Hadron Collder. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Scientists have been hunting the Higgs for more than 30 years with machines so large they are miles across and consume the power of a reasonable-sized town. While the results are unlikely to be conclusive – the hints of the particle could fade when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collects more data next year – they are understood to be the strongest evidence so far that the Higgs particle is there to be found.

Finding the Higgs boson has been a major goal for the £10bn LHC after a less powerful machine at Cern, the LEP, failed to find the missing particle before it was shut down in 2000. The hunt was joined by scientists at the Tevatron collider near Chicago, who will present their results early next year.

The Higgs boson is the signature particle of a theory published by six physicists within a few months of each other in 1964. Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University was the first to point out the theory called for the existence of the unusual, missing particle.

According to the theory, an invisible energy field fills the vacuum of space throughout the universe. When some particles move through the field they feel drag and gain weight as a result. Others, like particles of light, or photons, feel no drag at all and remain massless.

Without the field – or something to do its job – all fundamental particles would weigh nothing and hurtle around at the speed of light. That would spell disaster for the formation of familiar atoms in the early universe and rule out life as we know it.

While the field is thought to give mass to fundamental particles, including quarks and electrons (the particles that make up atoms) it accounts for only 1% or 2% of the weight of an atom itself, or any everyday object. That is because most mass comes from the energy that glues quarks together inside atoms.

To hunt for the Higgs boson, physicists at the LHC sift through showers of subatomic debris that spew out when protons collide in the machine at close to the speed of light. Most of the energy released in these microscopic fireballs is converted into well-known particles that are identified by the collider's giant detectors.

Occasionally, the collisions might create a Higgs boson, but it disintegrates immediately into more familiar particles. To find it, scientists must look for telltale "excesses" of particles that signify Higgs boson decays. They appear as bumps, or peaks, in the data.

If the rumoured glimpse of the Higgs boson turns into a formal sighting next year, it may be one of several Higgs particles outlined in a radical, but much studied theory of nature called supersymmetry. The theory, that every known type of particle has an undiscovered twin, is popular among many physicists because it explains how some forces of nature might have behaved as one in the early universe. Unifying the forces of nature was a feat that eluded Albert Einstein.

Has the Higgs Been Discovered?

Physicists Gear Up for Watershed Announcement

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=higgs-lhc

By Davide Castelvecchi | December 8, 2011 |88

Rumors are flying about a December 13 update on the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe's Large Hadron Collider

SMASHING RESULTS? Workers in front of part of the ATLAS detector

at the Large Hadron Collider, one of two experiments rumored to have seen

hints of  the elusive Higgs boson.Image: CERN/Claudia Marcelloni

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing—although not conclusive—evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

Many physicists have already swung into action, swapping rumors about the contents of the announcement and proposing grand ideas about what those rumors would mean, if true. "It's impossible to be excited enough," says Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The spokespersons of the collaborations using the cathedral-size ATLAS and CMS detectors to search for the Higgs boson and other phenomena at the 27-kilometer-circumference proton accelerator of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are scheduled to present updates December 13 based on analyses of the data collected to date. "There won't be a discovery announcement, but it does promise to be interesting," says James Gillies, spokesperson for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), which hosts the LHC.

Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and a member of the CMS collaboration, says, "Whatever happens eventually with the Higgs, I think we'll look back on this meeting and say, 'This was the beginning of something.'" (As a CMS member, Lykken says he is not yet sure himself what results ATLAS would unveil; he is bound by his collaboration's rules not to reveal what CMS has in hand.)

[Click here for a lightly edited partial transcript of the interview with Lykken that Davide Castelvecchi conducted for this story.]

The talks were announced last week; true to form, the particle physics rumor mill shifted into high gear, and by the weekend multiple anonymous sources had leaked consistent information, according to several bloggers, including Peter Woit, Lubos Motl and Philip Gibbs. Both experiments are said to have seen evidence of the long-sought Higgs, pointing to a particle mass of around 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. (125 billion electron volts is roughly the mass of 125 hydrogen atoms.) Such results would not constitute an ironclad discovery quite yet, being below the required "5 sigma," a measure of statistical reliability. But the two experiments are rumored to have seen signals of 2.5 sigma and 3.5 sigma, which together would give a strong hint. (Three sigmas would correspond to a one-in-370 chance of the finding being a statistical quirk, although in particle physics experiments it is not uncommon for 3-sigma results to vanish.)

Previous rounds of data analysis from the LHC as well as from its U.S. predecessor, Fermilab's Tevatron, had narrowed the Higgs mass range down to somewhere between 115 and 140 GeV. But the new announcement would constitute the first time that both LHC experiments had made a precise and consistent estimate of the mass.

Even before the data are out, theoretical physicists around the world are working out the possible implications. Some have pointed out that a value of 125 GeV would be good news for supersymmetry, a theory that predicts that each particle would have a heavier partner known as a superparticle (at least for particles within the framework of the Standard Model of particle physics, the currently accepted description of the subatomic world)." Most supersymmetric models put a Higgs below 140 [GeV] or so," says Matt Strassler of Rutgers University. Supersymmetry has long been a favorite candidate for extending the Standard Model, because it would answer numerous open questions, beginning with the nature of dark matter, the unseen mass that keeps galaxies rotating faster than they otherwise would.

But Kane, a longtime proponent of supersymmetry, makes a more ambitious statement. In a paper posted to the physics preprint site arXiv.org on December 5, he and his collaborators work not from supersymmetry but from an even more radical overhaul of physics: string theory. (String theory is itself an extension of supersymmetry.) Their calculations predict a Higgs mass between 122 and 129 GeV. "If it's in that range it's an incredible success for connecting string theory to the real world," Kane says. He says he is confident that the upcoming LHC announcements, if they pan out as predicted, will constitute evidence for string theory. "I don't think my wife will let us bet our house, but I'll come close," he says.

That Kane and his colleagues released their paper now that the Higgs mass has been—or is about to be—restricted to a particular range, will surely lead some physicists to charge that the new study constitutes not a prediction but a "postdiction." String theory critics have long claimed that the theory has so much flexibility that one can always tweak it to make it predict just about anything.

Moreover, whether string theory can make testable predictions at all has often been the subject of debate. "The trouble is, for all we know, there might be 10,000 other ways of starting with string theory and getting the same Higgs mass, and they may differ in other respects," Lykken cautions.

And when it comes to mass predictions, consistency does not necessarily mean validation, Strassler points out. "If the Higgs turns up at 125 GeV, that would also be consistent with the Standard Model with no supersymmetric particles and no hint of string theory," Strassler says.

For all the excitement, it is still quite possible that any preliminary whiff of the Higgs will later turn out to be a statistical fluke. After all, the CMS and ATLAS detectors cannot directly catch Higgs bosons; those particles would decay into other particles immediately after being created in the LHC's proton collisions. Instead, physicists must analyze the subatomic debris from the decays and reconstruct what happened. Thousands of collisions take place every second, and many of them generate signatures similar to those of the Higgs. "The reason why we don't know whether there's a Higgs yet has mostly to do with the fact that the Higgs boson's decays look like other kinds of physics," Lykken says. "So we need to understand the other kinds of physics enough. It's not just a question of statistics."

Whether next week's announcements pan out, experts say, it is only a matter of time before a final answer is known: Once the experiments have amassed enough data, they either will find the Higgs boson and understand its properties or they will conclusively demonstrate that it does not exist. "It's just a question of when it will happen," Lykken says. "It's not going to be a maybe-yes-maybe-no kind of answer."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For More Information see Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Brian Greene Reacts to Today’s

CERN Announcement

2011.12.13Ask Brian Greenehiggs bosonLHC Comments (42)Comments (91)

Earlier this morning, CERN made a much-anticipated announcement about its progress in finding the elusive Higgs particle. Below, Brian Greene explains the significance of the news.

• More information and a video of the CERN announcement here

Here’s a summary of today’s announcement: The Large Hadron Collider (a 17-mile-long circular tunnel in which protons are sent whizzing around in opposite directions at just shy of light-speed, and directed into head-on collisions) has two mammoth detectors called ATLAS and CMS (each of which captures and analyzes particulate debris created by the proton–proton collisions). Two independent (and highly competitive) research teams, involving thousands of scientists, using each of these detectors have seen moderately convincing evidence that the elusive Higgs particle has been created in some of the proton–proton collisions.

This is a challenging experiment as the detectors can’t see the Higgs particle directly—it is a short-lived particle that quickly falls apart (decays)—but, rather, they infer its presence by seeing its decay products. (Watch here, as physicist and ATLAS researcher Monica Dunford explains this process of inferring new possible particles during the World Science Festival.) In particular, the equations show that when a Higgs particle decays, some fraction of the time two photons (particles of light) are produced. The researchers sift through a maelstrom of debris for these photons, but even then they need to ensure that the photons weren’t produced by some other, more mundane process. This painstaking work, aided by sophisticated computer analysis, now shows evidence of a Higgs particle that weighs about 126 times as much as a proton.

The researchers’ confidence in this result, while fairly strong, does not yet rise to the level at which a definitive discovery is claimed (there’s roughly a chance of a few in a thousand that the data is a statistical fluke, sort of like the chance of getting 8 to 9 heads in a row when you flip a coin; the protocol for claiming a definitive discovery is more like 1 in a million, similar to getting heads about 20 times in a row). But within the next few months, or surely within the next year, the teams should know whether or not they’ve found the Higgs particle.

For some background, here’s a short piece (about a minute long) I filmed giving an explanation of the Higgs idea—take a look if you have a moment. In the video, when I refer to a “molasses-like substance” that’s a metaphor for the “Higgs field”; the Higgs particle would be a tiny nugget of that field which the violent particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider may have, roughly speaking, knocked loose.

Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss on CERN’s Higgs Announcement
http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/ask_brian_greene_and_lawrence_krauss_cerns_higgs_announcement?utm_source=Fb_BG&utm_medium=Wall&utm_campaign=Higgs

2011.12.13    The Cosmos    higgs boson     large hadron collider    physics

About This Video

On the morning of December 13th, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that its Large Hadron Collider had found evidence which leads them to believe that the elusive Higgs Boson may reside at the 126 gigaelectron volts(GeV) of energy with a confidence level of 2.8 sigma. A sigma of greater than 5 is required to announce the discovery of a new particle. World Science Festival co-founder Brian Greene was at Arizona State University at the time, and he met with theoretical physicist and WSF alum Lawrence Krauss in order to field some questions sent in about the Higgs Boson and the future of physics as we know it.

Eternal Inflation of a Cosmic Landscape

http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/eternal_inflation_of_a_cosmic_landscape

2011.12.08

About This Video

The search for a unified theory of physics has led theorists far and wide for answers. String theory is a major contender in the race to find the unified theory, but there are things that it doesn’t explain. Surprisingly, the answers have been coming from cosmologists. Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind explains how a vast energy landscape becomes populated with bubbles, each with their own complex landscapes.

How can one picture Eternal Inflation and Multiverses?
By thinking of it in terms of...

Bubbles within bubbles within bubbles in an infinite but discrete array
of primodial possibilities giving birth to more arrays of primodial possibilities.

In the end, we live in the kind of universe that can support the kind
of universe that we can live within.

Select Christmas Songs

 

Casting Crowns

I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day Live



As seen on 2008 TBN Christmas special. "I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day"

is available on Casting Crowns' Christmas album, Peace On Earth,

available on iTunes (http://bit.ly/uspDEb) and in stores.

Steven Curtis Chapman

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

 

 

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lowly exile here
Until the Son of God appear.

 

O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.

 

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel, rejoice!

 

 

 

Francesca Battistelli

You're Here

Mary & Jesus Christmas Music Video

 

 

This song by Francesca Battistelli is amazing!

Video clips were used from The Nativity Story and The Gospel of John.

God Bless you and Merry Christmas.

 

 

 

Kutless

What Faith Can Do

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/artist/Kutless?feature=watch_metadata

 

 

 

Mercy Me

Joseph's Lullaby

 

 

 

 

Cherie Call

Mary's Lullaby to Jesus

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6X4NDeRzDk&feature=related

 

 

 

Mark Schultz

When Love was born

 

 

Created for a church carol service, Dec 2010.

All pictures were obtained from Creative Commons sources.

The song is by Mark Schultz, released by Word Records, Oct 2009.

Available for purchase through Amazon Downloads.

 

 

 

Mark Lowery

Mary Did You Know

 

 

Music video for Mary Did You Know by Mark Lowery.

Uses video from the Jesus film (very moving).

Available for purchase through: http://www.jesusfilm.org/

 

 

 

Mercy Me

What Child Is This

 

 

Christmas video using music by Mercy Me

and famous paintings of the birth of the Christ child.

 

 

 

I Wonder As I Wander

 

 

http://larkandspur.com/music/season-of-light/. Written in 1933 by John Jacob Niles from a fragment of a song he heard sung during an evangelical church fundraising meeting, this hauntingly beautiful melody has been recorded down through the years by such notable artists as Jo Stafford, Burl Ives, Mahalia Jackson,Joan Baez, Barbra Striesand, Julie Andrews, Linda Ronstadt and many others. We hope you enjoy our performance of this beautiful Christmas song. Lark and Spur.

 

 

 

King's College Cambridge (2008, #10)

What Sweeter Music

by John Rutter

 

 

Dr. Stephen Cleobury was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)  for services to Music in the Queen's birthday honours June 17 2009. Stephen Cleobury, has been the Organist and Director of Music at King's College, Cambridge since 1982, and, since 1983, conductor of the orchestra and chorus of the Cambridge University Musical Society. http://spiritdei.blogspot.com King's College Cambridge 2008 What Sweeter Music John Rutter.

 

 

 

Maureen Hegarty

I Wonder as I Wander





Carrie Underwood

Do You Hear What I Hear?