BUMP DISCOVERED IN DATA
Crowds Go Wild
From today’s New York Times:
Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., say they have found a bump in their data that might be the long-sought Higgs boson,
Beate Heinemann, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been deeply involved in analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider, said recently of the CERN results, “This very much smells like the Higgs boson.” But, she noted, the signal could also go away when more data is obtained.
Those of you who enjoy hearing the thing (or the no-thing) called the “God particle”, can consult a more breathless account in today’s Washington Post, still pandering away at the same stand. (The downside to such a come-on is, should physics determine that there’s no Higgs after all…. You see the problem.)
The Higgs boson, you probably know, is the Official Subatomic Mascot of the media, doing yeoman work over the years and decades, by repeatedly being sought-for, and repeatedly failing to show up. The Godot boson, we might dub it. The whole process feels a little like the Republican Presidential primaries.
Exciting details here.
[Updates 8 III 2012] On a more serious note:
Science vs. sideshow:
China advances in particle physics:
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