CERN researchers announced this morning the barest of hints of the Higgs boson at the Large Collider. It’s not a discovery, and anyone that pays any sort of attention to this stuff knew just as well there wasn’t going to be a “discovery” announced today ‘cause that’s not really how it works when you’re hunting for statistical evidence of a theorized particle through not direct observation of the particle, but via its decay products.
It’s not spotting Bigfoot. Think of it more like analyzing millions of hours of surveillance footage in a crowded city for signs that Bigfoot might have passed by this or that street corner — without knowing what exactly Bigfoot looks like.
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At today’s seminar, a regular seasonal report of findings and not the hastily called press conference a lot of the more breathless talk over the past couple days would have led one to think, scientists revealed an even further narrowed range of masses in which the Higgs could fall, somewhere between 115 and 130 GeV. We’ve known for a while that range was tightening, shrinking the range in which we might find the Higgs and leading some folks to start fretting about finding it at all. Well, it seems there’s a couple of “small excesses” within that range, found at both the collider’s ATLAS and CMS detectors, that might indicate the Higgs.
Read the rest at Motherboard.