Last month, CERN reported its latest results at the Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India, and they weren’t all that promising. Instead of confirming a statistical “bump” from earlier in the summer that gave some small amount of hope for a detection of the Higgs boson, it was announced that that bump was probably nothing. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, Fermilab’s Don Lincoln tells msnbc.com: "Variations up and down on significance are to be expected.Importantly, researchers at the LHC have further narrowed down the range of possible masses for the Higgs, to under 145 electron volts, which is a more difficult, lower energy range in which to hunt. But not impossible.This is sort of old news by now, but a particularly skewed post came across my screen this morning that gave me a chill. We are 95 percent certain that the Higgs does not exist in the range of 145 electron volts, yet over at Digital Trends that got skewed into, “research shows a 95 percent probability that the hypothetical Higgs boson particle is nothing more than a figment of our imagination.” And that the particle likely does not exist.Which is not really the case. We’ve just narrowed the range farther. In a sense, we’re closer to it than ever before.But “eliminated a range of possible masses” is not as catchy as “HIGGS BOSON NOT FOUND.” The LHC cost about $9 billion, and most of the world recognizes one central function of it: finding the God particle. (Though smashing particles together is used to hunt for other things: Supersymmetry for example.) Of course, not finding the Higgs would be a bummer, but at the same time it would be wicked exciting because it would mean that something was amiss in the Standard Model of particle physics, and we’d be on a whole new track toward “new physics.”The idea, however, of finding funding to explore new physics in a climate dominated by the sense that we all got ripped off by a big atom smasher because we couldn’t prove the “old physics” is kind of scary. And to that Digital Trends post’s credit, it makes the good point that a great many people would find the absence of a Higgs finding a great vindication. See? Science doesn’t have all the answers. Should be plenty gross.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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