Hey, everybody, did you hear the big news? The Higgs boson has been discovered!!!!Oh wait. No it hasn’t. Well, at least not yet. So please, for the love of theorized God particles, please refrain for the time being from shitting bricks and/or popping the bubbly.Yes, reports coming out of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that scientists who’ve been working tirelessly to detect traces of the elusive particle are set to make some sort of announcement this Wednesday about how they’ve got their hands on enough evidence to say with a certain level of confidence that the Higgs boson “almost certainly does exist” are tantalizing. Really, really tantalizing. This would be huge. We absolutely should be excited and waiting with bated breath to see just what it is they’ve got to say. I mean, I’m no particle physicist, but four decades seems long enough to (think about how to) look for anything, not least what theorists tell us is the mechanism responsible for endowing stuff with mass.The thought of maybe getting a first, rough glimpse of that very thing should have you and I and the rest of humanity frothing at the mouth, head spun. I think I want it to be true. It’d be about damn time. And if indeed Wednesday’s announcement confirms today’s more-than-rumors that currently have the indoor-kid corners of the Internet all wet and geeking…well, shit. I’m just gonna have to run outside and give the very first lady I cross a big fat kiss because hey, people who collide proton beams in deep underground tunnels and generally think about stuff 99 percent of us will never fully comprehend are now that much closer to cracking one of the – if not the – most fundamental riddles of the universe! Now we can finally build that skyscraper with a laser on top!Oh wow. Oh wow.But hey. Let’s all take a slow, deep breath. There has been no formal announcement. No results released to the public. No “discovery.” Could a dual ATLAS-CMS – these are the two projects collaborating on the Higgs hunt, and which represent scientists from both CERN and Fermilab – confirmation of Higgs decay at 5-sigma (the so-called gold standard for “discovery” claims, where physicists are sure any questionable bump in their data isn’t just a fluke) be imminent? Of course. But for now, all we, the general public and press, have to chew on is word from the APNewsBreak that “experts familiar with the research” “say” that from their gargantuan data sets they’ve found something that “will essentially show the footprint” of the Higgs boson. John Ellis, a Kings College London professor and 30-year CERN veteran, does tell the AP that, “Any reasonable outside observer would say, ‘It looks like a discovery.’” True. And that rules! At the same time, this “footprint” doesn’t yet mean that the God particle has been spotted, once and for all.That’s what we’ve got, folks. Nothing more. And until we’re told definitely that yes, this is it, or something like it, we shouldn’t preemptively tell ourselves it’s here when it may still be a ways around the bend, only gaining clout after rigorous crosscheck after rigorous crosschecking (after rigorous crosscheck ^ 10). Or that it’s maybe not even on its way at all.Think of it this way. Remember just last week when the Internet collectively busted CNN’s balls for getting that whole Obamacare ruling wrong? The giant of “breaking news” was straight up pilloried for reading only a fraction of the Court’s majority opinion before pulling the trigger on the big story. But it wasn’t just that. What the real outrage and facepalming and head shaking was directed at was this insatiable urge to “break” a story at the expense of, you know, accuracy.I’m not saying the same thing is going on here. But we should resist the hype, anyway, and be curmudgeonly skeptics ‘til the cold and bitter end. History may look back on the AP for getting it sorta right, first. And that’s great. But we should avoid, with every last fibre of our beings, going down in history as having not held ourselves, as scientists and otherwise, to the same skepticism that any researcher on ATLAS, or CMS, or whatever, holds herself to.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
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