Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Another success for the Standard Model?

CERN reports that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has detected what appears to be the Higgs Boson (Wikipedia).
They report the detection at five sigma (SLAC), which means that the probability that random noise could have generated this signal is 1 in 1 million.

While the results await more tests and confirmation, until there is a retraction, or conflicting results from another group, I will ignore blog comments and emails from EU supporters and others who rant that the 'failure' to detect the Higgs boson is evidence for their claims.

Update, 7/5/2012: minor typo fixed.

1 comment:

W.T."Tom" Bridgman said...

Favorite Higgs joke so far:

A Higgs boson walks into a church. Priest says, "Thank God you're here. We can't have mass without you!"

Heard on a recent "Skeptics Guide to the Universe" podcast or perhaps AstronomyCast space hangout?

So...What Happened?

Wow.  It's been over eight years since I last posted here... When I stepped back in August 2015,...