About two weeks ago, we mentioned here that two teams of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, looking for a '5-sigma' result in looking for the Higgs boson, meaning that what they wanted to find needed to have only a 0.000028%. Rumors suggested that the two teams had each come up with a 4-sigma result, meaning there was a 0.13% chance of it being a statistical outlier as opposed to what they've been looking for. The buzz came from the fact that in this case, 4-sigma plus 4-sigma might equal 5-sigma.
This morning, the two teams announced their official results.
Both reported 5-sigma. The Bad Astronomy blog at Discover Magazine goes into the nitty-gritty of it here.
Unless there is a spectacular misjudgment going on, they've found it. And unless someone comes along to disprove them- and the community's surely going to do their due diligence- it's just about a given that three of the people who helped find it have a Nobel speech in their future.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
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