God Particle Proves Elusive

By on December 13, 2011 in News 5

CMS_41For those of you following the “God Particle” saga, the scientists at CERN disappointed us all at today’s much hyped news conference. Nick Collins reports for the Telegraph:

At a specially-arranged seminar at the Cern laboratory in Geneva, researchers presented clues in their data which suggest experts may have pinned down the “God particle” at last.

Scientists remained cautious about their findings and insisted they did not represent an official discovery, but admitted the results were “intriguing”.

The two teams searching for the Higgs boson at the LHC said they had found hints which point towards a Higgs boson with a mass between 124 and 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

A mass of 125 GeV is equivalent to about 130 times the weight of a proton found in the nucleus of an atom.

The team working on the ATLAS detector said there was only a one per cent likelihood their results occurred by chance rather than reflecting a real effect, while the CMS team quoted a figure of about five per cent.

But this does not equate directly to a 95 per cent or higher chance that they reflect the Higgs boson, experts explained.

Oliver Buchmueller, a senior physicist on the CMS team, said: “We see a small bump around the same mass as the Atlas team and that is intriguing. It means we have two experiments seeing the same thing and that is exactly how we would expect a Higgs signal to build up.”…

[continues in the Telegraph]

, , , , ,

  • Ronniedobbs

    I bet those scientists did not pray hard enough.

  • Mortimer

    It’s hardly “elusive” if there was only a 1% likelihood the results occurred by chance. 

  • D.D.B.

    Scientists looking for God??  Don’t they know that God lives in heaven and heaven is UP? Morons.

  • Anonymous

    Are you a Yooper?

  • Dr K

    Funny how they seem to find the things they are looking for. I can’t remember the guy’s name but one scientist when studying light noted how it behaved like a particle when they set up particle experiments and how it behaved like a wave when they set up wave experiments. I think the nature of our reality is dependant on the observer a lot more than we think … I like the deep stuff.