On the BBC, a CERN physicist just dramatically announced that they’ve found the Higgs boson… maybe:
The two teams of scientists work independently, using two separate detectors – called ATLAS and CMS – each relying on different technologies. This way they provide an independent cross-check for each other. How closely their results agree will be an important measure of how significant a finding they can claim.
The teams are sworn to secrecy, but various physics blogs, and the canteens at Cern, are alive with talk of a possible sighting of the Higgs, and with a mass inline with what many physicists would expect.
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Professor John Ellis, a former head of theoretical physics at Cern, told Newsnight’s science editor Susan Watts about the growing sense of excitement at Cern, a week ahead of that key science meeting next Tuesday.
“I think we are going to get the first glimpse. The LHC experiments have already looked high and low for this missing piece. It could be that it weighs several hundred times the proton mass, but that seems very unlikely, then there’s a whole intermediate range where we know it cannot be, then there’s the low mass range where we actually expect it might be. There seem to be some hints emerging there… and that’s what we’re going to learn on Tuesday”.