Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Is it true?



The Rumor 

It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result. That the result comes from the Tevatron is for sure, since the LHC experiments do not have nearly enough data yet to search for that elusive particle, and other particle physics experiments in the world have not nearly enough energy to produce it. However, I am unable to understand whether the rumor comes from CDF or from D0. 

Lest you jump at conclusions too early, I need to explain something more: despite being a CDF author, I unfortunately do not follow actively the works of the Higgs Discovery Working Group within CDF, so a Higgs excess in CDF data could well have escaped me. In principle, if I now took on digging hard enough in the internal pages of the CDF experiment I might be able to find out if this signal is coming from there, and maybe learn more about it. But there are at least a dozen analyses to dig into! Too much work - while wild speculation is more fun! 

read more here.

1 comment:

Rich said...

Link provided here has been provided with an update with the rumor(s) being essentially dismissed.

I definitely do admire research like this stuff going on.

Unfortunately research dollars can be hard to come by in science sometimes or a lot of times so who knows what "foul play" of information is going on and has been going on.

Most average people don't even know about experiments like this, let alone have the spirit to care about them...hence support the funding regardless of how unexciting any data gathered and results might be for long periods of time.

It is the spirit of the hunt. The spirit of playing and not always winning but still trying. The spirit to move forward, however slow, in the who, what, where, when, why and how of EVERYTHING.

Although, even with all the funding going to something like cancer research...we're still stuck with the bullshit.

And the world is forced to accept the reality of suffering and death, make excuses for it, 99 thousand trillion billion beliefs, explain with stories, believe they have it all figured out, etc, etc, etc...the list goes on.

Where for me, there is NO adequate explanation for this bullshit except to say the world is cold and if there is a reason it exists...it exists only for itself, whatever this might be.

Hence, for me anyway, we're back to square one. Who, what, where, when, why and how of EVERYTHING.

So where is the particle bullcrap, are we a living la la land hologram or some Willy Wonka type cuckoo dookoo shit nightmare assuming free will?