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Has LHC Seen a Hint of the Higgs? 96

Posted by Soulskill
from the or-did-ted-drop-his-sandwich-in-the-machine-again dept.
gbrumfiel writes "Researchers at two detectors at the Large Hadron Collider are seeing something unusual. The signal is faint, but it could be from the long-sought Higgs particle. The Higgs is part of the mechanism that gives other particles mass, and it also unifies the electromagnetic and electroweak forces. No one is willing to declare it found just yet, but the new data from the CMS and ATLAS detectors are an independent, 'tantalizing' hint of what's to come. The results were presented today at HEP-2011 in Grenoble, France."
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Has LHC Seen a Hint of the Higgs? More

Has LHC Seen a Hint of the Higgs?

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  • Electromagnetic and electroweak (Score:3, Informative)

    by mtinsley (1283400) on Friday July 22 2011, @04:06PM (#36850820) Homepage

    it also unifies the electromagnetic and electroweak forces

    Doesn't electroweak already encompass electromagnetic? Should that be 'unifies the electromagnetic and weak forces'?

  • Re:Uh Huh (Score:5, Informative)

    by The_Wilschon (782534) on Friday July 22 2011, @04:10PM (#36850888) Homepage
    Nobody who is a scientist (except possibly for inflammatory gossip addicts like Dorigo) is claiming anything remotely resembling a discovery. Nature is, in my opinion, highly irresponsible for posting things like this, precisely because it leads to reactions like yours. It isn't screwy instrumentation or glitches, it isn't a discovery, it isn't an exclusion, it isn't a bird or a plane or superman, it's just a result that is not yet conclusive.

  • Re:Electromagnetic and electroweak (Score:3, Informative)

    by mswhippingboy (754599) on Friday July 22 2011, @04:27PM (#36851110)
    I believe you are correct. Electroweak IS the unified description of the electromagnetic and weak forces.

  • Not even found the Higgs yet (Score:5, Informative)

    by Roger W Moore (538166) on Friday July 22 2011, @04:29PM (#36851134) Journal

    It hasn't opened a wormhole to another dimension yet...

    We also have not found the Higgs yet there is not enough data to distinguish this from a fluctuation in the background. Frankly I'm appalled at Nature for printing wild, inflammatory speculation like this. If their editors have this level of ignorance of science you have to question what sort of decisions they are making regarding the journal itself...not that many particle physics papers are typically submitted there: perhaps this is why!

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