No Higgs Just Yet 190
gbrumfiel writes "Last month, scientists reported a number of 'excess events' that could be caused by the appearance of the long-sought Higgs boson inside the LHC. But it looks like they'll have to put the champagne back on ice. New data presented at a conference in India shows no new signs of the Higgs. The signal was probably just a statistical fluctuation."
such is the life of a bump hunter (Score:3, Insightful)
I did bump hunting for my PhD in particles a decade and a half ago. This is the way life goes -- you get a signal that almost has enough significance to really believe -- then it collapses when you pile in more data. If a journal is filled with papers each having a single p=0.05 result, then one out of 20 of them is reasonably expected to be wrong!
Re:God Particle (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of "faith" exposes itself to falsification through experimentation? What kind of "faith" in an entity has all of its greatest practitioners carving out all the places where we can be sure it doesn't exist, and prepared to face the potential truth that it simply doesn't at all? What kind of "faith" is based on making educated guesses at first, but ultimately wanting to know one way or another, of demanding evidence?
Oh right, no kind of faith. That's kinda what "faith" means.
But go ahead and keep on projecting.
Re:There is no Higgs Boson (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm afraid that for your viewpoint to qualify as real science you have to get your hands dirty and come up with a competing theory that not only explains all of the measurements that have been performed in the past (not just by hand-waving arguments but actual numbers) and also makes predictions that can be tested. Do you have one of these or is this just some gut feeling?