Thread: Weird News
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Old 12-14-2011, 02:59 AM   #1667
Lamplighter
Person who doesn't update the user title
 
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: Bottom lands of the Missoula floods
Posts: 6,402
Here's followup from Higgs Boson Central.
The quote below has been re-organized to clarify the article.

Close, but no cigar. (yet)

NY Times
DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: December 13, 2011
Data Hints at Elusive Particle, but the Wait Continues
Quote:
Physicists will have to keep holding their breath a while longer.

Physicists around the world, fueled by coffee, dreams and Internet rumors of a breakthrough,
gathered in lounges and auditoriums early Tuesday morning
to watch a lengthy Webcast of the results at CERN.
“Physicists at 8 a.m.,” exclaimed Neal Weiner,
a theorist who organized a gathering at New York University.
“That’s really impressive!”

Two teams of scientists sifting debris from high-energy proton collision
in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, said Tuesday
that they had recorded tantalizing hints — but only hints —
of a long-sought subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson,
whose existence is a key to explaining why there is mass in the universe.
By next summer, they said, they will have enough data
to say finally whether the elusive particle really exists.

Meanwhile, the other team, known as C.M.S.
— for its detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid —
found what its spokesman, Guido Tonelli, termed “a modest excess”
in its data corresponding to masses around 124 billion electron volts.

The physicists from the different teams are already discussing
whether these differences are significant.

The fact that two rival teams using two different mammoth particle detectors
had recorded similar results was considered good news.
They still think they will need a bigger collider.
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