{"id":3452,"date":"2012-07-17T16:47:54","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T20:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=3452"},"modified":"2012-07-17T16:47:54","modified_gmt":"2012-07-17T20:47:54","slug":"the-higgs-boson-hasnt-been-discovered-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=3452","title":{"rendered":"The Higgs boson hasn&#8217;t been discovered yet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you were reading newspapers, science blogs, or even some articles written by prominent scientists or announcements by prominent institutions (such as Canada&#8217;s Perimeter Institute), you might be under the impression that the Higgs boson is a done deal: it has been discovered. (Indeed, Perimeter&#8217;s Web site <a href=\"http:\/\/www.perimeterinstitute.ca\/News\/In_The_Media\/PI_Science%3A_What_is_Next_for_Higgs?\/\">announces<\/a> on its home page that &#8220;[the] Higgs boson has been found&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Sounds great but it is not true. Let me quote from a recent New Scientist <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg21528734.000-beyond-higgs-deviant-decays-hint-at-exotic-physics.html\">online article<\/a>: &#8220;Although spotted at last, many properties of the new particle &#8211; thought to be the Higgs boson, or at least something similar &#8211; have yet to be tested. What&#8217;s more, the telltale signature it left in the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) does not exactly match what is predicted&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>There, this says it all. We are almost certain that something has been discovered. (This is the 4.9-sigma result). We are not at all certain that it&#8217;s the Higgs. It probably is, but there is a significant likelihood that it isn&#8217;t, and we will only know for sure one way or another after several more years&#8217; worth of data are collected. At least this is what the experimenters say. And why should you listen to anyone other than the experimenters?<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=3452' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you were reading newspapers, science blogs, or even some articles written by prominent scientists or announcements by prominent institutions (such as Canada&#8217;s Perimeter Institute), you might be under the impression that the Higgs boson is a done deal: it has been discovered. (Indeed, Perimeter&#8217;s Web site announces on its home page that &#8220;[the] Higgs <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=3452' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3452"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3455,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions\/3455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}