18 
The Higgs Boson. The “God Particle.” We found it. It’s “real science.” Story’s over right? Not exactly. An anomaly in the data kinda-sorta makes it look like there might have been two.
When scientists originally found ol’ higgy, there was a bit of a strange blip that’s still confusing: the particle was decaying into two photons more often than it should. Now researchers at the Atlas experiment have clarified the findings some, but the result is still puzzling. There are two peaks in the data which seem to indicate two different Bosons at two statistically different masses.
Scientific American ‘explains’ (to what extent anyone can):
Certain extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics postulate the existence of multiple Higgs bosons, [but] none of them would predict that two Higgs particles would have such similar masses. They also don’t predict why one should preferentially decay into two Z particles (the 123.5 GeV bump comes from decays of the Higgs into Zs), while the other would decay into photons.
It’s certainly weird, but physicists out there are betting — one of them literally — that it’s just a fluke or systemic problem, and it’ll go away with more data. The thing is that it hasn’t so far. We’ll just have to wait until the next scheduled data release in March to find out, or maybe to continue being confused. [Scientific American via The Register]
Well this is certainly interesting. Time to do some more experiments!
Scientists like this are going to be the death of us….they make create a mini-blackhole or a virus that wipes us out or something else but this shows how ‘easily’ mistakes can happen
There is a vast difference in how ‘easy’ it is to make a slight mistake like this might be and creating a blackhole that will devour us!
We don’t stop doing cutting edge physics because people on the internet think it will create dangerous black holes. Leave the risk assessment to those who know what they are talking about.
I liked the margin between the two most likely scenarios suggested by scientists and complete nutters:
1) We find or do not find Higgs Boson
2) We create a black hole that devours the planet in its entirety.
Ugh1979: Black hole was an example, my point being that at some levels of science a ‘small’ deviation from expected results can lead to very different results.
Shadowmatt: as above plus I believe (unless it’s common myth) that a proportion of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project felt that the first nuclear explosion ‘could’ lead to a cascade event where the splitting of an atom and the energy released would cause other atoms to split and create a chain reaction destroying the planet. Obviously this failed to happen but if the story is true surely that was a bit of a risk moving from theory to practical
No the physicists are CERN are not going to create a black hole. The interactions they are running and at the energies involved occur billions of times per day in our upper atmosphere.
As for biologists and viruses? Now that could actually happen.
This is not a mistake, its data from an experiment showing result that were not 100% predicted. The whole point in moving from theory to real world tests is to check the accuracy of a theory. Now unexpected results have been found it gives the scientist a new line of research which they can now follow so see exactly what is going on and they will update their theories as necessary. As was stated in the article, they expect the data is more of an anomaly and more experiments should rule it out or clarify the findings.
I hate it when i see it refered to as the God Particle. It was never called the God Particle, it was called “That God Damn Particle” because it was so difficult. Then certain media organisations just removed part of it for what ever reason. And thus the uninformed think it’s called the God Particle.
“God Damn” is blasphemous!
I think Mr Higgs was joking when he named it that, look it up.
I think the real mystery with the Higgs Boson is that it isn’t called Higgs’ Boson.
I mena, he owns that shit.
Typical. You wait ages for one particle to come alone and two turn up
They should rename it/them the Bactrian Higgs (two humps, yer see…)