I woke up this morning to the BBC Radio News at 7am announcing that scientists at CERN were going to report “hints” of the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider; you can find a longer discussion by the BBC here. This was later accompanied by articles tackling the important questions of the day such as whether the discovery of the Higgs would justify the enormous expense of
Brian Cox the LHC.
Prize for the most inaccurate science report goes to the Daily Fail:
‘God’ particle found:
Atom smasher reveals Higgs boson, the key to the universe
Evidence soon emerged however that this particular squib might be of the damp variety. Consistent with previous blogospheric pronouncements, a paper on the arXiv this morning suggested no convincing detection of the Higgs had actually been made by the ATLAS experiment.
I then had to make an important choice between watching the live webcast of the CERN seminar at which detailed information on the Higgs searches was to be presented or to accept a free lunch with the examiners of a PhD candidate. I chose the latter.
Catching up on events after lunch confirmed the underwhelming nature of the Higgs “detection”, but with some intriguing evidence an excess signal at around 126 GeV at the 2.3 sigma level, in the frequentist parlance favoured by particle physicists and others who don’t know how to do statistics properly. In the words of the late John Bahcall: “half of all three-sigma detections are false“. Of course if they used proper Bayesian language, scientists wouldn’t make so many nonsensical statements. Personally, I just don’t do sigmas.
My attention then switched to the CMS experiment. As a point of information you should be aware that CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, where “compact” is a word used by particle physicists to mean “fucking enormous”. CMS makes pictures like this:
Anyway, it seems from the CMS part of the presentation that they find a bit of a peak at a similar mass ~ 125 GeV but spread out over a larger range, this time at a level of – sigh – 2.6 sigma.
All in all, it’s a definite maybe. Putting the results together in the way only a frequentist can the result is a 2.4 sigma detection. In other words, nothing any serious scientist would call convincing.
It’s interesting how certain these particle physicists are that the Higgs actually exists. It might, of course, and I think these results may be pointing the way to more convincing evidence based on more data. However, I still think we should bear in mind the words of Alfred North Whitehead:
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
If there is a Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV then that would of course be an exciting discovery, but if there isn’t one at all wouldn’t that be even more exciting?
Final word from the Director of CERN:
We have not found it yet, we have not excluded it yet, stay tuned for next year.
Thunder and hail descended on Cardiff just as the webcast finished, which is clearly not a coincidence although I couldn’t say how many sigmas were involved.
And a final, final word from the Chief Executive of the Science & Technology Facilities Council, John Womersley:
There is still some way to go before the existence of the Higgs boson can be confirmed or not, but excitement is mounting. UK physicists and engineers have played a significant role in securing today’s results, and will continue to be at the forefront of exploring the new frontiers of knowledge opened by the results coming from the LHC. This is an incredibly exciting time to be involved in physics!
Brian Cox is 43.Follow @telescoper