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Thursday, April 10, 2008

Does Higgs Have Insider Information?

Okay, before I go into it, I have to say it drives me crazy that the "popular" media continues to refer to the Higgs Boson as the "God particle." I know why they do it but it is a pet peeve of mine. I just don't like it.

With that said, I have been interested in the recent reporting that Dr. Peter Higgs, whom the particle was named after, is claiming he think it will be discovered within the next year. Furthermore, he says that his recent trip to CERN convinced him of this and also suspects evidence of the Higgs may exist in data at Fermilab but the data is to difficult to bring it out as of now.

I have no evidence of this, but all these statemements make me wonder if he has some insider information on what people are seeing. It could be the media is playing his comments up too much, but a part of me wonders if some groups have some interesting data where the details just need to be worked out. If he is correct we should find out in the next year or so.

One reason I question if he has insider information is there are several people at Irvine with ties to many experimental groups and they don't seem to claim anything special is being seen. So, I don't know.

From the USA Today:

GENEVA — The father of a theoretical subatomic particle dubbed "the God particle" says he's almost sure it will be confirmed in the next year in a race between powerful research equipment in the United States and Europe.

British physicist Peter Higgs, who more than 40 years ago postulated the existence of the particle in the makeup of the atom, said his visit to a new accelerator in Geneva last weekend encouraged him that the Higgs boson will soon be seen...

Higgs said Monday the particle may already have been created at the rival Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, where the Tevatron is currently the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

"The Tevatron has plenty of energy to do it," Higgs said. "It's just the difficulty of analyzing the data which prevents you from knowing quickly what's hiding in the data."

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