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."

CERN Blows Up

You probably heard about this by now, it's kind of old news, but I found a rather humerus article about it. Actually the article was uninteresting, but the comments were rather funny. Oh, the things people don't know. Also I find it interesting how the article is blaming Fermilab for the whole mess (are they implying a kind of cloak and dagger secret sabotage?).

W Boson, and Higgs Just Around the Corner?

Well, I threatened to blog about this, and now I am. Before I do I want to say people should consider taking a look at Science Daily every once and a while since they stay on top of really cool recent physics being published.

With that said, according to the report by Science Daily:

Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced the world's most precise measurement by a single experiment of the mass of the W boson, the carrier of the weak nuclear force and a key parameter of the Standard Model of particles and forces. The new W-mass value leads to an estimate for the mass of the yet-undiscovered Higgs boson that is lighter than previously predicted, in principle making observation of this elusive particle more likely by experiments at the Tevatron particle collider at Fermilab. Scientists working at the Collider Detector at Fermilab measured the mass of the W boson to be 80,413 +/- 48 MeV/c2, determining the particle's mass with a precision of 0.06 percent.

What is so interesting to me is this suggests the Higgs Boson may be light enough to be detected by FermiLab! This also means the needed energy level is likely to be in the crosshairs of CERN. Just any day now and we will be overturning cars in the streets over some monumental news.