Friday, June 22, 2012

The BIG gossip


The gossip is all around us. You can smell it in the air, feel it in your skin, see it on the faces of the people around...

By today, everybody knows that a team of physicists gathered in a room on Friday to "open the Pandora box" and begin crunching the new data from this year. Newspapers from all the world are spreading these news, some of them with funny headlines like  "New Data on Elusive Particle Shrouded in Secrecy", "Europe Overtakes U.S. in Physics Pursuing God Particle" or "Excitement builds over Higgs data".

Some blogs they even give lots of details! This one claims, with lots of details, that both Atlas and CMS have already observed the Higgs boson for sure with sigma of around 4 in at least one of the decay modes (more than 3 implies 'observation', more than 5 is called 'discovery'). It's funny that some VIPs, like the Atlas spokesperson, have already alerted about that and pleaded “Please do not believe the blogs” :D

The rumor of the discovery is even a trending topic in Twitter!! (#HiggsRumors).

Of course, the official version (and probably the only reliable one :D) is that nothing happened yet, they are still analyzing the results and you have to wait to the avant-premiere of the show where the final results (double-checked lots of times) will be presented. Basically in a couple of weeks in an important physicists conference.

And, once again, it could be that this is just a rumor :) Don't forget that Higgs has already been "discovered" 2 or 3 times here if you believed all the previous rumors!!!! :D