Higgs within reach…
I am re-posting my own post from the www.bcapt.ca web site:
It is not that often that science news makes the front page of our newspapers and the headlines of news reports. Today is the day. Today, on July 4th, 2012, scientists at CERN (CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research ) announced that long sought particle – Higgs boson – is within reach. This discovery will “change our understanding of the universe” … and it will also change what is written in our physics textbooks and what we teach in our physics classes in schools, colleges and universities. It is also very exciting that Peter Higgs who predicted the existence of the particle more than half a century ago lived to see his particle discovered!
I would like to quote what is said about this result on the CERN web site (see on the left): “Both ATLAS and CMS gave the level of significance of the result as 5 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a discovery. One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, 3 sigma counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery. The results presented today are preliminary, as the data from 2012 is still under analysis. The complete analysis is expected to be published around the end of July.”