Higgs Boson Detected?

Travis McGee writes "A scientist says one of the most sought after particles in physics - the Higgs boson - may have been found, but the evidence is still relatively weak. The Higgs boson explains why all other particles have mass and is fundamental to a complete understanding of matter. The report was published in Nature magazine and the BBC has an article." The last time the elusive particle was in the news was 2001.

Comments

Re:The boson kludge

[mph]

Reminds me of the "dark energy" idea: "Well, we can only find 1/3 of the matter that we know should exist, so the rest is.. well, it's just the dark energy that we can't detect!"

This statement is wrong in several ways.

First of all, "dark energy" has nothing to do with the missing mass problem. You meant to say "dark matter." Dark energy is another term for the cosmological constant, a parameter tied to the observed acceleration of the universe. There are completely independent measurements that require this parameter, including supernova acceleration studies and incredibly precise cosmic microwave background measurements.

Regarding dark matter, you seriously trivialize the situation. It's not a case of astronomers being unable to find the matter, like it's a lost set of keys. We see that galaxies and clusters of galaxies experience more gravitation attraction than they should, based on the visible mass. Hence "dark matter." But it's not just that we can't see it; big bang nucleosynthesis tells us that only a small fraction of the matter in the universe is baryonic. Baryons are the normal particles that "stuff" is made of, like you, me, stars, dust, and gas. That means that the missing mass is not simply something we're not seeing (because it doesn't glow, for example), but is something utterly different.

We're not missing mass because we're not good at finding stars, or dust, or whatever. We're missing it because it's something completely, fundamentally different from all of that stuff.