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Race For the "God Particle" Heats Up

Posted by kdawson on from the mister-higgs-i-presume dept.

SpuriousLogic writes "CERN is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims. Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. CERN's Lyn Evans admitted the accident which will halt the $7B Large Hadron Collider until September may cost them one of the biggest prizes in physics."

3 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. Re:race? by arndawg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is there a race? Why aren't they working together to find it?

    Races are good. I don't think we would have gone to the moon so fast if it wasn't a race between usa and russia.

  2. Re:How do you give odds for that? by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The great thing about scientific theory - real scientific theory - is that is has predictive capabilities. Theory predicts that the Higgs exists. If the theory is correct, they feel that their experiment has a 50% to 96% chance of finding it.

    And if they don't find it, it would actually be a bigger deal than if they do. It means something was off either in the experiment or the theory, and that means it's back to square one!
    =Smidge=

  3. Re:race? by bockelboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's a very friendly "competition". While it *may* be possible for the Tevatron to locate the Higgs before LHC turn-on, it doesn't negate the fact that the LHC will use energies an order of magnitude higher than the Tevatron.

    Fermilab - which is where the Tevatron is located - also has a huge number of people working on CMS - one of the LHC detectors.

    Most of the "US vs Europe" mentality and the "OMG we're losing our physics crown to some other lab" is a sidebar injected by the media and politicians. Otherwise, it can be very dry (aka, non-newsworthy) work punctuated by moments of "Eureka!"