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Race For the "God Particle" Heats Up
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."
What data are they lacking? The math and physics from other experiments that suggest that the Higgs Boson exists, along with a lot of details about it? Or the fact that it is by far the simplest solution to a number of phenomenon? Remember, much more often than not, the simplest solution that fits the math tends to point to the correct answer.
Oh wait. They aren't lacking those.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
somebodys not a Bayesian :)
Anyway theres pretty reasonable indirect evidence for the Higgs, lets just say to make all our measurements consistant, it would be nice if a fundamental scalar existed around 115 GeV. And it would be even nicer if it generated all the masses in the Standard Module while it was at it. There is certainly enough to have a reasonable Bayesian prior.
There are two leading explanations for why it was called the God particle:
1) It will explain how the universe was created (or at least bring us significantly closer), from a scientific standpoint. Finding it will not disprove the existence of a deity, nor will not finding it prove the existence of one.
2) It was nick-named that as a tongue-in-cheek 'We think this particle is everywhere but nobody has actually seen it.' (this came from an earlier Slashdot article, you can look it up for yourself later)
On the other hand, Newton tried to cover up the Calculus, just so he could have the edge over other natural philosophers. Some competition is harmful. It depends.