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CERN May Not Have Discovered Higgs Boson After All
An anonymous reader writes Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson, but some scientists believe that the particle may not have been discovered yet at all. A new study by a group of scientists from the University of Southern Denmark raises the possibility that the data collected from the Large Hadron Collider could instead explain another type of subatomic particle. Mads Toudal Frandsen, a particle physicist, explained in a statement, "The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particular particle is the Higgs particle ... It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles."
It's got nothing to do with those theories being 'imposters',
The theories are not imposters, the specific category of theories the GP was referring to contain "Higgs imposters", i.e. particles that to various degrees look like what is expected for the Higgs boson. What the poster said was correct, that as more observations are made, it can be more and more difficult to come up with alternative theories that are consistent. That isn't a statement about what should and shouldn't be done, only that it becomes harder.
If the Standard Model is correct it should ideally be "more" correct than those "imposter" theories.
We already know that the Standard Model is wrong on some level, and have accumulated quite a few theories that extends the Standard Model to deal with some of its shortcomings. The big question at this point isn't if the Standard Model is more correct, but which of the competing extensions is more correct, especially considering they often are a superset of a large part of the Standard Model.
The summary was wrong: Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert did not win the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson. They (along with some others) predicted it, but didn't discover it. (More accurately, they won the Nobel for elucidating the Higgs mechanism of symmetry breaking as a means for massless particles to acquire mass).
This was a deduction (deducing that a particular field would lead to symmetry breaking with particular properties, from the mathematics of field theories), not an induction (fitting a model to theories).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I doubt many scientists believe that you can prove any scientific theory true.
In general, this is correct: you can prove a scientific theory false, but never prove it true. (You can prove mathematical theories true. But mathematical theories require assumptions, called postulates. To prove that a mathematical theory is true in the real world, you would need to find a way to prove the postulates true.)
Physical theories are confirmed by evidence, and well confirmed by large amounts of of evidence... but confirmation is not exactly the same as proof
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Uhm, the particle at CERN had properties that didn't match either of the predicted properties of the Higgs boson
And which two properties are you talking about? If they got it so wrong, you should be able to name them, or look it up easily otherwise.
Here's a hint, there are three main properties of the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model: Spin 0, where spin 1 has been experimentally eliminated for the candidate, and results are now more than three sigma certain of eliminating the other alternative spin 2. The parity was also predicted and confirmed to more than 3 sigma. Finally, the biggest one was the decay paths, four of which have been confirmed and the branching ratios match within experimental error.
That's three for three. There is some possibility that with more data the branching ratios might be slightly different, which would not be evidence it is not a Higgs, but only that it is interacting with things beyond the Standard Model.
In other words, they got it WAY fucking wrong
So far it has been essentially dead on, the exact opposite of "WAY fucking wrong," which seems to better describe your post at this point.