My attempt at stimulating your curiosity with a scientific graph last time worked quite well, and I want to try it again. This time, however, you should not consider yourself eligible to participate if you are an experimental particle physicist (or in the process of becoming one). That's because I want to "lower the bar" a little, allowing non-experts in the game, and an experimentalist in HEP should recognize what this figure is quite easily. If you are a theorist, I am not sure -today's plot might be instantaneous for you to recognize, or not easy, depending on what you work on. I'll take Lubos as a testing ground. Lubos ?

As many of you know, I expressed here my strong doubts that the rumoured Higgs signal found by members of the ATLAS collaboration in the two-photon final state was due to a real particle, and went as far as to bet 2:1 against it (you can take the bet by just writing in the comments thread, but you must be a well-known individual who has a reputation in physics if you want to be taken seriously).

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

R. Feynman

The interest for the tentative new signal of a Higgs decay to photon pairs does not seem to cease. Yesterday I gave a short interview to Fabio De Sicot, on the latest Higgs rumour. Fabio works for an Italian radio station, Radio Città Fujiko.

The interview is available as a podcast here, but be aware that it is in Italian...

Another comment on the ATLAS rumour is worth mentioning today, even if it comes a bit late, because it is written by Jon Butterworth, who is a ATLAS collaborator who also writes for the Guardian. You can find it here.

In particular here's a notable quote:

The thing is, CERN is an exciting place right now. New data are coming in as I write. There are lots of levels of collaboration and competition. Retaining a

Worth mentioning because of its irrelevance: that's my other choice for a post which points out a new preprint by H.Nielsen, the Danish physicist who became famous by hypothesizing that the future was influencing the past in order to prevent us from discovering the Higgs boson.