"Oh Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ?"

Good old Shelley inspired me to start today's article with the above verse, taken from his magnificent "Ode to the West Wind". With the weather we are experiencing these days in Geneva and northern Italy, I found it a relieving thought...

So, winter conferences are over, and summer ones are still far away. This is therefore a nice moment to try an assessment on the quality of the results that the two competing CERN experiments have produced on the study of the Higgs boson. Why ? Because we are not going to have to change our conclusions in a short time scale caused by a result about to be published.

How to compare the results

The results of a third-party investigation of Rossi's E-CAT reactor have appeared on the Cornell arxiv, and the conclusions of the tests are at the very least startling:

Finally the decay of Higgs bosons to b-quark pairs is emerging from LHC data, too.

Supersymmetry, the extension of the Standard Model of particle physics that was once sold as an almost certain discovery that the LHC experiments would bump into upon starting to collect proton-proton collisions, is not in a very healthy situation these days.