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Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed voices which have no foundation, Lubos Motl over at the Reference Frame gets more detailed rumors on the same thing, and that does make things a bit more interesting.
The CDF experiment has just released their new average of top quark mass measurements, obtained with analyses that use up to 5.6 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions provided by the 2-TeV Tevatron collider: the new measurement is  M(top) = 173.1 +- 0.7 (stat) +- 0.9 (syst) GeV, a measurement with a total uncertainty of 1.3 GeV, or 0.75%!

Have a look at the various measurements that enter the calculation in the graph below.


"Eighty percent of success is showing up"

W.Allen
Sometimes my sympathy for science magazines (in print and online), which try to keep intelligent readers informed on the progress in basic science, gets dampened by observing how they end up providing a narrow-sighted look at things. What is at stake is usually not science popularization: an article you read does not need to inform you of all what is going on in a field of research; rather, it is the correct acknowledgement of the different efforts. It sometimes happens that a group works hard on something, they believe they have made great progress and furthered everybody's knowledge in the field, and then an article appears that discusses somebody else's contribution, which came later, was less successful, and less valuable.
UPDATE: if you came here to learn more details about the rumored Higgs signal, which media around the world are discussing and which Fermilab Today just dismiss-tweeted, please visit this other more recent post for more details. Below is the original post which apparently originated a lot of buzz.
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And for once, I feel totally free to speculate without the fear of being crucified. If you have followed my past blog adventures for long enough, you know that in at least a couple of occasions my posts have created some friction.
This is a post that has nothing to do with physics or other sciences, for once. I just report here my thoughts as a father upon allowing my 11-years-old son to go spend a day to the beach alone with his friends. Is it too early ? Is it about time ?