Higgs Boson

A Higgs Boson explanation that even I can understand

And here is the BBC story on what the CERN LCH researchers are reporting today.

Actually there were really only three likely outcomes that could have been announced today

(1)    That there is no evidence of Higgs Boson.  Looking at the graph of energy versus collisions we don’t observe the predicted bump in the graph.   My "anonymous physics insider source" says that a year ago some people thought that this was a real possibility.  Although at this point in the study that would be a surprising result.

(2)    That there does appear to be a bump in the graph but given the size of the bump versus the size of our sample we cannot dismiss the possibility that the bump is the result of randomness.   In this case they would need to run more samples.  That would be a bit surprising because it is a non-committal result and those types of results don’t tend to garner huge fanfare.

(3)    That there does appear to be a bump in the graph and given the size of the bump versus the size of our sample we find that there is very little likelihood that the bump is the result of randomness.   That was what was in fact announced today.

Thanks to brother Steve for pointing me to an explanation that was right at my level.

7/7 update:  brother Steve points out a fourth possible announcement that the researchers could have made.  They could have said that not only do we see a bump at the graph at this particular energy level, and not only can we exclude randomness (as in case 3) but here are some properties of that particle as well.  They did not go that far.