Scattered media attention focuses on the Higgs boson
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0171
With the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics convening in Melbourne, Australia, on 4 July, the New York Times and a few other major media organizations in recent days have reintroduced Higgs boson anticipation to the public.
Dennis Overbye’s Times article , after reviewing what the Higgs is, reminded readers that in “December, scientists went into a qualified tizzy when two teams of physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, outside Geneva, reported hints—but only hints—of a bump in their data that could be the boson.”
Physicists “are racing to make a deadline to report the results” of the experimentation in Melbourne, Overbye wrote. He continued:
This, all agree, is the boson’s last stand. If the December signal fades, it probably means that the Higgs boson, at least as physicists have envisioned it for the past 40 years, does not exist, and that theorists have to go back to their drawing boards.
If the signal is still there, the work is just beginning. In order for it to be certified as a “discovery,” there has to be less than one chance in 3.5 million that it is a fluke background fluctuation. Last fall’s signals were at the level of one chance in a thousand, which sounds good, but you would not board an airplane that crashed every thousand flights.
For now, the whole physics world is waiting and wondering.
The physics world is also worrying about bias, according to a blog posting at the Guardian by Jon Butterworth of the Atlas experiment, which along with the CMS experiment has been taking Higgs-related data. When it comes to CMS data, Butterworth emphasizes, “I really do not want to know.” He continues:
Part of the point of having two independent experiments is that they cross-check each other—independently. We do that most effectively when we are blind to the other experiment’s data, right up to the last minute. In fact we even try to blind ourselves to our own data up to a point. As much as possible of the analysis should be optimised and decided in advance, before even looking at the data. This prevents even the possibility of subconscious bias entering the studies. If you are biased, the truth will probably still out in the end, but in the meantime your statistical estimations of confidence and significance will all be wrong. So hearing gossip from CMS would at best be distracting, inaccurate noise. At worst, it would be accurate and would bias our analysis.
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette , among others, has reported about the rumors. In a Fox News online piece , she wrote:
Just before 3 p.m. on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, the elusive Higgs boson made science history: it topped the list of trending Twitter topics—all because of a flurry of rumors that began on a handful of physics blogs, and quickly spread to media outlets.
The Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post have also recently run brief articles about the impending Melbourne announcements.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.