Higgs boson chasers: Now only 1-in-300 MILLION chance we're wrong
Yup, we're feeling lucky, say boffins in new findings
CERN boffins are growing in confidence that the particle they spotted in the latest data from their Large Hadron Collider is indeed a Higgs boson.
The Atlas experiment team has upped its level of certainty for Higgs-ness in a paper [PDF] for Physics Letters B, putting the sigma level at 5.9, which translates into a one-in-300-million chance that the observed elementary particle isn't the highly sought-after mass-giving boson.
That's well over the sigma needed to declare a discovery, which is set at 5 and represents a one-in-3.5-million chance. But the Atlas scientists aren't quite willing to settle with that because it has to narrow the mass range.
The CMS experiment team also posted a paper [PDF] with further analysis of its data, but its certainty only reached 5 sigma, around the same level reported at the start of July when the world went bonkers for the Higgs.
"The Standard Model Higgs boson is excluded at 95 per cent CL in the mass range 111–559 GeV, except for the narrow region 122–131 GeV. In this region, an excess of events with significance 5.9 sigma … is observed," Atlas said in its paper.
"Taking into account the entire mass range of the search, 110–600 GeV, the global significance of the excess is 5.1 sigma."
Announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson would have a massive impact on the physics world, and our understanding of mass, so caution is the name of the game. The CERN boffins won't want to say they've seen the Higgs until they're sure beyond, er, a shadow of a doubt.
And as physicist Paris Sphicas told The Register last month, just deciding that this is a Higgs boson isn't the end of the search: scientists are eager to learn how it fits into our universe and whether theories of supersymmetry or extra dimensions are necessary to explain how we and everything around us simply exists.
Nevertheless, upping the significance of the particle find brings us a step closer to knowing that this is a new and Higgs-like elementary particle that has never been seen before. ®
COMMENTS
Re: The chance of being killed by a shark...
But you're working with a sample size of 7 billion. What you're saying is that if we repeated the experiment 7 billion times, "just" one in 300 million is insufficient to describe certainty. And you'd be right. But that isn't what this says.
This says that, for any one person, observed on any one particular day, the odds of being killed by a shark / being the Higgs boson are 300 million to one. So it's the chances of you, in particular, personally, now, getting killed by a shark. Which is vanishingly small, even if you're swimming at the moment.
Don't try to interpret probabilities without (at minimum) a maths degree, or some sort of probability / statistics speciality. Because one you have a maths degree, you will realise just how dangerous it is to put your toe into probability without understanding tiny, minor differences that the human mind is built to see as equivalent when they can produce WILDLY varying results.
I refer you to the birthday problem, and the Monty Hall Problem. Even if you understand them, or have been shown them, would you really have been able to spot them on your own and get the answer right first time without any help or hints among a sea of mathematics? Chances are that you wouldn't have. And the tiniest change to circumstances makes every probabilistic calculation just as fraught with danger.
Re: The chance of being killed by a shark...
>How dare you criticize science. Don't you know it's the atheist's religion?
Yes the socially acceptable thing to worship is a 2000 yo Jewish zombie.
Re: The chance of being killed by a shark...
In case anyone here isn't familiar with those two problems, let me throw up the quick-and-dirty version of them.
Birthday Problem: In a room full of people, what are the odds of ANY TWO having the same birthday?
Monty Hall Problem: 3 curtains: 1 prize, 2 Zonks. You pick one. Monty reveals one of the ones you didn't pick (a Zonk) and gives you a chance to switch over to the other unopened curtain. Are you better off KEEPING or SWITCHING?
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