Discovery News totally called this one: It turns out that all of those rumors that the elusive Higgs Boson had been discovered by Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator aren’t true.
Last week, a physicist and blogger at the University of Padua, Tommaso Dorigo, wrote that “It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result.” Like a uranium-235 chain reaction, Dorigo’s words exploded through the blogosphere and into the mainstream media, which inexplicably turned the rumored discovery into the latest in a nonexistent ‘rivalry’ between Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.
Fermilab has laid the smackdown on the Higgs Boson discovery rumors, saying that they have “no merit” and are “just rumors.” Fermilab has also taken a few digs at bloggers in the process:
From Fermilab’s Twitter feed:
Spokesmen for Fermilab and for the DZero experiment told BBC News that “There is no merit to the rumours of a Higgs discovery” and “There is no evidence yet of a Standard Model Higgs signal; more data will be needed for that. The rumours started by the blog are not correct and blogs are not a reliable source of information.”
That last bit kind of hurts (I mean, have they heard of Phil Plait?) but in this case, the blogs definitely deserved the drubbing.
(via BBC News. title image via UToronto.)
Published: Jul 14, 2010 10:10 am