Prepare the fireworks: The discovery of the Higgs boson is finally here. Early in the morning on July 4, physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced they have found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs.
“As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer. “It’s a historic milestone today. I think we can all be proud, all be happy.” Both CMS and ATLAS, the two main LHC Higgs-hunting experiments, are reporting a boson that has Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) with a 5-sigma significance, meaning they are 99.999 percent confident of its existence.
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Image: Scientists assemble the endcap for the ATLAS experiment, one of the LHC’s two main experiments. Peter Ginter/CERN
Looks like Stephen Hawking may be in the hole $100.
HA! Take that Lesley Winkle!
Prepare the fireworks: The discovery of the Higgs boson is finally here. Early in the morning on July 4, physicists with...