LHC May Have Observed Higgs Boson For The First Time

One of the things that the Large Hadron Collider or LHC has been trying to observe has been the Higgs boson particle. There have been rumors floating around for a while now that the Higgs boson particle had been observed at the LHC and the CERN folks running the LHC are set to make an announcement tomorrow. There is no official detail on what the announcement will be, but with the rumors, the thought is the announcement will be on the Higgs boson.

The announcement is expected to be announced with a fairly high degree of certainty the particle had been observed. With science of this sort, there are grades of certainty before the particle is declared discovered. To make the discovery official the certainty has to be sigma level of five. According to the rumors, the certainty at the LHC so far is 2.5 to 3.5 sigma certainty.

That would work out to 96% to 99.9% certainty. The discovery of this particle apparently will mostly only confirm what physicists have thought about particles for a long time. However, the more interesting possibility with the Higgs boson particle would be to find it doesn't exist or has odd behavior. If the particle doesn't exist Extremetech reports that physics books would have to be rewritten. There are rumors that the observed Higgs boson particles have acted strangely. If the rumors are true, the particles were observed at 125GeV. If that is the case, there will be some changes to be made in physics books, but not as physics altering as the particles not existing.

[via Extremetech]