Believe nothing

The announcement on 4 July was greeted with enthusiasm around the world

 

The particle has been the subject of a decades-long hunt as the last missing piece of physics’ Standard Model, explaining why matter has mass.

Now one Higgs-hunting team at the Large Hadron Collider report a “5.9 sigma” levels of certainty it exists.

That equates to a one-in-550 million chance if the Higgs did not exist, the team would see these same results.

The formal threshold for claiming the discovery of a particle is a 5-sigma level – equivalent to a one-in-3.5 million chance.

That is the level that was claimed by the team behind Atlas, one of the LHC’s Higgs-hunting experiments, during the 4 July announcement. The other, known as CMS, claimed results between 4.9 and 5 sigma.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19076355