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End of the line: will science journalists be flocking to CERN in August? (CC-BY/Darkzink)
By Hamish Johnston
Things are heating up in the blogosphere after two A-list physics bloggers have speculated that a tantalizing hint of new physics seen by the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN is vanishing now that the latest collision data are being analysed.
The hint is a bump at 750 GeV in the spectrum of photon pairs created when protons collide in the LHC. It is not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics and has not yet reached a statistical significance of 5σ – the threshold for a discovery. If it turns out to be real, the bump could become one of the most important discoveries in particle physics made so far this century.
Adam Falkowski, who writes the Resonaances blog, has Tweeted “Rumour: 750 GeV diphoton bump is going away as more data is collected by LHC. Most likely, excess seen in 2015 was just statistical fluke.”
This sentiment seems to be shared by several commenters on a blog post Falkowski wrote earlier this week about the surfeit of theoretical papers that have put forth explanations about the 750 GeV bump.
Meanwhile over on Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit plays augur and advises on how to read upcoming signs from the CERN public-relations gods. He reckons that if the bump has reached a statistical significance of 5σ, the announcement will be made at CERN in early August – with concurrent seminars at the ICHEP conference in Chicago. This is how the Higgs announcement played out in 2012, with journalists receiving a mysterious invitation to CERN a few weeks before the announcement.
The CERN teams of ATLAS and CMS collecting and working on the di-photon data with the 750 GeV bump, should have the last word on it away from the already 1000 or more write ups and the impatient blogs showing clearly that there are a lot of persons around who do not much to do.
People who comment on such blogs must therefore have even less to do…
Dr. Johnston, these comments are needed and you ask for them to justify the reasonable working of your PW-entreprise! These people devote their time to this “bénévole task”, while busy with their own work. In case, you decide and announce that no comments are needed for the PW, we shall stop them immediately.
Approximately 400 papers from theorists submitted to the arxiv repository based on a 2-sigma “bump”.
This tells us something about the state of particle physics.
Yes it does: particle physics theorists are smelling Nobel prizes
RLO’s comment pushes me to say that we will know a lot more about the realities of particle physics as soon as I publish my TOE.
Dr. Peerally, please publish your TOE instead of continuosly using the comment as the unhealthy self-publicity. Moreover, after publishing, the TOE needs to be checked and tested as we know, there can be numerous logic-based theories around, but few stand up to the heat of tests.
Normally Dr Asghar’s comment would be a reasonable one. I have told you earlief I have a 22pp article on the Theory of Everything=Philosophy of Everything + Physics of Everything on vixra. This paper explains why I cannot publish my TOE now, which I started thinking about 4 years back and which I since then believe it is a lot more involved than what you have read about from others on the subject. It is a huge stress to me to do so, but this is inevitable.About the view that many others have tried unsuccessfully. That is true but precisely because the TOE is such a very complicated topic that I cannot publish now, but after doing the preconditioning on the philosophical and historical realities I will do soon. The TOE’s complexity is so elusive that if I don’t publish it nobody will in another at least 5 decades. I have some intellectual hurdles and there is no self publicity but a contextual necessity. I will please you not mention it again on PW. If Hamish, an eminent PW writer, is not happy with my comment I do mind if he deletes it, for I cannot myself judge how and why this should be so.
Dr. Peerally take it professionally as mine was a normal reaction to your comment which was necessary to try to pin it down as I have in my life seen a few other claims on TOE. Prepare your document and publish it and there should be no need for the PW blessing. All the best to your endeavour that cannot be shut out from others’ scrutiny- after all, this is “the facing the heat of tests”.
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True the Science being conducted at CERN is amazing, yet no one can correlate the data with real world/universe conditions. The man made, earth bound, tests conditions may not actually explain how matter came into existence in deep space. Since no one knows exactly what happened during the big bang, including how random extreme pressures and vacuums, and random extreme temperatures affected light/energy to form into matter, then no one one should accept any findings as concrete facts.
Only when scientists conducts these tests in zero gravity and in deep space, away from the SUN and any gravitational force, and then compares that data with the data from CERN can anyone be sure that the model for how matter came into existence and the subatomic particle findings are true and correct.
Also the detectors and software themselves may not be working properly, and analysts may be interpreting the data wrong. This field of study is still so very young… it is hubris to think the past 110 years of science can actually give us the recipe for how everything came into existence.