Being first is almost everything -- the product in academic research is new knowledge. How much press was given to the second time the LHC discovered the Higgs

Being first is almost everything -- the product in academic research is new knowledge. How much press was given to the second time the LHC discovered the Higgs, with higher precision? Robert Dicke, in the running for "greatest experimental physicist in history", was working rapidly toward discovering the cosmic microwave background, with a keen physical insights driving the research. His team was beaten by a team at Bell Labs, who, when they discovered an irreducible isotropic source of noise emanating from the Universe, literally called Dicke [1] to help them understand the signal. Who got the Nobel Prize? The team from Bell Labs. Never mind that Dicke literally wrote the companion paper explaining why the Bell Labs measurement was so important. Why? Because they were first. Regarding graduate students: It is extremely common in physics to have the lead author (and coordinator) on important/cutting-edge research be a graduate student. It is only the largest collaborations where this isn't always the case. Graduate students tend to follow a single thread of research from beginning to end, learning the ropes on the way, while faculty generally manage and mentor multiple threads (each with a student) simultaneously. When it comes time to publish, frequently it is the student who knows all of the details of the measurement the best. For your final question, the answer goes back to "because being first is almost everything", combined with "we have to give the credit to somebody, right?". If someone notices that the eighth word on 50% of Guinness World Record citations is "person", should the credit for the discovery go to the person who noticed that interesting fact, or should it primarily go to Guinness World Records, who assembled and produced the dataset over decades of work? Or, more-concretely, when someone applies for and receives fifteen minutes of time on the Hubble Telescope and, using a clever time-domain analysis, happens to find a repeating optical signal that blinks 13 times, then 53 times, then 13 times, then 53 times (as good a SETI candidate as you'll find), who gets the credit? Is it the researcher with the keen insight and good luck, or is it the huge amalgamation of humanity, spanning a half-century of science and engineering, that made such a measurement possible? [1] https://theconversation.com/the-cmb-how-an-accidental-discovery-became-the-key-to-understanding-the-universe-45126#:~:text=Dicke%20came%20off%20the%20phone,at%204080%20Mc%2Fs%E2%80%9D https://theconversation.com/the-cmb-how-an-accidental-discov....