3 ms·

The title is hyperbole. Neither group claimed "discovery". They only are claiming observation of a new boson.

• shawabawa3 14y ago
  Prof Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented: "We have a discovery - we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson. But which one? That remains open." Either way you're being incredibly pedantic. What's really the difference between discovering and observing something that's never been observed before?
  • cshimmin 14y ago
    It seems a lot of people here were a bit taken aback by Heuer's comment at the end. Both teams spent weeks vetting the results and prsentation, and the decision not to claim discovery was taken very seriously. There is still a lot of work to do to polish up the statistics. Note how the different physics channels each have their own significance and weights, as discussed pretty clearly in the CMS presentation. Combining the overall significance from all channels is not a trivial task. To answer your question: we have not shown that it is a higgs boson. Essentially today's result is simply that we observed a lot of objects decaying from a mass 125GeV. More than we expect from the Standard Model (w/out higgs).
• mikk0j 14y ago
  Well at least they didn't say "God particle" in the headline. Points for that.