Live now

http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

Guardian doing 1 minute updates here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...cle?intcmp=122

126 GeV excess with 2.3 sigma.

More details here

http://www.atlas.ch/news/2011/status...-dec-2011.html

If you had to guess, how likely (%) do you think this is the Higgs ?

Tempting fate but like 99%+?

If it means that it is the Higgs within 2.3 standard deviation and assuming the data is normally distributed:

1-2*(1-normcdf(2.3,0,1)) = 0.978551779956648

(hope math checks out).

For reference, 5 sigma:

1-2*(1-normcdf(5,0,1)) = 0.999999426696856

Is there a video up somewhere of the presentation? Looked on goggles and the youtubes but found zip.

...probably the only odds I've heard so far that I would take on this not being the Higgs.

But seriously, i think the real experts** are being a bit too nitty here. There have been instances in the past of being burned on 3 sigma results that were "expected" (the people I've talked to who were active in the mid 80s love telling me that they were watching SUSY/top quark 3 sigma bumps disappear before I was born) but this is the Higgs...we have a ton of theory and data telling us it exists, so much of the phase space has been eliminated we have 2 separate bumps that granted, might not perfectly match.....but I would lay 3:1 on this being confirmed as the first higgs observation eventually.

**Of course I can't really complain about this. That is what experts should do. If somebody came up with a "3 sigma" proof of Grothendiecks standard conjectures or the generalized Hodge Conjecture I would be yelling from the roof tops about all the ways it could fail.

So only 1 out of 35 trillion collision events producing a Higgs.....hmmm not a long shot you say!

This shows a good deal of misunderstanding about how it works.

Yes...if the rates where much, much higher it couldn't be standard model Higgs.

Can someone explain to me what the Higgs is in a way that's not incredibly vague. I've heard the statement that it "couples to particles to give them their mass" or something similar repeatedly, but I have no idea what that means, in spite of the fact that I understand the basics of QCD/QED and the very basic concepts behind the standard model.

I think the problem is that no one knows exactly what the Higgs boson is, so no one can really give you a good explanation.

Well, the Higgs boson is a 0 spin 0 charge particle with mass around 125 GeV. So what it "is" isn't much different from any other fundamental particle...how it is involved in electroweak symmetry breaking and causes the W/Z to have mass is more complicated.