Higgs Bosun confirmed

[Saniflush]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/09/12/higgs-boson-discovery-has-been-confirmed/

Higgs Boson Discovery Has Been Confirmed

Last July, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, announced that it had finally discovered the elusive Higgs boson – or at least, a particle that matches the predictions of what the Higgs boson should look like. Now the organization has announced that its official findings have passed through the hurdle of peer review. Two papers describing the discovery have been published in the journal Physics Letters B.

“These papers present the first observations of a new particle discovered by two big experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson which has spanned many decades and has involved many experiments,” Compact Muon Spectrometer (CMS) spokesperson Joe Incandela said in a statement. “They are the most important papers to come from the LHC so far and the findings are key to the field of particle physics. We are very pleased to see them published in Physics Letters B, accessible to all who may want to read them.”
How Much Does It Cost To Find A Higgs Boson? Alex Knapp Alex Knapp Forbes Staff

Of course, passing muster with peer review isn’t the end of the story – lots of papers have passed peer review and then turned out later to be false. However, CERN had the eyes of the world on them, and their experiments were part of a long chain of experiments stretching back decades. What’s more, after the debacle of the OPERA group’s claim they discovered faster-than-light particles – only to find out later that it was just a measurement error – I’m willing to wager that there was a lot of checking and double checking going into the analysis of these papers.