particle physics phlap

curious flap over leaked internal memo from LHC's ATLAS collaboration over at "Not Even Wrong"

hints of Higgs at 115 GeV in γγ decay

intriguing but too vague and unconfirmed for the physics to be interesting at this point.
Sociology of the comments is interesting.

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Part sociology and part statistics: How much should the threshold for discovery increase as the size of a collaboration increases?

Hm, significance threshold = 3 + ln(N_collab)?

Would explain a lot of the 99.5% confidence null results.

So believe 9 sigma LIGO results and 11 sigma ATLAS results?

I think that is pretty close.

Although, some collaborations have many more trials per collaborator than others (i.e. Auger?). And some communities have many smaller collaborations but too many variables (i.e. biomed).

Fortunately all is saved by the holy logarithm.