Cosmic Variance finally got themselves an experimentalist, John Conway of CDF, and he hits the ground running with a nice post about the search for the Higgs boson:
I've been looking for the Higgs boson for almost 20 years.
So there I was, on a Saturday morning in December, at CERN as it so happened, when I saw the graph we'd been working towards all year. At first I thought it was some mistake - the hair literally rose up on the back of my neck, and I said: "Holy crap! What's that?"
This is only part one of the description, and like a good author, he leaves the reader in suspense. It's a promising start, though.
(Also, I'd like credit for not using a post title like "Who Put the Bump..." Thank you.)
More like this
"This is evidently a discovery of a new particle. If anybody claims otherwise you can tell them they have lost connection with reality." -Tommaso Dorigo
"We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!" -Gollum, from the Hobbit
In the beginning there was light.
Sort of.
When energies were high enough, particles were effectively massless and the universe was a nice seething mess of particle/anti-particle creation and annihilation.
I'm a higs! I'm here... you found me...
You're not a Higgs, you're a Higgins! You bozon...
He's put up a part 2 now.
Did I miss something? Did Joanne leave CV? I seem to recall her poking fun at her blog mates from time to time about acting like there wasn't a house experimentalist. Did I misunderstood her specialty perhaps?