CERN Higgs boson conference video goes live

Jul 4, 2012
CERN Higgs boson conference video goes live

Miss the CERN Higgs boson press conference earlier, and confused about what exactly all this particle magic is about? The teams responsible for apparently spotting the errant subatomic minx have released a video of the conference following the big reveal, going into greater detail of the findings and trying to put them into better context as for what it means for science and the Standard Model. Check out the video after the cut.

As the gist of it goes, the two teams hunting the particle each came up with apparently conclusive findings that there is something boson-like being spotted in the Large Hadron Collider experiments. Exactly what that boson is is unconfirmed, though it fits with all the expectations of the Higgs boson.

The scientists assign a so-called sigma value of certainty to the findings, and today - for certain channels at least - that hit the magic 5.0 point. That translates to a 99.99997-percent likelhood that what they've found is, indeed, a boson, and in fact the heaviest boson ever discovered.

For the Standard Model, it could be the final significant chunk in realizing how the subatomic world works. There are plenty more experiments to come, but the video above goes some way into putting today's exciting news into overall context.

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