Excitement as Higgs boson seminar set to announce latest LHC findings

[hue]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/dec/01/higgs-boson-seminar-lhc-findings

"The runup to Christmas looks exciting for the Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva. Staff at the laboratory have arranged a special seminar on Tuesday 13 December at which the latest results in the search for the Higgs boson will be made public. The presentation is due to happen directly after the lab's scientific policy committee has convened one of its regular meetings behind closed doors.

So what can we expect to hear? The two main groups that hunt the Higgs boson, the Atlas and CMS detector collaborations, will describe their results separately, unlike the recent combined figures put out this month in Paris. There has been too little time to merge the most up-to-date results from both experiments...But for now we have to wait. The seminar in December is going to be a milestone in the search for the Higgs boson, whatever the message from the scientists. You can be sure the news will leak out on a blog before the seminar arrives, and that plenty of speculative nonsense will be written too. As one Cern physicist put it: "This should be fun."

[On the Road]

1. My Cousin, Who is in a PhD Program in Wayne State,

will have to go back to the drawing board if they find the Higgs particle. The program he's in is pursuing a "technicolor" solution to dark matter than does not depend on the Higgs. Instead, it theorizes that extra mass results from combinations of massless particles, which under conditions can acquire mass.

[hue]

2. The bulk of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) is not dependent on the Higgs.

CERN (ATLAS & CMS) have corroborated data that shows a signal at about 125 GeV. Confirmation would come next year.