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Scientists Say ‘God Particle’ May Be an Impostor

Last Wednesday everyone went crazy when CERN scientists announced proof of the existence of the Higgs boson, which theoretically gives us mass and holds the Universe together. Now, other physicists say that CERN may have found an impostor and notthe popularly called God Particle.

After analyzing the data collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, scientists Ian Low, Joseph Lykken and Gabe Shaughnessy at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, claim that these observations may be explained by two other “impostor” particles, which may be masquerading as the fabled Higgs boson:

We show that current LHC data already strongly disfavor both the dilatonic and non-dilatonic singlet imposters. On the other hand, a generic Higgs doublet and a triplet imposter give equally good fits to the measured event rates of the newly observed scalar resonance

In their 20-page research paper—available through Cornell University’s Arxiv (PDF)—Low and his colleagues also add that, while the data may be explained by these two impostors, the “Standard Model Higgs boson gives a slightly better overall fit.”

If they are right, however, the 30-year $9-billion quest to find the holy grail of physics, may have not ended yet.

We have to wait

Indeed, this is nothing to be surprised about. When CERN scientists claimed that they were 99.9999 percent sure that the measurements are the result of the existence of the Higgs boson, they were cautious in their optimism, saying they needed to investigate more.

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