Physics Gossip Overload: The Higgs

finally, the people over at fermilab are telling the rest of the world to CALM DOWN and wait for official results from the D0 collaboration to be released before gossiping their mouths off about a potential sighting of the higgs. sounds like good advice to me. as sagan said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." read this article from wired. (image credit: abc news. for the record, i'm not buying into the whole "god particle" terminology. but the picture is quite cool.)

Delay of the LHC

the original plan was that the lhc would do a test run in november this year, in which a proton beam would have run through the accelerator without actually being accelerated. however, because of the failure of the quadrupole magnets earlier this year, the lhc probably won't run until 2008. official notification of any delay will be made later this month. this nice article ends on the upnote that fermilab may be able to find the higgs before the lhc turns on. well, we can always hope. it sure would be a nice thing for fermilab to accomplish before the tevatron shuts down.