What will be the next discovery ? February 2, 2007
Posted by dorigo in games, physics, science.20 comments
330 graduate students at Fermilab were polled to see what they believed would be the next discovery in particle physics. The result is shown in the plot below.
Interesting to note how many do believe there is something out there that we can and will reach for, earlier than the Standard Model Higgs boson: about 64% of them think so.
Interesting also to note there is a certain amount of skeptics that believe nothing will be discovered at all… Even I -and I consider myself a skeptic- think that would be quite a discovery by itself.
I wonder what the readers of this blog think. How about telling me here what you think will be discovered next ? You know my vote already, it is the SM Higgs -and nothing else of course, but that is only my personal opinion, and that of this 1000$ bill.
Bumps part IV - the deflation of significance February 2, 2007
Posted by dorigo in computers, personal, physics, politics, science.2 comments
In the previous part of this post, I started discussing how to perform a statistical study of the mass spectrum obtained by the Frascati group, to determine how unlikely it was that a statistical fluctuation of background events would produce a gaussian bump somewhere in the spectrum, of size equal or larger to that observed. Now I will describe the whole study in some detail, and draw the necessary conclusions. (more…)
