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Yes, we did discover the Higgs
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
But I think everyone would agree that the data (black dots) don’t follow the null (stack of blue and green) distribution and it clearly prefers that alternate hypothesis with the additional red bump. So when Ben writes “Do we believe that their presented statistical counts represent a close enough facsimile of experimental conditions to corroborate an ornate, impossible to understand theory?” I hope you can see how that is off base when it comes to claiming discovery of a new particle. (You can quibble about how independent they are, but the point is that it’s deeply ingrained in the culture of particle physics that these things could go wrong, so we’ve built a number of protective measures to avoid those problems.)
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