Excitement accounts for some of this frenzy, but much was just hastily rehashed old theories being reapplied in the hope they might catch on this time.Īlas, with the bump gone, these papers are unlikely to trouble the Nobel committee any time soon. Yet theorists, starved of new physics, produced more than 500 papers claiming to explain the result. Normally, physicists wouldn’t even get out of bed for that. ![]() The latest bump, when announced last December, barely ranked two sigma: odds of one in 20 of being down to chance. ![]() “Five sigma”, meaning odds of one in 3.5 million that a result is down to random fluctuations, counts as a discovery like that of the Higgs boson. Such false starts are to be expected, so physicists talk in statistical jargon about how likely anomalies are to be real. Read more: Physicists look to the future as new particle dream dies
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