Physics: "God Particle" Observed - Maybe

Connections Through Time,   Issue 10: January -March 2001

Circular configuration of the LEP 28 km (17-mile) underground tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland.

Inside the   LEP Tunnel

Without the full context of the theoretical models, all attempts to explain the Higgs field are simplistic, and yet, it seems important to grasp its meaning since this field is so fundamental to our physical universe.  Here are the best layperson's explanations we have found, from a contest held in Britain, that places the Higgs field in a more "information-type" context. 

Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted. 

In three dimensions, and with the complications of relativity, this is the Higgs mechanism. In order to give particles mass, a background field is invented which becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion - the clustering of the field around the particle - generates the particle's mass.

If this theoretical Higgs field/particle was measured, then science has come one step closer to a fundamental and quantitative understanding of our physical universe.  However, even by combining the data of four groups analyzing the results of the LEP experiments, the analysis indicated that the Higgs particle was found with "enhancement above background of less than 3 standard deviations", but still better than 2 standard deviations.  This is encouraging, but not sufficient proof for the physics community.  The "proof of discovery" issue was better quantified in a Scientific American - Science and the Citizen discussion of the Higgs particle:
... the odds that the results were noise were one in 250--a tantalizing result but much too uncertain to proclaim "discovery." ...
Hoping to gain enough data to reduce the odds of error below the one in a million needed for a discovery, experimenters pleaded for a year's reprieve to LEP's scheduled dismantling ...