The hunt intensifies

First bounds on the Higggins boson

“The left shaded portion is the mass range excluded by LEP, and the central shaded region is the range excluded by the Tevatron. High masses are excluded by precision measurements of the weak mixing angle and the W mass, leaving only the range 115–150 GeV/c2 for future searches if the standard model is the correct theory.”

I find the Great Boson Hunt to be rather interesting, mostly because I am anticipating the prospect of all the amusement that will be provided by the competing explanations for why the standard model of particle physics is incorrect, what the most likely alternatives are, and whose fault it was.  It is quite funny to think of all the time and effort that has gone into the search for something that may still turn out to be no more real than the mythological pegasi. And yet, one has to respect the physicists, as unlike the evolutionary biologists, they have the intellectual integrity to test their assumptions and are even willing to abandon their theoretical models when their predictions fail rather than angrily defending them in the face of the observable evidence.

As we all know, if Haldane’s famous rabbits in the pre-Cambrian are ever found, it will take about two nanoseconds for the Darwinists to begin shrieking that what they had previously sworn up and down was a pre-Cambrian strata were actually Palaeogene rocks and this doesn’t disprove anything anyhow and maybe it’s not a real rabbit and why do you hate science you stupid Creationist bible-thumper…. Actually, come to think of it, it’s almost a pity that physicists don’t behave this way.