CERN's Gamble Shows Perils, Rewards of Playing the Odds

摘要

"It would be unprecedented in the history of science," says Michael Riordan, a particle physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). "It would be the greatest signal since the discovery of quarks, and they can't chase it down." Riordan is referring to a last-gasp chase by physicists at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, for solid evidence of a particle known as the Higgs boson. Experiments using CERN's Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) turned up hints of the elusive Higgs particle just before LEP's scheduled shutdown (Science, 22 September, p. 2014). The tantalizing results won LEP a monthlong stay of execution, but nobody expects CERN to nail down whether the discovery is real or a mirage. "Oh, no—that is quite excluded," says Peter Igo-Kimenes, a particle physicist in charge of combining data from the four LEP experiments.