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The Higgs boson will be discovered whether it is there or not. If the Higgs boson is not there, then before you get to a collision energy of 1 TeV, the interaction strength between the W bosons becomes gigantic. This leads to huge resonances that play the same role as the Higgs boson, and mimic many of its properties. (Geeks: if the electroweak symmetry is not spontaneously broken, it must break dynamically.) If this does not happen, it will violate the principle of unitarity, which is the requirement that the probability of any interaction not exceed 100%.

Anyway, I don't know why these guys are wringing their hands about the Higgs, unless they are pushing strong electroweak sector models like I described above. LEP had a 2.5-sigma indication of a Higgs at 114 GeV just before it shut down. The only other game in town is the Tevatron at Fermilab, but that won't have enough data to make useful statements about the Higgs for a couple of years, yet.

``We've eliminated most of the hunting area,'' Neil Calder, of CERN, told the magazine.

I have no idea where this claim comes from.

If the Higgs boson is not there, then before you get to a collision energy of 1 TeV, the interaction strength between the W bosons becomes gigantic. This leads to huge resonances that play the same role as the Higgs boson, and mimic many of its properties.

That's easy for you to say.

"LEP had a 2.5-sigma indication of a Higgs at 114 GeV just before it shut down."

I thought they subsequently admitted to being a little hasty in that claim? Anyway the above article seems to be their final assessment of the data, and the Higgs was nowhere to be found. If it doesn't turn up by 130Gev or so, there's going to be a lot of red-faced physicists -- claiming that it's really there because the theory says so but it must be invisible just isn't going to sit very well. (Sounds a little like religion, doesn't it?)

Personally, I hope they don't find it in the hadron collider either. It would be a lot more entertaining!!