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I thought they subsequently admitted to being a little hasty in that claim?

It is what it is. The result still stands, but it's not statistically strong enough to publish. Nothing can be said without more data. The usual standard in particle physics is 3 sigma to claim evidence for something, and 5 sigma to claim a discovery.

Anyway the above article seems to be their final assessment of the data, and the Higgs was nowhere to be found.

Well, that's just wrong. I don't see how anyone can make that claim. But, don't believe everything you read in the New Scientist.

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.

That's not the way it works, really. Most of the people who are working on this are experimentalists, and we experimentalists love a theory-killer. The holy grail of experimental physics is to discover the unexpected, or to overturn the conventional wisdom. Some theorists might be disappointed, but the results out of left field are what win the Nobel Prize.

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

It's all one to me; I just want the truth. Nature is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be. We don't invent it, we discover it.

"Well, that's just wrong. I don't see how anyone can make that claim. But, don't believe everything you read in the New Scientist."

Don't take my word for it, Bozo. Read the papers coming out of the EWWG. Their first take on having found an H was at about a 97% confidence level. After they went back and got the background noise right it was more like 80% minus. Given that they only had around a dozen events to look at, they backtracked posthaste.

If a Higgs doesn't show up by 130Gev, somebody's going to have to start rethinking the Standard Model.

In my high school physics class, a friend and I developed a parody model of a unified theory that we called "tapeball physics". The basic concept was that all matter was made up of little tiny pieces of tape. You had the tapons, which was the backing, and the stickyons, which was the adhesive. There were three classes of particles, and within each class were different ranks. The particles got bigger as they sought to improve their 'status'. It was an amusing intellectual exercise. Now, though, I wonder if we were on to something. Maybe WE were right all along!