🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MATT.92Nov14111225@physics.berkeley.edu>, matt@physics.berkeley.edu writes...
>In article <1992Nov14.185501.26643@cs.yale.edu> jhh@waldzell.physics.yale.edu (Jim Horne) writes:
> 
>> I heard this third hand from someone who talked to someone who heard
>> the talk at Fermilab last week where this was discussed. There are
>> six events of e^+ + e^- -> Z^0 -> e^+ + e^- + \gamma + \gamma, which
>> seem to give a mass of 60 GeV (the e's in the final state can also
>> be \mu's).  This shouldn't be the higgs because the decay mode is
>> wrong. It's not clear what it could be, but someone mumbled
>> "technipion". In any case, the person who heard the talk thought it
>> was just background, and not a real signal.  Given past history, I
>> would bet that these events are indeed just background, and don't
>> represent a new particle.
> 
>There's another reason why it can't be the Higgs, and probably isn't a
>particle at all: contrary to appearances, it isn't a peak!  That is:

There is more call for skepticism, perhaps, than most people would 
think.  We have been through this so many times that I have almost zero
expectation that this will amount to anything.  Six months ago it was
an anomalous rate of e+ + e- -> Z0 -> four leptons that had people excited.
Today it's two leptons and two photons.  Tommorrow it will be three photons
and a grapefruit.  In the end, in my experience, 9 out of 10 (if not more!) 
such claims quietly fade away.  

What we have here is some graduate student who sifted through tens of 
gigabytes of data, 100's of thousands of (presumed) Z0 decays to find
7 events which are thought to belong to a certain class.  There are 
dozens of reasons why these events might not be real - and I guarantee
that when the results are *first* announced, most of these possibilities
have not been scrutinized enough.  

-Scott
--------------------
Scott I. Chase			"It is not a simple life to be a single cell,
SICHASE@CSA2.LBL.GOV		 although I have no right to say so, having
				 been a single cell so long ago myself that I 
				 have no memory at all of that stage of my 
				 life." - Lewis Thomas