July 4th was a significant day, (or a five sigma day) according to CERN. Physicists from around the world were told that confidence exists that they have found the fundamental particle of matter. That is a simplification but what happened was that they are almost sure that their mathematics is correct.
To explain: use an analogy:
To discover what is inside a "walnut" you need to open it. Using a small hammer you crack the shell and voila, you see what the walnut looks like inside. The thing looks like two hemispheres, convoluted like our brain, it tasted good and now you assume with confidence that all walnuts will have this appearance; with a confidence of at least one Sigma. What if this nut was a "dud", you know, one of those icky, dried up black nuts you don't want to eat? You open more nuts and if 99.999% are perfect you say with a confidence of 5 Sigma that a "good" walnut is the norm.
What if you always just smashed the nut with a great hammer and got nut butter, what would you learn? All nuts, peanuts to Brazil nuts would look like mush. Tasty but no information except color, flavor and amount.
What the Higgs Boson or "god particle" search was all about was this!
For 80 years they cracked lots of different nuts, with just the right size hammer so they didn't get mush. They discovered taste, fat and protein, each nut's unique quality, but they also knew that each nut grows into a unique plant. One created an oak, one a peanut plant etc. etc. So they knew each had a unique germ which held the genetics. Now they started to dissect the insides, found the code and implied the reason for each. What eluded them was what started the growth cycle.
The people at CERN and Stanford and Fermi now know that the Higgs has a signature at 125 to 128 GeV. That is to say they have discovered the size of the hammer and the amount of force needed to crack the nut so they can now investigate the inside; for the next 10 billion dollars they will tell us that it produces a tree that is 35 feet tall and has green leaves and lives for 500 years. Does this answer the questions they should be asking?
Since this is only an analogy, consider what the real question should be.
How is it that such a simple thing as the nut or seed can produce the beauty of a forest, with many unique trees, each harbouring life in its branches, going through the cycle of growth, leafing, branching, breathing, taking in water and carbon dioxide, giving up oxygen, dying, decaying and fertilizing new growth. This is what I consider to be the ultimate search and to find the answer you need to imply that there is a proviso.
