After last week’s euphoria over the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson, city astro-physicist and director of GM Birla Science Centre Dr B.G. Sidharth, said caution should be exercised before jumping into conclusions. Dr Sidharth states two points of contention regarding the discovery of the Higgs boson with 5-sigma accuracy. A 5-sigma accuracy implies that there is a one in 3.5 million chance of the discovery being a fluke. “There have been other 5-sigma discoveries in the past that have not proved to be the real thing. So there’s a small chance that this one too could be erroneous,” he said.
The second point, surprisingly, is that the discovered particle could be an impostor. “It could be something else. Ian Lowe at Argonne National Laboratory and his associates have used the same data and concluded the particle is consistent with two other particles. So it could be a Higgs doublet or triplet,” Dr Sidharth explained.
The European Organi-sation for Nuclear Resea-rch too, in its release, was careful not to explicitly call the particle Higgs boson. “The discovery of a particle consistent with Higgs boson opens the way for more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe,” the CERN release said. Dr Sidharth said scientists have to observe how the Higgs boson decays, to be sure about the newly discovered particle. “It depends on how much data we have. If we get more data, we can make accurate conclusion. So, we need further confirmation about it,” he said.