EVEN physicists get their sums wrong. A glimpse of the eagerly sought
particle known as the Higgs boson, reported last year, was revealed last week to
be just a mathematical slip.
Scientists at CERN in Geneva reported seeing signs of the elusive Higgs last
September, just as their LEP accelerator was due to be demolished to make way
for a more powerful machine. In a flurry of excitement, they persuaded their
managers to let them run LEP for an extra month to gather more data
(New Scientist, 9 September 2000, p 4).
The Higgs boson is believed to endow…
