The worst news article about phyiscs ever?

So I haven't blogged in a long while, mostly because I have been giving lectures on Supersymmetry (see the end of this, or read Herbi Dreiner's excellent blog describing it for a general audience) as well taking my normal set of tutorials.  I am really still too busy  right now, catching up with many things that I neglected etc, but I read a few things that annoyed me this week so I feel the need for a brief break to rant...Anyway sorry for the lack of recent posts. 

Earlier this week I read a very short article by Deborah Orr, where she misunderstood the significance of recent physics results,  representing it as a milestone in the road to discovering the Higgs, then made a very vague point about science and faith, which could be interpreted as saying anything from science = religion to the simple notion that belief that we will be able to keep finding answers or belief in specific unproven models requires faith. From reading her tweets it seems more like the latter, but not only was she vague, she also based her argument on the awful "god particle" phrase that  apparently Leon Lederman coined.  All this has already been pointed out though and afterwards Deborah Orr on twitter appeared to back down and accept the criticism was valid .  That she accepted the criticism actually leaves me with more respect for her, though to be fair I could only remember her as a writer I used to skip in the Independent and my level of respect for random journalists starts out a very low level.

Today I saw something more annoying,  about something which was of interest to me, but the article mangled the entire story.   Rather than ranting about the terrible new coverage I should probably write about the actual news, however others, have gotten there before me (and they are real particle physics bloggers rather than just a particle physicist writing rants about random stuff on a blog) so let me just summarise.


There was an interesting anomaly from CDF at the tevatron, from events with 2jets and a W boson, showing an excess in which was at a statistical significance (3.2 standard deviations) where people get a little interested but well below the standard for accepted discovery (5 standard deviations).  Then later the significance rose to  4.1 standard deviations, which is a very large discrepancy. However as well as statistics not being enough for discovery, many were sceptical because it was a small signal sitting on top of a very large background, so small misestimations in the background could, change the significance a lot, and  you have to be very confident you understand the background  (CDF of course know this and carried out a lot of checks before publishing, but it is still a tricky task).  In addition there was no very standard and popular theory prediction giving this, though many proposals were made afterwards, such as a leptophobioc Z' (neutral gauge boson with heavily suppressed couplings to leptons to avoid usual constraints) or a state predicted in models called technicolor (an analogy to the strong nuclear force where charges are discussed as colours), where a new strong forces leads to bound states.

Anyway when the other very similar experiment at the Tevatron, D0, looked at this they found no excess and their results are not consistent with CDF casting a lot of doubt on this as a signal for new physics.

Here is how Fox news decided to report this.  First the title and the first paragraph are totally wrong:

"Heartbreaker: Major Setback in Quest for 'God Particle'"

 This was not a Higgs signal and was not interpreted as such. It was a much more exciting prospect, not the conformation of the Standard Model, but new physics beyond the standard model, and not new physics from one one of the most commonly considered scenarios, but new physics that we didn't really expect!  

  Quite possibly the author has confused the rumour that a Higgs signal (at 4 standard deviations) had been seen by the Atlas experiment at the LHC, based on a leaked internal note created before proper checks had been done.  This turned out to be wrong (I have friends who had to work on this over Easter).  Atlas themselves killed that story and it is unrelated to the CDF anomaly. 

Indeed the first time the Tevatron is mentioned is in relation to the new revelation that the signal doesn't show up, but no mention of this being a result from D0, is made.  CDF and D0, the individual experiments, which use different detectors to study the physics from Tevatron collisions, don't get mentioned anywhere in the piece.  

One quote attributed to D0 Cospokesperson, Dmitri Denisov, must either be a misquote or taken entirely out of context: "At this point I'd say the chances are 50/50 for the Higgs to exist at all,"

  If this was a proper blog, that tries to amount to real journalism  I'd go check by emailing him, but thats not what this is, and to be honest I'd rather not waste his (and my) time checking something I know doesn't represent the situation here.   If anyone wanting to be a proper journalist/blogger does check I will try to add this as an update.  All I will say now is this result, given that it was not a predicted Higgs signal, doesn't decrease our degree of belief in the existence of the Higgs.

The article also has this stupid phrase, mocking people who are interested in the very topic of the article, that can only be described verbal diarrhea:

 "a heartbreaking setback for scientists and armchair experimenters worldwide, who have been following the particle-physics treasure hunt like a baseball fan monitoring stats."

Incidentally it should also be pointed out that just because the D0 and CDF analyses do not agree does not immediately prove that the CDF one is wrong.  We tend to assume CDF is wrong because it is their analysis which makes the surprising and dramatic claim, but we don't actually know this, jsut that the the two analyses are not consistent.   

If you look to the left of the article there is also a description of the LHC which is several years out of date, apparently written prior to the LHC run at 7 TeV, suggesting that the machine has only been run for 9 days and is still shutdown.  In fact the LHC was started up again on the 20/09/2009 and has been making 7 TeV collisions for over a year now, with plenty of interesting physics papers as a result.

I should probably acknowledge that towards the end of the story you see better quotes pointing out that they didn't ever expect a Higgs here and that the explanation of the discrepancy is likely to be the result of background misestimation, but these are direct quotes that tend to completely contradict the story, suggesting that either author didn't read them, couldn't understand what they meant or just didn't care.

My blog title here is probably a lie though. Sadly I doubt this is even close to the worst new article on particle physics,  the quality of reporting and general understanding is despairing low.  Of course part of the problem is communication from us, we care about research and are not experts in public communication, but there is no excuse for lazy articles like this one from  fox news.  It is not journalism it, it is just drivel!