{"id":3807,"date":"2012-07-04T10:43:38","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T14:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=3807"},"modified":"2013-01-23T18:50:54","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T23:50:54","slug":"happy-higgs-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/07\/happy-higgs-day.html","title":{"rendered":"Happy Higgs Day!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

Today, all over America (land of science enthusiasts) fireworks will be set off in\u00a0remembrance\u00a0of the many particle collisions that it took to bring our observations of the decay products of the Higgs up above a five sigma confidence interval. \u00a0If you need a refresher or just haven\u2019t followed all this very closely, you\u2019ll definitely want to watch PhD Comics<\/a>\u2018 animated explanation below (you\u2019ll want to see it full screen).<\/p>\n<\/iframe>\nThe best print coverage I\u2019ve seen so far today is, unsurprisingly, <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2012\/07\/cern-celebrates-as-higgs-signal-reaches-significance\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">at Ars Technica<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0What I kind of love best about all this is that this isn\u2019t just a triumph of theoretical physics or engineering. \u00a0It\u2019s also a big day for statistics<\/em>. \u00a0When I worked in a genetics lab, there were\u00a0biostatisticians\u00a0working overtime trying to figure out how to quantify all our assumptions about high thoroughput shRNA screening and decide whether tests were more about identifying plausible candidates for further testing or trying pass fewer<\/em> targets that were more likely to work. \u00a0(Remember <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/04\/upon-this-roc-i-will-build.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">sensitivity and specificity<\/a>?).<\/p>\nWe\u2019re a long way from the practice stat problems you did in high school where the teacher tells<\/em> you how big the standard deviations are (the \u2018sigma\u2019 in five sigma). \u00a0Ars<\/em> does a beautiful job giving you a conceptual sense of how complicated it is for statisticians to come up with a rigorous way of\u00a0gauging\u00a0the data:<\/p>\n<blockquote>But the huge number of collisions created its own problems. At times, up to 30 collisions were taking place nearly simultaneously, and the computer systems had to reconstruct which signals came from what collisions and trigger the system to save the data if something looked interesting\u2014all within a fraction of a second. According to the talks, the software triggers were improved, the code reconstructed events faster, and the computing grid was given more sophisticated analysis tools to identify events that could come from a Higgs decay. The net result was today\u2019s announcement (and yesterday\u2019s accidental pre-announcement).<\/p>\nWhere do we now stand? There are a lot of ways to look at it. One is basically the probability of finding the Higgs at a specific mass. If we assume the Higgs is 125GeV, we see a signal that\u2019s a specific sigma above background. But there\u2019s no particular reason to assume 125GeV and not, say, 135GeV, and the statistics need to compensate for this (called the \u201clook elsewhere effect\u201d). Then there are multiple channels thanks to the different decay pathways, and two different detectors. So, for the CMS detector, the two-photon channel produces a local Higgs signal that\u2019s 4.5 sigma, but that drops to 2.5 sigma when the look elsewhere effect is considered. It\u2019s only by combining all its channels that CMS reaches a 4.9 sigma, and the data from both detectors had to be combined to be able to declare discovery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo huzzah for theorists, engineers, and professional heuristic makers! \u00a0Go off and caper! \u00a0Jump up and down and celebrate as your atoms, affected by the Higgs field, pull you back to earth. \u00a0And tonight, enjoy the fireworks all the more after you watch the video below.<\/p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0Mbf1Pfl_2U\">http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0Mbf1Pfl_2U<\/a>\n(The fourth of July after I read an article on fireworks chemistry in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cricketmag.com\/MUS-MUSE-Magazine-for-Kids-ages-9-14\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Muse<\/em> magazine<\/a>, I had a great time yelling out the names of the elements that produced the colors we\u2019d just seen. \u00a0Copper! \u00a0Charcoal! \u00a0Strontium!<\/em> Fun times.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, all over America (land of science enthusiasts) fireworks will be set off in\u00a0remembrance\u00a0of the many particle collisions that it took to bring our observations of the decay products of the Higgs up above a five sigma confidence interval. \u00a0If you need a refresher or just haven\u2019t followed all this very closely, you\u2019ll definitely want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-3807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy","tag-statistics"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>Happy Higgs Day!<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Today, all over America (land of science enthusiasts) fireworks will be set off in\u00a0remembrance\u00a0of the many 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