For days, now, the Web has been sizzling with news that the long-sought Higgs boson — the particle that theorists think gives other particles their mass — might have been discovered at last. The Higgs, also known as the “God Particle,” was evidently hiding in a bunch of subatomic debris, like a robbery suspect crouching in a dumpster, at the European Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. Such astonishing news hasn’t been heard in the physics community since … last year, actually. That’s the most recent time the Higgs might have been discovered .
If there seems to be a theme here, there is — and it’s not that particle physicists love to make dramatic claims for which there’s no actual evidence. The truth is that making discoveries at the very edge of physics is really hard
