To be honest I'm usually happy with the standard of science / tech reporting on the BBC. Yes it's intended for layman rather than uber geeks but they at least attempt to keep the facts straight rather than a number of other UK media companies I could name.
Publicly-funded, non-commercial, high quality, arguably unbiased programming? If it existed in the US, it would be decried as "socialist". Our right is often lefter than your left.
> Just curious, what do you think is the BBC equivalent in the US?
We have several public broadcasters, the most famous of which is National Public Radio (NPR). There's also Public Radio International (PRI), which rebroadcasts some BBC programming in addition to its own material
For TV, there's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
There is no "TV license" here like in the UK. No government agency sends threatening letters to people who haven't paid a yearly tax to benefit the public broadcasters. Instead, all of the broadcasters run funding drives to request donations from viewers/listeners. A sizable chunk of revenue also comes from the government's Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), but that pales in comparison to donations, as I understand it.
Prof Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented:
"We have a discovery - we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson. But which one? That remains open."
Either way you're being incredibly pedantic. What's really the difference between discovering and observing something that's never been observed before?
It seems a lot of people here were a bit taken aback by Heuer's comment at the end. Both teams spent weeks vetting the results and prsentation, and the decision not to claim discovery was taken very seriously.
There is still a lot of work to do to polish up the statistics. Note how the different physics channels each have their own significance and weights, as discussed pretty clearly in the CMS presentation. Combining the overall significance from all channels is not a trivial task.
To answer your question: we have not shown that it is a higgs boson. Essentially today's result is simply that we observed a lot of objects decaying from a mass 125GeV. More than we expect from the Standard Model (w/out higgs).
