Don Lincoln: evaluation

Transcript context

…Of course. Not, you know. So we were busting our butt, and we had done what I said. We had ruled out this region. We had certain mass ranges. We knew it wasn’t there. And we finally said, if there was a Higgs boson, if it existed, which we didn’t know at the time, its mass was somewhere between, if I recall, between, like, 120 and 145. All right? We’d ruled out all the other stuff. And so wearing our CERN hat, we said, “Okay, we’re gonna find that.” But we were really, really, really trying to do it. Now, if we had had another two years or maybe three years of running the Fermi accelerator, Fermilab would have discovered or ruled out, or in this case, it turned out, discovered the Higgs boson, ’cause it’s a real thing. We would have found it without a question. But we didn’t have enough data in July of 2012. We needed a couple more years. Unfortunately, in 2008, or fortunately, the LHC had turned on. It broke. They had to fix it. Turned on again in 2010. It ran poorly in 2011. In 2012, they pushed up their sleeves and said, “Let’s do this,” and it turned on. And so, you know, there was this– Fermilab knew if it didn’t have it now, it was too late. Anyways, 2012 rolls around, and like two days before the announcement at CERN was July 4th, so two days before that, Fermilab made a measurement and said, “We can rule out certain regions, but certain regions we can’t rule out. But what we know, and this is important, if the Higgs boson exists, it must be in this region for which we are not capable yet of ruling out. ” So that’s where we were two days before the LHC said, “We got it.” That was July 4th, 2012. So detecting the, the Higgs boson confirmed the existence of the Higgs field, the mechanism through which fundamental particles like electrons and quarks acquire mass in the standard model.…

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