New particle hopes fade as LHC data 'bump' disappears

[Ursa major]

From the BBC:

Hopes for the imminent discovery of a particle that might fundamentally change our understanding of the Universe have been put on hold. Results from the Large Hadron Collider show that a "bump" in the machine's data, previously rumoured to represent a new particle, has gone away. The discovery of new particles, which could trigger a paradigm shift in physics, may still be years away.

David Charlton of Birmingham University, leader of the Atlas experiment at the LHC, told BBC News that everyone working on the project was disappointed. "There was a lot of excitement when we started to collect data. But in the [latest results] we see no sign of a bump, there's nothing. It is a pity because it would have been a really fantastic thing if there had been a new particle."

 

[mosaix]

I see that they described the 'bump' as a statistical quirk. Why can't the disappearance of the bump be the statistical quirk instead? That's my hope anyway.

 

[hitmouse]

Not really. The bump disappears when the number of observations increases and the aggregate becomes statistically robust.