geekosystem

Remember all that handwringing that went on around the time as CERN prepared to fire up the Large Hadron Collider? Some people were concerned that the enormous particle accelerator would destroy all life as we know it. Thankfully that turned out to not be the case, but it looks like someone thought it sounded like a dandy sci-fi flick.

Discovery News totally called this one: It turns out that all of those rumors that the elusive Higgs Boson had been discovered by Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator aren't true.

Last week, a physicist and blogger at the University of Padua, Tommaso Dorigo, wrote that "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result." Like a uranium-235 chain reaction, Dorigo's words exploded through the blogosphere and into the mainstream media, which inexplicably turned the rumored discovery into the latest in a nonexistent 'rivalry' between Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.

Fermilab has laid the smackdown on the Higgs Boson discovery rumors, saying that they have "no merit" and are "just rumors." Fermilab has also taken a few digs at bloggers in the process: