If the blips in the debris of the Tevatron particle smasher really are signs of the Higgs boson then it's not what we expected. It might mean that it's time to replace the standard model with a more complex picture of the universe.
If they have found evidence of a Higgs particle, then it points towards the existence of a universe in which each and every particle we know of has a heavier "super-partner", an arrangement of the cosmos known as supersymmetry.
But the model is creaking. Take the Higgs itself. The standard model tightly links the masses of the Higgs, the W boson (the carrier of the weak nuclear force), and the top quark (one of the fundamental constituents of matter). Experiments at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider at CERN, near Geneva, in the late 1990s, and at the Tevatron, Fermilab's 6.3-kilometre-long particle accelerator at Batavia, Illinois, where Conway detected his blips, have homed in on the mass of the W boson and the top quark. If you use these measurements to calculate the mass range of the Higgs, and compare it with the standard model's predictions, you run into trouble. "The best measurements of the W and top quark mass don't agree well with the standard model," says Conway, who is based at the University of California, Davis.
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