The annals of cynicism - particle physics division

This from the New York Times --

At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: April 5, 2011

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.

The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.

“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”

One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.

Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature — in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by — that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.
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And yet another possible explanation is that the Tevatron, and perhaps ultimately the rest of Fermilab itself, is slated for shutdown by September of this year, when they run out of funding. Similar to how nebulous announcements of world-shaking possible discoveries of life on Mars, an abandoned Krispy Kreme franchise on the dark side of the moon, etc., sporadically emanate from NASA Headquarters at amazingly propitious times.

But I'm going to keep the faith on this one and assume the Fermilab folks think they may have something new.