| That would be cheating :-) Imagine you owned an intersection in a very busy city that was always covered in fog. You wonder what kind of cars they drive in your city but you can't tell because the fog obscures all the traffic below. But you do own an intersection, so what you do is you start turning the traffic signals green for both directions to cause a collision. When that happens sometime a part of the cars involved flys so far up in the air that you can see it above the fog. Of course the car has just been in a collison so it can be challenging to figure out what piece of the car you are looking at. So when you see a crumpled up fender come flying up you take a picture of it, its rotating and what not but you use some image processing on the picture and try to figure out what kind of a car that fender was on, that tells you what kind of cars are crashing in your intersection. Of course you really want to know the brand of the car, and unfortunately the designers these days have very little imagination so most of the cars look the same and well a fender looks like a lot of other fenders. So you figure if you could just get a hood ornament to come up out of the clouds you would really know what brand of car it was. So you set the speed limit on your roads a lot higher and hope for even more energetic collisons. Of those of few of them will be where you can see the hood ornament come flying up over the clouds but its really small and if its edge on you can't really tell what brand it is. The longer you do it thought the more confident you are that the hood ornaments you are seeing belong to the car manufacturer you think they do. The Higgs Boson is a piece of particle, when you crash two particles together and smash them there is a small chance that the resulting decay products will go by your detectors. If you don't crash them hard enough you won't see any (its like you see a lot of car hoods in our mythical scenario, but at higher speeds the hood and the hood ornament separate and you can see just the ornament). Basically the LHC has boosted the energy from last year which means there should be more chances to see this particular piece, and the detectors have been tuned better to look for it in a particular place, if they see what they saw last year, only more of them, then you can make the argument that the effect is really the Higgs Bosun decaying, if you don't see more then its likely some other effect. Hope that helps |