[copper]

Well, it does go on to say:

> This observation, which has a significance of 5.9 standard deviations, corresponding to a background fluctuation probability of 1.7x10^-9, is compatible with the production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson.

Technically it could be another particle with a 126GeV mass, though that's hopefully something more experiments will show one way or the other.

[Zenst]

I do wonder if the higgs is a funny creature in that it has a sort of quantum echo. By that I mean that it is in more than one place at once, this would also help explain why gravity is as weak as it is. If that is the case then you could think of the higgs as being like a bouncy ball with the decay of the various bounces all actualy happening at once (may explain those fluctuations). Though if you were to observe a bouncy ball and sample its movement slow enough then they would appear to be as one event. Just my theory of things and I hope more is proven given the higgs will help to one day make the theory of gravity a fully understood fact. My physics was formaly high-school level and the rest is from a passing interest of all things science so if I appear to be so wrong then maybe somebody could point out the details so that I may not make the same mistakes again.

[Daniel_Newby]

The Higgs boson is not thought to be related to gravity, beyond giving mass to some particles. The Higgs particle is the "chunky" form of the Higgs field, just like a photon of light is a little chunk of electric field that has broken off and gone into business for itself.

If you have more questions about physics, ask /r/physics on Reddit. They people there are very nice and include several serious physicists.

[Zenst]

Thank you very much Sir

[dictus]

That's the hope. New result from the Tevatron just showed that this thing appears to decay to matter, too (not just gauge bosons) http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0512051. It is looking very Standard Model like. An outside hope is that it doesn't couple to leptons. The CMS Higgs to tau tau result hinted as much, but it is very preliminary, unconfirmed by ATLAS. Measuring Branching Ratios (the rates that the new particle decays to different final states) will be a test of how Standard Model-like this new particle is. Here is CMS' paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1207.7235