Has CERN Found the God Particle? A Calculation

Abstract

Following the CERN announcement on December 13, 2011, physicists have been giving some very different assessments of the chances that the ATLAS and CMS detectors have seen the Higgs boson. Combining the three things I will consider, I get an overall probability for such a strong signal if there is no Higgs to be about 1 in 30. Perhaps I have failed to account for combinations where more than one of these effects could combine. That requires further coincidences but lets just call the overall result 1 in twenty. In other words, everything considered I take the observed result to be a two sigma effect.