Two years ago, I expressed my doubts about the existence of a multiverse (or at least it's portrayal by some cosmologists) in a blog post in this forum. In the meantime, last March, the announcement about the discovery of gravitational waves got us perhaps closer to a multiverse--at least to one form of it, based on inflation. And then some problems with the Bicep data were discovered.
Anything is either true,Or not true,Or both true and not true,Or neither true nor not true;This is the Buddha's teaching.--Nagarjuna (second century Buddhist monk and philosopher), the Mulamadhyamakakarika, Chapter XVIII, verse 8 (Note: there are other translations of this verse, for example, using "real" instead of "true.")
The Higgs boson, whose discovery was confirmed by CERN on July 4th to the exacting 5-sigma level required in particle physics (meaning that the probability that the bulge in the data indicating a particle with mass-energy in the range of ~125 GeV is a random fluke is less than 1 in 3.5 million), is the first and only boson to be predicted to be a very bad ballerina--it can't twirl around!
When CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson on July 4th this year--the result of years of running of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest, most expensive, most powerful, and coldest (liquid helium cooled, colder than outer space) machine ever built--it marked a tremendous triumph of experimental physics. A boson (an integer-spin particle, usually associated with conveying a force of nature), and the last undiscovered one, needed to complete the extremely successful Standard Model of particle physics, had finally been found!
