THE ELUSIVE GOD PARTICLE, AND A LESSON FOR US ALL – AT 11:40 A.M. ET:  Physicists have been searching for the so-called "God particle," the basic building block of matter, also called the Higgs boson.  They have suffered a setback in that search, and we are getting a good lesson in how science actually proceeds, a lesson we can apply to other national discussions that are allegedly based on "scientific findings."  From Fox:

The quest for the elusive Higgs boson seemed over in April, when an unexpected result from an atom smasher seemed to herald the discovery of the famous particle -- the last unproven piece of the physics puzzle and one of the great mysteries scientists face today.

Researchers were cautious, however, warning that it would take months to verify the finding.

Their caution was wise.

Scientists with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermilab facility just released the results of a months-long effort by the lab's brightest minds to confirm the finding. What did they find? Nothing.

"We do not see the signal," Dmitri Denisov, staff scientist at Fermilab, told FoxNews.com. "If it existed, we would see it. But when we look at our data, we basically see nothing."

"At this point I'd say the chances are 50/50 for the Higgs to exist at all," he said.

The results -- submitted Friday to the science journal Physical Review Letters -- are a heartbreaking setback for scientists and armchair experimenters worldwide, who have been following the particle-physics treasure hunt like a baseball fan monitoring stats.

COMMENT:  Sometimes "science" succeeds, and sometimes it doesn't.  It is a constant series of investigations, proceeding on evidence, experimentation, and observation.  Compare please with our discussion about "climate change," in which we are assured by the hustling classes that the science is "settled." 

There is no such thing as settled science.  Science, by its nature, is never settled.  And it certainly doesn't rest on computer models that try to project weather patterns 50 years from now.  The experiments at Fermilab have produced disappointment, not certainty.  Fortunately, Al Gore was not calling the play by play. 

This is a cautionary tale.  Politicians and real scientists don't mix very well.  I'd rather listen to the scientists, especially those, like Dr. Denisov, who are immediately prepared to tell us what they don't know.

June 11, 2011