Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a New Particle

Not yet, and it's actually a bit tricky to think about how this should be interpreted. Since neither experiment alone provides a super strong motivation to look at 750 GeV (since their global significance is low), it's hard to argue that one experiment can remove the LEE from the other by fixing the search mass to 750 GeV. But IMO it doesn't even make sense to do this thing post-hoc; otherwise one could always avoid the LEE by "fixing your attention" on a single hypothesis mass where you had previously observed a local excess.

Now, suppose you had a (probably contrived) theory which specifically predicts a particle at this mass in a way that is totally non-negotiable, so that the only meaningful question to ask about the theory is "is there a particle X at 750 GeV?". In this case you can do away with the LEE and use the stronger local p0 at that mass. Theorists are already flooding the arXiv with such articles (and even have been since a day before the announcement... oops!).

But in the general case, really the best way to understand the combined significance is to combine the datasets from CMS and ATLAS in a fully correlated way that handles systematics etc, and then make the diphoton mass plot again with the bigger dataset and evaluate the global significance of the resulting bump, still accounting for the LEE. But this is a really big effort, since the two detectors are substantially similar/different in many ways and it takes great care to handle correlations etc between their resulting data. Something like this was done for the Higgs discovery [1], in a paper which you might recall made news [2] for having more authors than any paper in history!

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07589

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-mo...

Or possibly nothing to do with physics - I went to a conference at CERN in '94 about one of their computing projects.

I believe that project became quite popular.

Deeper might be the wrong word in this context, but I don't think many physicists would disagree that there is probably a small set of rules and variables that makes up the substrate of reality. For all we know, the universe could be a really basic cellular automaton.

> These experiments are a bit like 3d scanning a tree in millimeter detail and then declaring that you have a perfect knowledge of trees.

That does not describe our current scientific process at all, which is to find underlying abstractions and models instead of just cataloguing concrete findings.

I also think there is a problem with the understanding of higher-order (emergent, as you say) phenomena: they often do not follow from the basic underlying rules in an immediately obvious manner. What they do is they become systems in their own right, with their own mechanics worth studying.

To use an analogy, just because you know everything about sugar and flour doesn't mean you know everything that's going on in a bakery.

> But it creates a degree of philosophical unease in the sensitive individual.

It's not the universe's job to make us feel comfortable, nor is it science's job to discard findings on the grounds that we personally don't like their implications. The universe does not care about our comfort, and philosophical considerations are not part of the fabric of nature outside of your personal mental frameworks.

There are many things about nature or the universe at large that make me uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean these facts should somehow be discarded.

> My hunch is that what we are seeing is the population dynamics of all possible systems of interacting elements - or atleast a tiny little piece of it.

I read this several times, and I have no idea what that means.

Theorems may be rejected all day long.

Edit: A null hypothesis in this schema would be something like (a bit ridiculous, but not my example): If toast exists and I eat it for breakfast, I should be able to detect that I ate it for breakfast at a higher rate than the false positive rate of my ability to determine whether what I eat for breakfast is or is not toast.

Keep downmodding. Or, you know, refute what I have said.