Higgs: is it one-sided or two-sided? | Understanding Uncertainty

Announcements about the Higgs Boson are invariably framed in terms of the number of sigmas, with 5-sigmas needed for a ‘discovery’. Media outlets helpfully explain what this means by translating 5-sigmas to a probability, which is almost invariably misreported as a probability of the hypothesis that it is all just statistical error e.g. “meaning that it has just a 0.00006% probability that the result is due to chance” [Nature] (see bottom of this blog for comments about the misinterpretation).

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