Among the particle theorists and phenomenologists I talked to at lunch at the Perimeter Institute, the probability assigned to this being real was in the 5%-20% range, with older physicists more skeptical.
I like the general philosophy behind Metaculus (that we should all be more public and accountable with our speculation) but I don't think the numbers are currently reliable because posting is open to anyone and there's no money on the line.
I agree, and you provided a link to a nice summary of why.
I do wonder, though, if there's ever been evidence from two independent detectors that ended up being false. That's a significant difference in the present situation.
The 3-sigma that you're quoting may not account for the "look elsewhere" effect: the possibility that a comparable fluctuation might have occurred in any number of other energy levels or other decay channels. It's really hard to correct for that properly, and particle theory has a long history of promising signals melting away with more data. That's why the folks involved are being pretty cautious.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure how well the observed decay mode fits with the most common supersymmetric models: I have the strong impression that it's not one that SUSY phenomenologists were expecting going in.
It's going to be fun to see where this takes us! Maybe a surprise would be the best outcome of all.
Hyperbole, but the actual article isn't entirely awful.
The TL;DR of this is that no-one's entirely certain as to what it is that's being created, if anything is being created at all. It's still very possible that this is noisy data.
That being said, the main contender at this point is a boson. At the far end of the possible options are things like a graviton, or a fermion, which would make the supersymmetry crowd happy.
Paul, not sure what the point of your comment was. But it reads like a speculative, vaguely ad hominem attack.
As I'm sure you could have found out with a little digging, the author is 61 years old. She had a long career in research and now seems to be focusing on science writing and communication.
Do you have a reference for that? When I graduated (~10 years ago), I recall a statistic saying that 98% of physicists found employment (not all in physics, of course).
Literally earth-shattering perhaps. Why have we never discovered alien life despite statisticians saying there must be thousands of alien civilisations? Probably because they blow themselves up looking for new particles.
Particles of much higher energy than the LHC is capable of generating slam into the earth's upper atmosphere every day. It's been going on for billions of years. If something exotic were to happen, it would have happened a long time ago.
And the effects reach all far enough down to flip bits. The experiments that we run probably can't reach out further than a few meters. We have a very long way to go before we start competing with nature.
Still no liquid betting market though...
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/05/how-to-reform-academia...
http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2006/01/prediction-markets-and-l...