The Higgs boson: the hunt, the discovery, the study and some future perspectives
&gt; The significance is typically quoted as σ, or a number of standard deviations of the normal distribution. In particle physics, a significance of 3σ is referred to as evidence, while 5σ is referred to as an observation, corresponding to the probability of a statistical fluctuation from the background of less than 1 in a million.<p>So, no one has ever observed the particle, and the &quot;observation&quot; is in actuality not an observation. Just a &quot;less than one in a million&quot; chance fluctuation from the background noise. Which doesn&#x27;t sound very convincing to me if you need to run the experiment millions of times to produce the output.