I found my info on the web a couple of months ago, but was evidently outdated.

I was going by a famous graph I’ve seen in many places, e.g. here, which I read as saying that discovery of a 115 Gev Higgs requires

1. Almost 2 fb^-1 for 95% confidence level

2. About 5 fb^-1 for 3 sigma

3. Nearly 20 fb^-1 for 5 sigma

The most optimistic Tevatron Run II projections now seem to be that 2 fb^-1 would be available by 2006, 5 fb^-1 by the time the LHC turns on (late 2007), and it’s unlikely they’ll ever get 20 fb^-1 since they’re not likely to run the machine for too many years after the LHC is up and running.

I think you are overly pessimistic. I have also seen that 2fb^-1 is required for a 5-sigma discovery of the Higgs (whether combined or for each individual experiment is unclear to me), but surely you can get hints with less than that. People have been excited about 2.5 sigma signals before. It also takes a lot less statistics to rule out a light Higgs; a 5-sigma discovery will take until 2009, but it will be possible to rule out a light Higgs at 95% CL already in 2006. Now that is only two years away, which suggests to me that if the LEP signal is real, some kind of bump should be visible at 115 GeV very soon, if not already.

Background-universality reads for practical purposes like a euphemism for background independence! Holy Smolin, Lubos, could this be a nod in the Loop Gravity direction?

That one got a lot less of press coverage. It was hinted, preliminary, in hep-ex/0105057 and then dismissed progressively via statistical methods. See also plots in hep-ex/9909044 and hep-ex/0009010. The statistic dismissal was based, it seems, on adding other dissintegration channels where signal was not seen. Pretty much the same history than 115 Gev.

Probably a motivation to forget about this event is that a low Higgs+ it is not compatible with the minimal supersymmetric standard model. I had also forgotten it, until recently a model forced my neurons to expel these papers from my deep repressed memories

Postdocs and junior faculty are under a lot more pressure. Their jobs may be as short as one-year appointments, and they definitely need to be producing as many publications as possible as quickly as possible if they want to continue to eat.

There certainly are a lot of very routine, resume-padding articles appearing, but this is not specific to string theory or high-energy theory. Pretty much every academic field, even very healthy ones, have this phenomenon. What’s scary about particle theory in recent years is not how many routine papers there are, but how few there are with any sort of interesting new idea at all.

Yesterday there was a status report from the Tevatron on the arxiv. CDF and D0 now have an integrated luminosity ~200$ pb**-1 (per experiment), but evidently they don’t see any deviations from the standard model. Does anyone know if this is significant?

Perhaps experimentalists are more sensible to funding phenomena. I am still astonished about the 115 and 68 GeV particles in LEP2; they were so in hurry to finish the experiment that they did not got time to take more measurements there.

Regardless of whether string theory is a legitimate or illegitimate field of research, is there any truth to the folklore stories that if you don’t publish anything during a year you’ll end up losing most, if not all, of your grant money for the next year?

Many papers that show up every day on the arxiv preprint server look like they aren’t much more than the equivalent of “resume padding” for a researcher’s CV. Perhaps it’s not so surprising if it’s papers produced by some 2nd or 3rd rate researchers at some 3rd or 4th rate universities, hoping to get tenure. Or for that matter, postdocs hoping to get an assistant professor job.