How the claim was explained to the general public (and perhaps even what some particle physicist thought)

But now we come to the clue point of this paper, since the CDF report [9] is by itself not so `dangerous'. People do not know about p-values and, as a matter of fact, even those who calculate them for scientific purposes seem to by highly confused about their meaning[11], as we shall see later. Normal people only understand what is the chance that a team has made a discovery instead of having just observed a statistical fluctuation. Or, at least, how much experts believe that the bump is hint of new physics, instead than a fluke.

Let us go straight to read how the thing was reported in some online resources (boldface is mine).

Let us make the logical complements of the highlighted statements (with the exception of the Discovery News one, that already provided the complementary propositions): that can be summarized saying that `we' should be highly confident this is a genuine discovery .

Giulio D'Agostini 2012-01-02