I'm a particle physics grad student. My god, what utter nonsense. The only reasonably accurate paragraph is this:

    "And, more importantly, the lower energy range from 114 to just under 145 billion electron volts, a region of energy that Fermilab has determined, through earlier experiments, may harbor the Higgs, has not been ruled out. But the Higgs is quickly running out of places to hide."

The region of higher Higgs mass is indeed ruled out (at 95% confidence), and currently the bound is even stronger than stated -- the Higgs mass is expected to be between 114-130 GeV if it exists.

The article's main flaw is its assumption that, because the remaining mass window is "small", it decreases our chances of finding the Higgs. This is not the case for several reasons. Most importantly, it has been known since the planning stages of the accelerator that a Higgs with such a low mass is more difficult to find, in the sense that it requires running the experiment for longer, collecting more statistics, before we can decide whether or not it exists. So it comes as no surprise that we first have conclusive results about the higher mass range. It just happens that the Higgs, if it exists, doesn't have a high mass, so we keep looking.

It is expected that in 1-2 years we will have enough statistics to either discover or rule out the Higgs in the remaining mass window.

The second mistake the article makes is in claiming that not finding the Higgs is somehow a bad thing. That it means the LHC was a waste of taxpayer money. I would say quite the opposite. If the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else, then it will only confirm our existing model and we will learn nothing new about the world (except for the value of the Higgs mass). This is the worst possible outcome. On the other hand, not finding the Higgs would be an extremely exciting result, since it would open the way to less well-explored ideas about the origin of mass. The goal of the LHC is to teach us about the world, not stroke physicists' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are.

>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful

This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong.

Europe explored the universe where America did not.