Not long after the initial discovery, we had enough data for everyone at the experiments to simply run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up.
Once I could "see" the peak, without having to conduct statistical tests against expected background, it was "real" to me.
In these cynical times, it may be that everything is relative and "post-modern subjective p-hacking", but sufficient data usually ends these discussions. The real trouble is that we have a culture that is addicted to progress theater, and can't wait for the data to get in.
Not the original commenter, but also ex-HEP person:
The invariant mass is the rest mass of the particle (i.e. it's "inherent" mass). You can calculate it by taking the final state decay products of the original particle (i.e. the particles that are actually observed by the detector) and summing up their four-vectors (squared).
You can plot the invariant mass calculated from any particular final state, and for a rare particle like the Higgs the majority of the contributions to your plot will be from background processes (i.e. not Higgs decays) that decay into the same final state.
If you have a lot of Higgs decays in your sample you should be able to see a clear peak in the distribution at the invariant mass of the Higgs boson, a clear sign that the Higgs (or something with the same mass) exists.
Often by the time the discovery has reached statistical significance, you might not really be able to see such a clear sign in the mass distribution. I.e. the calculations are telling you it's there but you can't see it that clearly.
I wouldn't really say this helps confirm the discovery in a scientific sense, just that it's reassuring that the signal is so strong that you can see it by eye.
> just that it's reassuring that the signal is so strong that you can see it by eye
It's really something when this happens. I worked on a big neutrino experiment searching for theta_13, where our goals were to (a) determine if theta_13 was dead zero or not (being truly zero would have a Seriously Major Effect in theories) and then (b) to measure its value if not.
Our experiment was big, expensive, and finely tuned to search for very, very small values of theta_13. We turned the thing on and... right there there was a dip. Just... there. On the plot. All the data blinding schemes needed to guarantee our best resolution kind of went out the window when anyone looking at the most basic status plot could see the dip immediately!
On the one hand, it was really great to know that everything worked, we'd recorded a major milestone in the field (along with our competition, all of whom were reading out at basically the same time), and the theorists would continue to have nothing to do with their lives because theta_13 was, in fact, nonzero. On the other hand... I wasted how many years of my life dialing this damned detector in for what now? (It wasn't wasted effort, not at all... but you get the feeling.)
what I showed is the squared 4 momentum when you use the Minkowski metric [1], assuming "squared" means "self-dot product". The formulation above is just another way to illustrate the Minkowski dot product.
Yeah. The higgs evidence is pretty convincing visually. Not so sure about LIGO. There is an extraordinary claim of noise reduction that requires extraordinary evidence and it's all obfuscated behind adaptive machine learning based filtering, and the statistical analysis on that is unparseable to a non-expert (that is worrisome). The pulsar timing network though is easily believable.
Luckily, there's pretty simple statistics that one can throw at that once the third detector comes online. Hopefully that comes in before we spend too much money on LISA.
It's basically this, from the article, but from astro:
> Particle physics does have situations where the hypothesis are not so data driven and they rely much more heavily on the theoretical edifice of quantum field theory and our simulation of the complicated detectors. In these cases, the statistical models are implicitly defined by simulators is actually a very hot topic that blends classical statistics with modern deep learning. We often say that the simulators don't have a tractable likelihood function. This applies to frequentist hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and Bayesian inference. Confronting these challenging situations is what motivated simulation-based inference, which is applicable to a host of scientific disciplines.
There's no fancy machine learning needed to detect some "bright" LIGO signals (some of the first blackhole-blackhole mergers). Given a set of template signals, a matched filter tries to find the one that best matches the noisy signal your instrument recorded. In order for a MF to work, what you really need is a good understanding of the noise in your instruments observations -- and there're very few people in the world better at that than LIGO folks. LIGO spent almost 20 years in construction and R&D, and almost 30 in planning. When you hear stories about how they can detect trucks miles away, and detect the waves crashing on the coast, it's possible because of scores of PhD students' who spent years characterizing each and every component that affects LIGO's noise levels. All of this to say that it's possible to download their data online and do a quick MF analysis (I did that), and with a little bit of work you get a blindingly bright statistical significance of 20-sigma or so. The actual result quoted in the papers was a bit higher. That's a testament to how well the instrument was built and its behaviour understood.
That's an n of one (I could be wrong but its the only multi messenger GW event we've seen, with how many events are being generated, you'd have expected more). Could be a coincidence. The angular resolution of LIGO is not exactly amazing, and we don't have a real estimate of the distance to the source of the GW? In fact, IIUC the event could be exactly in the opposite direction too.
I think the gigantic bumps that Kyle pointed to "discovered" the higgs.
The statistical interpretation showing a 5 sigma signal was certainly essential, but I suspect it would have taken the collaborations much longer to publish if there wasn't a massive bump staring them in the face.
> In these cynical times, it may be that everything is relative and "post-modern subjective p-hacking", but sufficient data usually ends these discussions.
I don't think that's right. I think having an application is what ends the discussions.
If you have a group of people who think CD players work by using lasers, and a rival group who think they do something entirely different, and only the first group can actually make working CD players, people will accept that lasers do what group #1 says they do.
On the other hand, nearly everyone believes in black holes, and there's no practical use for that information. The difference is that "we pointed a telescope at the sky and saw something" is easier for a layman to understand and requires somewhat less trust than "we did a bunch of complex statistical work on data from a machine you couldn't possibly hope to understand."
I think this is where it's worth differentiating between different types of "believes in" (and why I think modal logics are cool). I can convince myself that a thing seems safe to believe, or I can tangibly believe it, or I can believe it in a way that allows me to confidently manipulate it, or I could even understand it (which you could call a particular flavor of belief). Practical use seems to fit on that spectrum.
I certainly don't believe in black holes in the same manner that I believe in the breakfast I'm eating right now.
The information paradox is closer to us than we think!
Joking aside, another perspective on practical use is all of the technology and research advanced that have spun out of black hole research. Multi-messenger astronomy for example. We can point a telescope at the sky where two black holes merged.
There's a lot of (warranted imo) skepticism there too. Im sorry I can't find the citation but there was a Japanese paper out this year that claimed the ml post processing of the EHT data produces a qualitatively similar image given random data.
> people will accept that lasers do what group #1 says they do
Most people. Some fringe groups will believe it is all a front, and they are only pretending that so-called “lasers” are what make the CD player work when in fact it is alien tech from Area 51 or eldritch magics neither of which the public would be happy about. What else would CDDA stand for, if not Compliant Demon Derived Audio? And “Red Book”. Red. Book. Red is the colour of the fires of hell and book must be referring to the Necronomicon! Wake up sheeple!
Counterpoint: Vaccines work, but far too many people think that COVID vaccines contain Jewish-made GPS tracking devices that act as micro-antennae to allow Bill Gates to sterilise them using 5G.
That's a common misunderstanding. The mind controlling COVID vaccines are being spread by chemtrails. The 5G signal is only used by pilots to decide when to start spraying.
This sort of willful devil's advocacy doesn't further discussion and is extremely unhelpful. To take your first example, you know and I know that you can tell whether a CD player works. You put in a CD, you press "play", it plays.
If you have some theory as to why that test is inadequate, it's on you to lay your cards on the table and state it so there's something substantive to discuss. Until then you're just trolling.
It looks more convincing this way, especially when your audience know nothing about antibodies. HN is just not you target audience. IMHO, it will work well in a pub after a drink or two.
>Why do you think I presented those questions side by side?
Perhaps because cowardice prevented you from stating your point clearly, so instead you resorted to vague implications in the form of a question.
A fine tactic which gives the coward a plausible deniability defense when their bullshit is called out: I didn't say that, you said that.
Coupled with other similar techniques, e.g.:
* You know what I mean
* Questions that have actual answers, but are asked rhetorically to make an implication: How many cats are eaten alive each year by immigrants?
* Both-sidesing/false balance (giving equal weight to contradicting points of view, regardless of what the reality has to say)
* Ambiguous implication that can be taken in many ways, depending on how the asker defines the terms: Do you really think the immigrants are helping the economy?
* Non-sequiturs and non-answers
* False dichotomies
* Etc
...this gives the coward a superpower to start a heated discussion, where the coward never actually says anything directly.
Instead, the opponents exert an enormous effort to debunk each leaf on the tree of possible interpretations of the coward's incomplete thought, effectively doing the thinking for the coward in a futile attempt to nail down what point the coward intended to make.
(There is no such clear point, other than I am right and you are wrong).
By the time it becomes clear that no possible interpretation is supported by reality, the coward silently leaves the discussion, and says the same exact things elsewhere, feeling empowered by having made others frustrated.
That frustration counts as a victory in an argument in coward's view, with the assumption that it comes from inability to counter the coward's (unstated, vague, implied) points.
In reality, it's infuriating to have to be made guessing what the other person wants to say, doubly so when they are the one forcing to play that game, which, miraculously, you always seem to lose, because the outcome is invariably "that's not quite what I'm saying" (and what the coward is saying is never directly stated by the coward).
At the same time, this protects the coward from being riduculed for any of the views they're promulgating in the discussion.
This is why the coward never states the views directly, and instead e.g. "presents questions side by side".
If the coward were to say outright "Unlike CD players, there's actually no clear way to say whether vaccines work or not", the coward would be laughed out of the room, and they know it — which is why the resort to implications and rhetorical questions about coward's motivation.
COVID vaccines may "work" but they're pretty lame compared to something like the varicella vaccine where the disease basically disappears of the face of the earth.
We'll see if varicella stays gone. It's tricky in that it can embed itself in the host genome and come back later. That means that until the last person exposed to the virus dies, we can't really consider it gone. Good luck convincing people to continue vaccinating for a disease no one has seen in a couple decades. Of course, if varicella was able to infect germ-line cells it would be even worse...
COVID on the other hand doesn't have such a mechanism, and just relies on being really contagious. So if everyone would stay up to date in their boosters and continue masking in public places, we may be able to get rid of it in a couple of years.
> So if everyone would stay up to date in their boosters and continue masking in public places, we may be able to get rid of it in a couple of years.
By that logic we'd have gotten rid of the flu. Vaccines for rapidly mutating viruses like flu and COVID can't keep up and remain an epidemic. The only disease we've actually been able to eliminate worldwide due to vaccines is smallpox. We'd have gotten rid of measles too if crazies hadn't decided the MMR vaccine causes autism due to criminally fraudulent research.
Didn't one strain of the flu become extinct during the pandemic because we masked up and staying away from each other for a year? One would think that if we just kept that up we'd get rid of all the others.
It's really hard to draw causal links here. It could be any number of factors or required all of them together. In fact, if that had worked, why didn't COVID or other strains die too? And China had much more severe & prolonged lockdowns but that didn't eliminate anything extra for them.
Don't underestimate the impact of stock viral interference - flu & COVID are both respiratory infections and COVID was much more infectious. Some flu strains probably just couldn't remain competitive with the combined set of other flu and COVID strains.
While masking and social distancing have a beneficial impact on limiting the spread of respiratory diseases, there are practical reasons why it doesn't work to eliminate it altogether and ignores the possibility and likelihood of other resevoirs to reintroduce the disease. For example, if North America remains masked & socially isolated by the virus persists in Europe, then as soon as North America opens up you'll get the virus in North America again. And imaging a simultaneous world wide lock down is a laugh - even during COVID governments were not globally coordinated and even within national governments there was mixed local coordination.
Aside from all that, let's say it was purely a result of masking and social distancing. The consequences of that were quite sever & catastrophic, not to mention that no one actually stayed away vs limited their normal contacts & there were plenty of practical reasons it wasn't possible (e.g. getting groceries). Life involves death & risk and it's pretty clear that even before the vaccines became available many people were not OK with the tradeoff COVID entailed (e.g. Florida).
The article here is responding to an original blog post [1] that is not really saying the Higgs was not discovered (despite its trolling title), but raising questions about the meaning of "discovery" in systems that are so complicated as those in modern particle physics.
I think the author is using the original motivation of musing on null hypotheses to derive the title "The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place", and he has successfully triggered the controversy the subtitle ironically denies and the inevitable surface reading condemnations that we see in some of the comments here.
He is implying that the scientists involved haven't thought of those questions, when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc
Also he makes many factual claims that are just incorrect.
Just seems like an extremely arrogant guy who hasn't done his homework
Computers are a “complete” system where everything they do is inspectable and, eventually, explainable, and I have observed that people who work with computers (myself included) over estimate their ability to interrogate and explain complex, emergent systems - economics, physics, etc. - which are not literally built on formal logic.
a single computer might be complete (even then, not everything is inspectable unless you have some very expensive equipment) but distributed systems are not.
There was an entire class of engineers at google- SREs- many of whom were previously physicists (or experts in some other quantitative field). A fraction of them (myself included) were "cluster whisperers"- able to take a collection of vague observations and build a testable hypothesis of why things were Fucked At Scale In Prod. Then come up with a way to fix it that didn't mess up the rest of the complete system.
Nothing- not even computers are truly built on formal logic. They are fundamentally physics-driven machines with statistical failure rates, etc. There's nothing quite like coming across a very expensive computer which occasionally calculates the equivalent of 1*1 = inf, simply because some physical gates have slightly more electrical charge on them due to RF from a power supply that's 2 feet away.
I think you're mixing up two different things: the challenges of building these systems at scale, and their fundamental properties. Take your example of the expensive computer returning 1*1 = inf because of a nearby power supply - that actually proves my point about computers being knowable systems. You were able to track down that specific environmental interference precisely because computers are built on logic with explicit rules and dependencies. When these types of errors are caught, we know because they do not conform to the rules of the system, which are explicitly defined, by us. We can measure and understand their failures exactly because we designed them.
Even massive distributed systems, while complex, still follow explicit rules for how they change state. Every bit of information exists in a measurable form somewhere. Sure, at Google scale we might not have tools to capture everything at once, and no single person could follow every step from electrical signal to final output. But it's theoretically possible - which is fundamentally different from natural systems.
You could argue the universe itself is deterministic (and philosophically, I agree), but in practice, the emergent systems we deal with - like biology or economics - follow rules we can't fully describe, using information we can't fully measure, where complete state capture isn't just impractical, it's impossible.
To simply illustrate your point: if you see a computer calculate 1*1=∞ occasionally, you know the computer is wrong and something is causing it to break.
If you see a particle accelerator occasionally make an observation that breaks the standard model, depending on what it is breaking you can be very confident that the observation is wrong, but you cannot know that with absolute certainty.
> when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc
I'm not in HEP, but my graduate work had overlap with condensed matter physics. I worked with physics professors/students in a top 10 physics school (which had Nobel laureates, although I didn't work with them).
Things may have changed since then, but the majority of them had no idea what pre-registration meant, and none had taken a course on statistics. In most US universities, statistics is not required for a physics degree (although it is for an engineering one). When I probed them, the response was "Why should we take a whole course on it? We study what we need in quantum mechanics courses."
No, my friend. You studied probability. Not statistics.
Whatever you can say about reproducibility in the social sciences, a typical professor in those fields knew and understood an order of magnitude more statistics than physicists.
As an ex-HEP, I can confirm that yes, we had blinding and did correct for multiple hypothesis testing explicitly. As Kyle Cranmer points out, we called it the "look elsewhere effect." Blinding is enforced by the physics group. You are not allowed to look at a signal region until you have basically finished your analysis.
For pre-registration, this might be debatable, but what I meant was that we have teams of people looking for specific signals (SUSY, etc). Each of those teams would have generated monte carlo simulations of their signals and compared those with backgrounds. Generally speaking, analysis teams were looking for something specific in the data.
However, there are sometimes more general "bump hunts", which you could argue didn't have preregistration. But on the other hand, they are generally looking for bumps with a specific signature (say, two leptons).
So yes, people in HEP generally are knowledgeable about stats... and yes, this field is extremely strict compared to psychology for example.
> so complicated as those in modern particle physics
But... modern particle physics is one of the simplest things around. (Ex-physicist here, see username.) It only looks complicated because it is so simple that we can actually write down every single detail of the entire thing and analyze it! How many other systems can you say that about?
It has nothing to do with "maturity" and everything to do with just hierarchy in general. There is something to the old XKCD joke: https://xkcd.com/435/ because the disciplines really are divided like that. You have to know physics to do chemistry well. You have to know chemistry to do biology well. You have to know biology to ... etc.
Whereas to do physics well you need only mathematics. Well, at least, to do the theories well. To actually execute the experiments is, ah, more challenging.
So I would argue the Standard Model is pretty much the only thing in all of human knowledge that depends on no other physical theories. It's the bottom. Shame it's pretty useless (intractable) as soon as you have three or more particles to calculate with, though....
> I think the author is using the original motivation of musing on null hypotheses to derive the title "The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place",
It's probably a reference to "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" by Jean Baudrillard, which took a similar critical view of the Gulf War as TFA takes of the Higgs discovery.
A Berkeley academic invoking "it's actually your fault for believing the words that I wrote" and following it up with a "I'm not mad, I actually find this amusing" ... it's just disappointing.
> In any event, I use irreverence (i.e., shitposting) to engage with tricky philosophical questions. I know that people unfamiliar with my schtick might read me as just being an asshole. That’s fair.
People are piling the hate on Ben Recht here. I appreciate that he's calling his post what it is rather than doubling down.
It's also a great chance to lecture people on 4-momentum, thanks everyone!
For every time I see a criticism like Recht's (and Hossfelder's), I ask "could this theoretical scientist go into the lab and conduct a real experiment". I mean, find some challenging experiment that requires setting up a complex interferometer (or spectroscope, or molecular biology cloning), collect data, analyze it, and replicate an existing well-known theory?
Even though I'm a theoretical physicist I've gone into the lab and spent the time to learn how to conduct experiments and what I've learned is that a lot of theoretical wrangling is not relevant to actually getting a useful result that you can be confident in.
Looking at Recht's publication history, it looks like few of his papers ever do real-world experiments; mostly, they use simulations to "verify" the results. It may very well be that his gaps in experimental physics lead him to his conclusion.
The article this is responding to is some of the worst anti-science, anti-intellectual FUD I've seen in a while, with laughably false conceits like (paraphrased) "physics is too complicated, no one understands it" and thus "fundamental research doesn't matter".
Worse, the author of the original FUD is a professor of EE at Berkeley [1] with a focus in ML. It almost goes without saying, but EE and ML would not exist without the benefit a lot of fundamental physics research over the years on things that, according to him, "no one understands".
I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism. Engineers are also unusually likely to be Islamist terrorists, though there are many reasons for that. [1] There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.
> I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism.
If it's the same thing I'm thinking of, it was kinda flawed, IMO, in that it was a comparison of such beliefs amongst various types of scientists, with, for some reason, engineers thrown in, too. And yeah, it's kind of unsurprising that engineers are more into unscientific nonsense than various types of scientists, because engineers aren't scientists. It would be more surprising if they were significantly worse than the _general population_, but I don't think that it showed that.
> There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.
Lots of failed theorists with that personality type/flaw as well.
Uh huh. And that makes said professor an expert in 1) epistemology, and/or 2) experimental particle physics? Why, no. No, it doesn't.
I mean, I'm as prone to the "I'm a smart guy, so I understand everything" delusion as the next person, but I usually only show it in the comments here. (And in private conversations, of course...)
to be fair, maybe there is a decent overlap of people who saw the original and this. At least that might dispel the 'myths' raised in the original. Also, since this rebuttal article was written by a physicist (much more involved in the field), its also defending their own field
I think the person this article is responding to is just a crank, but it is interesting as a layperson to see the basic mechanisms for making this discovery laid out here.
Any fool on a hill can confidently state that they don’t believe in gravity because there’s no proof for it and the matematisk theories are all complicated and bureaucratic. Why should he believe it?
Good gracious! C'mon! ... science people want science not nonsense not cheap symbolism.
The article to which the link responds is cynical. And in my experience cynical assessments are made by people more likely to engage in the cynical BS artistry they complain about. Moreover, social media in general in conducive to whining, and what-about-ism which detracts from what science and all natural philosophers take seriously.
We're trying really hard to get away from the shadows on the the cave wall to the light whenever possible, and as often as possible.
And you know what else? The ``rush" is huge when we do so. There's a difference.
Just to pile on 'Ben', but sorry to break it to machine learning computing enthusiasts.
We(particle physicsts) have been performing similar, and in a lot of ways much more complex analyses using ML tools for decades in production.
Please stop shrouding your new 'golden goose' of AI/ML modelling in mystery it's 'just' massively multi-dimensional regression analyses with all of the problems, advantages and improvements that brings...
Why is there some beef that nature is complex, if you had the same vitriol toward certain other fields we'd be worrying about big-pharma's reproducibility crisis just at the top of the ice-berg of problems in modern science, not that most people are illiterate when it comes to algebra...
This debate reminded me Matt Strassler's recent post that most of the data observed in the accelerators are thrown away [1]:
So what’s to be done? There’s only one option:
throw most of that data away in the smartest way
possible, and ensure that the data retained is
processed and stored efficiently.
I thought that was strange. It's like there is too much data and our technology is not up to it so let's throw away everything that we cannot process. Throwing data "in the smartest way possible" did not convince me.
I would like a chance to jump into this point because this problem is a function of two things. The throughput that you can make your Tigger (Data acquisition system) save the data and transfer it to permanent storage. This is usually invlove multiple steps and most of them happens in real-time. The other problem is the storage itself and how it would be kept (duplicated and distributed to analysts) which at the scale of operation we are doing is insanely costly. If we are to say save 20% of the generated collision data then we would fill the entire cloud storage in the world in a couple of runs . Also the vasr majority of data is background and useless so you would do a lot of work to clean that and apply your selections which we do anyway but now you are dealing with another problem. The analysts will need to handle much more data and trying new things (ideas and searches) becomes more costly which will be discouraged. So you work in a very constrained way. You improve your capabilities in computing and storage and you present a good physics case of what data (deploy trigger line which is to pick this physics signal) that the experiment is sensitive to and then lets the natural selections take place (metaphorically of course).
Most of the experiments cannot because of the data acquisition problems.
- The LHC has 40M "events" (bunch of collisions) a second.
- The experiments can afford to save around 2000 of them.
This is a factor of 20k between what they collide and what they can afford to analyze. There is just no conceivable way to expand the LHC computing and storage by a factor of 20k.
Valid question would be why they don't just collide fewer protons. The problem is that when you study processes on a length scale smaller than a proton, you really can't control when they happen. You just have to smash a lot and catch the interesting collisions.
So yeah, it's a lot of "throwing away data" in the smartest way possible.
-------------------
All that said, it might be a stretch to say the data is "thrown away", since that implies that it was ever acquired. The data that doesn't get saved generally doesn't make it off a memory buffer on a sensor deep within the detector. It's never piped through an actual CPU or assembled into any meaningful unit with the millions of other readouts.
If keeping the data was one more trivial step, the experiments would keep it. As it is they need to be smart about where the attention goes. And they are! The data is "thrown away" in the sense that an astronomy experiment throws away data by turning off during the day.
My 200Mhz Oscilloscope "throws away" a lot of data compared to the 4GHz scope I used at work, but for the signals I'm looking for, it doesn't matter at all.
The original blog post have a point in that much of scientific "established fact" springs from prestigious committee with great fanfare, a chain of reasoning is established, it's cast forth with great force and splashes into a brainless media dissemination apparatus and that's the truth we're stuck with for, give or take, a human lifetime.
Though specifically making it an argument about particle physics results in a rather nebulous punching power against something for most of us have very weakly defined.
I might digress but cosmologists deserve focal criticism like this more for the cocksure way they've sold dark matter and the age of the universe. Both the phlogiston and the luminiferous aether was discarded after less contradictory observations than we today have against the former.
However the earlier predictions about which will be the energy where the resonance will be observed had been wrong.
The predictions have been revised a few times upwards after not finding a resonance at the predicted lower energies, then they have been proven wrong again and the cycle has been repeated until the actual discovery.
> This bump is what physicists call a resonance. It follows directly from energy and momentum conservation and special relativity that we teach first year undergraduates (hardly the ivory towers).
> This bump or resonance is intimately tied to what physicists mean when they say ‘particle’. If you dig a bit deeper, the term resonance is also tied to one of the most elementary physical systems: the simple harmonic oscillator. Sure, when you treat these things quantum mechanically, it gets more sophisticated, but my point is it doesn’t require highfalutin mathematics and quantum field theory to say that we discovered a new particle at the LHC.
Goes on to completely omit this apparently trivial mathematics.
I assume that you do need maths but not something developed only decades ago. That's what physics students learn today and represent a very conservative body of knowledge, which would be never trivial though.
This is all just counting statistics, it actually is that simple. (The resonance equals particle is quite a bit more complex, but for a basic treatment the bump is a particle could probably just be understood as jargon.)
> Goes on to completely omit this apparently trivial mathematics.
You're being somewhat unfairly downvoted because "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" is a huge problem in modern physics. All too often it turns out that the person teaching owl drawing has never seen an owl, has no idea how to draw any animal, but can explain at length the differences between the various pencil types.
For example, I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory.
Either you get a hand-wavey "it's an excitement of the field" with zero elaboration, or they talk only about the secondary properties of the particles such as their symmetries.
Imagine explaining cars in one of only two ways, and flat refusing to ever describe them in any other terms:
1. Cars are personal automobiles with three or more wheels.
2. Cars are largely left-right symmetric objects that can fit into a tunnel but not through a sieve. When set into motion they have a decreased longitudinal resistance compared to lateral. If two cars are smashed together a loud siren noise can often be briefly heard after a delay of a few minutes.
> ...and flat refusing to ever describe them in any other terms.
This is a completely unjustified insinuation against physics and physicists. While there may be a few exceptions in the form of certain individuals, in general, nothing is being held back, and if the answers are not satisfactory, it is because no satisfactory answer has yet been found. I have found physicists usually eager to a fault to talk about physics.
To make sense of it requires some work on your part, of course, but it would be utterly unreasonable to fault physicists for being unable to put everything they collectively know in terms that are immediately clear to everyone whose education on the topic ended at high school.
> I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory.
Quantum physics PhD here. It's because, we don't know. We don't have an ontology for quantum mechanics. We don't know what any of the mathematical model "actually is"
It's the same for basically all modern physics. We lack an ontology for it, so no we can't tell you "what it really is". Literally no one knows
But yes, the mathematical model is: a unit of excitation of the quantum field. What that actually is, is totally unknown
I think such attempts are not widely disseminated / taught to young physicists because older / more experienced ones believe that quantum gravity will re-write the situation anyway. { QG itself seems necessary since in General Relativity you "solve for the metric aka solve for time" self-consistently with mass-energy and that very same "time" is the background for QFT (which is what "makes" mass-energy). So, we don't really understand this model element we call "time" - so elemental to all our ideas of dynamics - without QG. Of course, the most direct quantum gravitational phenomena are, at present, at a subtle experimental scale due to the size of 'G'. This need not remain the case -- once we know what to look for - e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines were beginning to reveal atomic quantum physics in 1802 almost a full century before Planck's black body work and barely after Benjamin Franklin-ian electrostatics and long before Maxwellian electrodynamics. }
I'm mostly just trying to strike a less hopeless note for jiggawatts and provide some reading material which might be accessible (if, as noted, is probably necessarily preliminary - EDIT and some might say this of all "Science" at all times, of course).
They are not taught because of two things. First it just philosophical opinions and the second is that it does not matter when you are actually working with quantum mechanics/ quantum field theory. So it is usually outside the realm of your standard course/s that have a lot to cover anyway.
Another take on this: what do you expect the cutting edge of science to look like? Of course it's going to be "these things work, we're not quite sure why", once you know why they work it's no longer the cutting edge.
Neither of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems apply to quantum mechanics.
The two theorems apply to logical systems which prove facts about the natural numbers. While this is an incredibly broad class of things, it doesn't include physical theories like quantum mechanics.
Guess I Dunning Kruegered, when I thought physics is based on mathematics and logical systems, to which a theory (itself having been proven) aught apply.
Lets' assume the Higgs boson doesn't exist. A large group of scientists has spent 10 billion dollars of public tax payer money to create an experiment that will prove it's existence. It cost them many years to do, decades, and most scientists have staked their entire career on the outcome of the experiment. Turns out, they were wrong, and the particle doesn't exist.
Those scientists now have two options: 1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers (and income!), evoking the wrath of the taxpayer, and basically becoming the laughing stock of the scientific community. 2) Just make some shit up for a while and go on and enjoy your pension which is only a couple of years away.
You are right about the incentives being aligned a certain way. But, while the justification for the LHC might have been Higgs, what most high-energy physicists (theoretical and experimental) really cared about was validating beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) physics e.g. supersymmetry, hidden valleys etc.
Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.
So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.
What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.
The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.
Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf
Thank you for your explanation of what else could've been found with the LHC and that a lot of work was actually done to disprove the existence of a lot of stuff.
Kinda kills my thought experiment though, but I guess that's the point. Thanks.
There were lots of things people really were hoping to see from the LHC, and weren't seen. supersymmetry being one example. Not seeing those things is just as important to everyone involved as seeing them is, so although the theories may try to modify their theories to explain why nothing was seen at those energies, it isn't in any of the experimenters interests to pretend they observed something they didn't.
See also the number of experiments conducted to try and observe things like dark matter candidates with various properties. All those experiments are in competition to either show presence or absence, and absence is just as important because it's proving that you made an incredibly sensitive detector and have used that to show that a particular possibility really wasn't the right one.
By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?
I just said I loved the thought experiment. There's multiple ways to see the flaws in it. Like: how would that large group of scientists (be it at NASA or CERN) keep such a fraud a secret for such a long time? In NASA's case there'd be a lot of people coming clean on their death beds, which hasn't happened of course.
"thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.
>1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers
By writing this it seems like you are under the impression that no science happened until they discovered or "non-discovered" the particle. But that is of course wrong.
It would be no harm to the bureaucracy if they did not find the Higgs. The scientific community would have reacted with excitement and the search for the hole in the standard model would have been apace. In many ways this would have been better for particle physics funding. The standard model is now complete, and we still don’t have a unified field theory. I’m not a physicist but have been following this search through popular writing since I was a kid. Is there now any reason to build a bigger supercollider, and/or is there a risk of the entire field stagnating till someone comes along with a testable theory?
Off the top of my head, Hawking’s books talk a lot about the GUT and are still relevant, Greene’s book on string theory is an advancement of conceptual attempts to find one. It’s harder to point to now because so much of the public discourse since the mid-2000s has moved online.
Yes? Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?
Not hardly. If there was no Higgs, then some other mechanism would be needed to cause the same effects the Higgs does. We’d need the LHC even more then.
No, you keep running the machine, hoping to find a useful signal. More data means more fidelity. A lot of that has been probing the properties of the Higgs, but it's also spent a lot of time ruling out quite a lot of proposed extensions to the standard model.
The LHC wasn't built to discover the higgs. Another primary motivation was looking for supersymmetry and dark matter candidates. But really it was more general than that. Every time we've built a bigger collider we've found something new, and on some level, they just wanted to see what would happen. New data means new things to explain.
From the perspective of the (real) physicists involved the outcome is the same.
Most of my colleagues who have stayed in particle physics post Higgs are wishing it was never discovered.
The motivation of scientists is not well-understood by others, but assuming people make a career in particle physics for the income or job stability is ridiculous. The alternative cost is so high it has to be that they actually really like what they do.
Yep, every single physicist I know would be twice as good at my job as I am and would have twice the earning potential if they switched with me. They don't do it because it sounds incredibly boring to them. "You mean someone might ask me to tweak the size of a button on a website? No thank you!"
Ironically, some physicists (specially maintaining webpage for their project on CERN) might actually have to tweak the button sometimes. But usually they rarely do it and usually without being asked /s.
The scientist calling bullshit that can back it up gets in history books. The others eventually lost credibility.
So I (and pretty much all scientists I'e ever worked with) would call it a failure.
By your implication, nuclear fusion researchers would have "found" it decades ago. But since reality wins in the end, and scientists are generally not pathological liars, they did not. They continue to advance the field.
There's ample other cases demonstrating the flaws in your story. Bad scientists don't tend to last long under the gaze of reality.
Your options are reversed. Under the mass conspiracy scenario, any individual scientist could become famous and promote their own career by whistleblowing about the fraud. But if the scientists are truthful as a group, they can guarantee further research and grants because the standard model is wrong and more experiments will be needed.
We know what they did because a _lot_ of scientists desperately wanted to find supersymmetry and various dark matter candidates with the LHC and they've found absolutely _nothing_ and didn't actually just "make some shit up".
Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.
Is that how it works in the scientific community? I'm not actively involved, but I feel like publishing my findings, one way or another, would require explaining how I arrived at them in a manner that would be reproducible (and thus, verifiable to an extent) by others. What am I missing?
Not asking rhetorically, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious.
The challenge with the results from the LHC is that there's no second one, so no completely independent reproduction. That said, there were two experiments which were seperate apart from using the LHC for the collisions, and both of them have published their full raw data and methods of analysis, so a fabrication would require falsifying quite a large quantity of raw data in a way that hasn't been detected yet, and co-ordination between quite a lot of people.
You don't seem to understand what "thought experiment" is. It is not when you pull some contrived nonsense out of your ass and make conclusions from it.
You also don't really seem to understand how scientists view science. When something that nobody expects DOES happen, and similarly, when scientists expect very very much to see something and clearly do not, both of those outcomes are exciting for scientists.
Predicting something from a model or theory and then having it be confirmed very successfully sure is great for that theory or model, but is the most BORING outcome for the scientists working on it.
Confirming someone else's fairly successful and well developed model is rarely how you gain money or fame in science.
I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research.
If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.
Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".
Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.
You're quite wrong in your guess but that's ok. I work in a research lab actually, and there's lots of experimental physics going on here.
I never claimed people are choosing a career in physics research for the money, I just used the argument of having to choose to lose ones income. Also, I can't help but notice though that, when ascended high enough on the academic ladder, the income isn't a joke either.
Do you know what severely hurts your income as a scientist? Lying about the data and then other people finding out. With the amount of data both of LHC detectors were publishing covering up the lie would be impossible- it’s exceedingly difficult to fabricate data convincingly (see Jan Hendrik Schön).
I would be much more worried about errors in methodology than falsifications.
The income is a total joke compared to what those people would be able to make on any private sector job ladder. Anyone who can be a tenured research physicist could easily make seven figures (likely more) in finance.
Yeah I guess this might be hyperbolic. But my sense is that quite a few quants make seven figures, and that people capable of being tenured research physicists could be at least in the top of that group, if not partners / executives at those firms, which I believe is often an eight figure job. If they could stomach the work, that is...
Not long after the initial discovery, we had enough data for everyone at the experiments to simply run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up.
Once I could "see" the peak, without having to conduct statistical tests against expected background, it was "real" to me.
In these cynical times, it may be that everything is relative and "post-modern subjective p-hacking", but sufficient data usually ends these discussions. The real trouble is that we have a culture that is addicted to progress theater, and can't wait for the data to get in.
> run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up.
For the idiots in this post (me), could you please explain what that entails and why it helps confirm the discovery?
Not the original commenter, but also ex-HEP person:
The invariant mass is the rest mass of the particle (i.e. it's "inherent" mass). You can calculate it by taking the final state decay products of the original particle (i.e. the particles that are actually observed by the detector) and summing up their four-vectors (squared).
You can plot the invariant mass calculated from any particular final state, and for a rare particle like the Higgs the majority of the contributions to your plot will be from background processes (i.e. not Higgs decays) that decay into the same final state.
If you have a lot of Higgs decays in your sample you should be able to see a clear peak in the distribution at the invariant mass of the Higgs boson, a clear sign that the Higgs (or something with the same mass) exists.
Often by the time the discovery has reached statistical significance, you might not really be able to see such a clear sign in the mass distribution. I.e. the calculations are telling you it's there but you can't see it that clearly.
I wouldn't really say this helps confirm the discovery in a scientific sense, just that it's reassuring that the signal is so strong that you can see it by eye.
> just that it's reassuring that the signal is so strong that you can see it by eye
It's really something when this happens. I worked on a big neutrino experiment searching for theta_13, where our goals were to (a) determine if theta_13 was dead zero or not (being truly zero would have a Seriously Major Effect in theories) and then (b) to measure its value if not.
Our experiment was big, expensive, and finely tuned to search for very, very small values of theta_13. We turned the thing on and... right there there was a dip. Just... there. On the plot. All the data blinding schemes needed to guarantee our best resolution kind of went out the window when anyone looking at the most basic status plot could see the dip immediately!
On the one hand, it was really great to know that everything worked, we'd recorded a major milestone in the field (along with our competition, all of whom were reading out at basically the same time), and the theorists would continue to have nothing to do with their lives because theta_13 was, in fact, nonzero. On the other hand... I wasted how many years of my life dialing this damned detector in for what now? (It wasn't wasted effort, not at all... but you get the feeling.)
Like this one? https://cds.cern.ch/record/1546765/files/figs_gamma_gamma_ma...
Squared four-vectors?
I'm only an amateur, but wouldn't that give different results depending on choice of units? I.e, I usually use C=1.
the math is
m^2 c^4 = E^2 - p^2 c^2
where m is mass, E is the total energy in the decay products and p is the 3-vector sum of the momentum.
Those units should work out (they certainly do if you set c = 1).
Ah, I see. I was assuming you meant the 4-momentum. Though I'm not sure this doesn't come out to the same thing.
what I showed is the squared 4 momentum when you use the Minkowski metric [1], assuming "squared" means "self-dot product". The formulation above is just another way to illustrate the Minkowski dot product.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space#Minkowski_metr...
you use the same units on both sides of the equation, it's fine, it's like counting "meters squared"
What about the loss of mass released as energy inherent to the decay process?
“Energy” is only released as the energy and momentum of the resulting particles.
Yeah. The higgs evidence is pretty convincing visually. Not so sure about LIGO. There is an extraordinary claim of noise reduction that requires extraordinary evidence and it's all obfuscated behind adaptive machine learning based filtering, and the statistical analysis on that is unparseable to a non-expert (that is worrisome). The pulsar timing network though is easily believable.
Luckily, there's pretty simple statistics that one can throw at that once the third detector comes online. Hopefully that comes in before we spend too much money on LISA.
It's basically this, from the article, but from astro:
> Particle physics does have situations where the hypothesis are not so data driven and they rely much more heavily on the theoretical edifice of quantum field theory and our simulation of the complicated detectors. In these cases, the statistical models are implicitly defined by simulators is actually a very hot topic that blends classical statistics with modern deep learning. We often say that the simulators don't have a tractable likelihood function. This applies to frequentist hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and Bayesian inference. Confronting these challenging situations is what motivated simulation-based inference, which is applicable to a host of scientific disciplines.
There's no fancy machine learning needed to detect some "bright" LIGO signals (some of the first blackhole-blackhole mergers). Given a set of template signals, a matched filter tries to find the one that best matches the noisy signal your instrument recorded. In order for a MF to work, what you really need is a good understanding of the noise in your instruments observations -- and there're very few people in the world better at that than LIGO folks. LIGO spent almost 20 years in construction and R&D, and almost 30 in planning. When you hear stories about how they can detect trucks miles away, and detect the waves crashing on the coast, it's possible because of scores of PhD students' who spent years characterizing each and every component that affects LIGO's noise levels. All of this to say that it's possible to download their data online and do a quick MF analysis (I did that), and with a little bit of work you get a blindingly bright statistical significance of 20-sigma or so. The actual result quoted in the papers was a bit higher. That's a testament to how well the instrument was built and its behaviour understood.
How do you explain the LIGO detection of a neutron neutron star merger that was at the same time observed as GRB by many, many other telescopes?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817
That's an n of one (I could be wrong but its the only multi messenger GW event we've seen, with how many events are being generated, you'd have expected more). Could be a coincidence. The angular resolution of LIGO is not exactly amazing, and we don't have a real estimate of the distance to the source of the GW? In fact, IIUC the event could be exactly in the opposite direction too.
1 for 29 by 2019:
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/phys_facpub/164/
I think the gigantic bumps that Kyle pointed to "discovered" the higgs.
The statistical interpretation showing a 5 sigma signal was certainly essential, but I suspect it would have taken the collaborations much longer to publish if there wasn't a massive bump staring them in the face.
> In these cynical times, it may be that everything is relative and "post-modern subjective p-hacking", but sufficient data usually ends these discussions.
I don't think that's right. I think having an application is what ends the discussions.
If you have a group of people who think CD players work by using lasers, and a rival group who think they do something entirely different, and only the first group can actually make working CD players, people will accept that lasers do what group #1 says they do.
On the other hand, nearly everyone believes in black holes, and there's no practical use for that information. The difference is that "we pointed a telescope at the sky and saw something" is easier for a layman to understand and requires somewhat less trust than "we did a bunch of complex statistical work on data from a machine you couldn't possibly hope to understand."
I think this is where it's worth differentiating between different types of "believes in" (and why I think modal logics are cool). I can convince myself that a thing seems safe to believe, or I can tangibly believe it, or I can believe it in a way that allows me to confidently manipulate it, or I could even understand it (which you could call a particular flavor of belief). Practical use seems to fit on that spectrum.
I certainly don't believe in black holes in the same manner that I believe in the breakfast I'm eating right now.
> there's no practical use for that information
The information paradox is closer to us than we think!
Joking aside, another perspective on practical use is all of the technology and research advanced that have spun out of black hole research. Multi-messenger astronomy for example. We can point a telescope at the sky where two black holes merged.
Has that been done?! Iirc there is only one multi messenger observation of LIGO results (of which there have been many) which casts doubt on LIGO
It is still nascent according to this https://rubinobservatory.org/news/multi-messenger-astro
There's a lot of (warranted imo) skepticism there too. Im sorry I can't find the citation but there was a Japanese paper out this year that claimed the ml post processing of the EHT data produces a qualitatively similar image given random data.
> people will accept that lasers do what group #1 says they do
Most people. Some fringe groups will believe it is all a front, and they are only pretending that so-called “lasers” are what make the CD player work when in fact it is alien tech from Area 51 or eldritch magics neither of which the public would be happy about. What else would CDDA stand for, if not Compliant Demon Derived Audio? And “Red Book”. Red. Book. Red is the colour of the fires of hell and book must be referring to the Necronomicon! Wake up sheeple!
Counterpoint: Vaccines work, but far too many people think that COVID vaccines contain Jewish-made GPS tracking devices that act as micro-antennae to allow Bill Gates to sterilise them using 5G.
That's a common misunderstanding. The mind controlling COVID vaccines are being spread by chemtrails. The 5G signal is only used by pilots to decide when to start spraying.
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This sort of willful devil's advocacy doesn't further discussion and is extremely unhelpful. To take your first example, you know and I know that you can tell whether a CD player works. You put in a CD, you press "play", it plays.
If you have some theory as to why that test is inadequate, it's on you to lay your cards on the table and state it so there's something substantive to discuss. Until then you're just trolling.
Why do you think I presented those questions side by side?
It looks more convincing this way, especially when your audience know nothing about antibodies. HN is just not you target audience. IMHO, it will work well in a pub after a drink or two.
I think the reason you presented those questions side by side is that you are trolling. I won't be responding further.
>Why do you think I presented those questions side by side?
Perhaps because cowardice prevented you from stating your point clearly, so instead you resorted to vague implications in the form of a question.
A fine tactic which gives the coward a plausible deniability defense when their bullshit is called out: I didn't say that, you said that.
Coupled with other similar techniques, e.g.:
* You know what I mean
* Questions that have actual answers, but are asked rhetorically to make an implication: How many cats are eaten alive each year by immigrants?
* Both-sidesing/false balance (giving equal weight to contradicting points of view, regardless of what the reality has to say)
* Ambiguous implication that can be taken in many ways, depending on how the asker defines the terms: Do you really think the immigrants are helping the economy?
* Non-sequiturs and non-answers
* False dichotomies
* Etc
...this gives the coward a superpower to start a heated discussion, where the coward never actually says anything directly.
Instead, the opponents exert an enormous effort to debunk each leaf on the tree of possible interpretations of the coward's incomplete thought, effectively doing the thinking for the coward in a futile attempt to nail down what point the coward intended to make.
(There is no such clear point, other than I am right and you are wrong).
By the time it becomes clear that no possible interpretation is supported by reality, the coward silently leaves the discussion, and says the same exact things elsewhere, feeling empowered by having made others frustrated.
That frustration counts as a victory in an argument in coward's view, with the assumption that it comes from inability to counter the coward's (unstated, vague, implied) points.
In reality, it's infuriating to have to be made guessing what the other person wants to say, doubly so when they are the one forcing to play that game, which, miraculously, you always seem to lose, because the outcome is invariably "that's not quite what I'm saying" (and what the coward is saying is never directly stated by the coward).
At the same time, this protects the coward from being riduculed for any of the views they're promulgating in the discussion.
This is why the coward never states the views directly, and instead e.g. "presents questions side by side".
If the coward were to say outright "Unlike CD players, there's actually no clear way to say whether vaccines work or not", the coward would be laughed out of the room, and they know it — which is why the resort to implications and rhetorical questions about coward's motivation.
I hope this fully answers the question asked.
It's not hard to find people who are germ theory truthers. They have alternative "explanations" for why nobody gets polio or smallpox anymore.
No need for scare quotes. Post hoc fallacies aren't proof of work, and anyways there's doubt if post hoc is even true for polio and smallpox.
Way too many confounding factors here, and nobody will risk and experiment with a control group in this situation.
They're talking about additional functions (side-effects) of vaccines, really. It's secondary to whether they work or not.
We can't tell whether a CD player has a listening device in it, for instance.
Yes.
COVID vaccines may "work" but they're pretty lame compared to something like the varicella vaccine where the disease basically disappears of the face of the earth.
We'll see if varicella stays gone. It's tricky in that it can embed itself in the host genome and come back later. That means that until the last person exposed to the virus dies, we can't really consider it gone. Good luck convincing people to continue vaccinating for a disease no one has seen in a couple decades. Of course, if varicella was able to infect germ-line cells it would be even worse...
COVID on the other hand doesn't have such a mechanism, and just relies on being really contagious. So if everyone would stay up to date in their boosters and continue masking in public places, we may be able to get rid of it in a couple of years.
> So if everyone would stay up to date in their boosters and continue masking in public places, we may be able to get rid of it in a couple of years.
By that logic we'd have gotten rid of the flu. Vaccines for rapidly mutating viruses like flu and COVID can't keep up and remain an epidemic. The only disease we've actually been able to eliminate worldwide due to vaccines is smallpox. We'd have gotten rid of measles too if crazies hadn't decided the MMR vaccine causes autism due to criminally fraudulent research.
Didn't one strain of the flu become extinct during the pandemic because we masked up and staying away from each other for a year? One would think that if we just kept that up we'd get rid of all the others.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5155997/influenza-strai...
It's really hard to draw causal links here. It could be any number of factors or required all of them together. In fact, if that had worked, why didn't COVID or other strains die too? And China had much more severe & prolonged lockdowns but that didn't eliminate anything extra for them.
Don't underestimate the impact of stock viral interference - flu & COVID are both respiratory infections and COVID was much more infectious. Some flu strains probably just couldn't remain competitive with the combined set of other flu and COVID strains.
While masking and social distancing have a beneficial impact on limiting the spread of respiratory diseases, there are practical reasons why it doesn't work to eliminate it altogether and ignores the possibility and likelihood of other resevoirs to reintroduce the disease. For example, if North America remains masked & socially isolated by the virus persists in Europe, then as soon as North America opens up you'll get the virus in North America again. And imaging a simultaneous world wide lock down is a laugh - even during COVID governments were not globally coordinated and even within national governments there was mixed local coordination.
Aside from all that, let's say it was purely a result of masking and social distancing. The consequences of that were quite sever & catastrophic, not to mention that no one actually stayed away vs limited their normal contacts & there were plenty of practical reasons it wasn't possible (e.g. getting groceries). Life involves death & risk and it's pretty clear that even before the vaccines became available many people were not OK with the tradeoff COVID entailed (e.g. Florida).
By that line of reasoning, the moon does not exist.
The article here is responding to an original blog post [1] that is not really saying the Higgs was not discovered (despite its trolling title), but raising questions about the meaning of "discovery" in systems that are so complicated as those in modern particle physics.
I think the author is using the original motivation of musing on null hypotheses to derive the title "The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place", and he has successfully triggered the controversy the subtitle ironically denies and the inevitable surface reading condemnations that we see in some of the comments here.
[1] https://www.argmin.net/p/the-higgs-discovery-did-not-take
He is implying that the scientists involved haven't thought of those questions, when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc
Also he makes many factual claims that are just incorrect.
Just seems like an extremely arrogant guy who hasn't done his homework
A computer scientist/electrical engineer who is arrogant? I dunno, I need to see the statistical test to believe that's possible.
Computers are a “complete” system where everything they do is inspectable and, eventually, explainable, and I have observed that people who work with computers (myself included) over estimate their ability to interrogate and explain complex, emergent systems - economics, physics, etc. - which are not literally built on formal logic.
a single computer might be complete (even then, not everything is inspectable unless you have some very expensive equipment) but distributed systems are not.
There was an entire class of engineers at google- SREs- many of whom were previously physicists (or experts in some other quantitative field). A fraction of them (myself included) were "cluster whisperers"- able to take a collection of vague observations and build a testable hypothesis of why things were Fucked At Scale In Prod. Then come up with a way to fix it that didn't mess up the rest of the complete system.
Nothing- not even computers are truly built on formal logic. They are fundamentally physics-driven machines with statistical failure rates, etc. There's nothing quite like coming across a very expensive computer which occasionally calculates the equivalent of 1*1 = inf, simply because some physical gates have slightly more electrical charge on them due to RF from a power supply that's 2 feet away.
I think you're mixing up two different things: the challenges of building these systems at scale, and their fundamental properties. Take your example of the expensive computer returning 1*1 = inf because of a nearby power supply - that actually proves my point about computers being knowable systems. You were able to track down that specific environmental interference precisely because computers are built on logic with explicit rules and dependencies. When these types of errors are caught, we know because they do not conform to the rules of the system, which are explicitly defined, by us. We can measure and understand their failures exactly because we designed them.
Even massive distributed systems, while complex, still follow explicit rules for how they change state. Every bit of information exists in a measurable form somewhere. Sure, at Google scale we might not have tools to capture everything at once, and no single person could follow every step from electrical signal to final output. But it's theoretically possible - which is fundamentally different from natural systems.
You could argue the universe itself is deterministic (and philosophically, I agree), but in practice, the emergent systems we deal with - like biology or economics - follow rules we can't fully describe, using information we can't fully measure, where complete state capture isn't just impractical, it's impossible.
To simply illustrate your point: if you see a computer calculate 1*1=∞ occasionally, you know the computer is wrong and something is causing it to break.
If you see a particle accelerator occasionally make an observation that breaks the standard model, depending on what it is breaking you can be very confident that the observation is wrong, but you cannot know that with absolute certainty.
Great explanation, thank you.
> when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc
I'm not in HEP, but my graduate work had overlap with condensed matter physics. I worked with physics professors/students in a top 10 physics school (which had Nobel laureates, although I didn't work with them).
Things may have changed since then, but the majority of them had no idea what pre-registration meant, and none had taken a course on statistics. In most US universities, statistics is not required for a physics degree (although it is for an engineering one). When I probed them, the response was "Why should we take a whole course on it? We study what we need in quantum mechanics courses."
No, my friend. You studied probability. Not statistics.
Whatever you can say about reproducibility in the social sciences, a typical professor in those fields knew and understood an order of magnitude more statistics than physicists.
As an ex-HEP, I can confirm that yes, we had blinding and did correct for multiple hypothesis testing explicitly. As Kyle Cranmer points out, we called it the "look elsewhere effect." Blinding is enforced by the physics group. You are not allowed to look at a signal region until you have basically finished your analysis.
For pre-registration, this might be debatable, but what I meant was that we have teams of people looking for specific signals (SUSY, etc). Each of those teams would have generated monte carlo simulations of their signals and compared those with backgrounds. Generally speaking, analysis teams were looking for something specific in the data.
However, there are sometimes more general "bump hunts", which you could argue didn't have preregistration. But on the other hand, they are generally looking for bumps with a specific signature (say, two leptons).
So yes, people in HEP generally are knowledgeable about stats... and yes, this field is extremely strict compared to psychology for example.
> so complicated as those in modern particle physics
But... modern particle physics is one of the simplest things around. (Ex-physicist here, see username.) It only looks complicated because it is so simple that we can actually write down every single detail of the entire thing and analyze it! How many other systems can you say that about?
Other systems might not be part of a field as mature as yours, I would argue.
It has nothing to do with "maturity" and everything to do with just hierarchy in general. There is something to the old XKCD joke: https://xkcd.com/435/ because the disciplines really are divided like that. You have to know physics to do chemistry well. You have to know chemistry to do biology well. You have to know biology to ... etc.
Whereas to do physics well you need only mathematics. Well, at least, to do the theories well. To actually execute the experiments is, ah, more challenging.
So I would argue the Standard Model is pretty much the only thing in all of human knowledge that depends on no other physical theories. It's the bottom. Shame it's pretty useless (intractable) as soon as you have three or more particles to calculate with, though....
> I think the author is using the original motivation of musing on null hypotheses to derive the title "The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place",
It's probably a reference to "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" by Jean Baudrillard, which took a similar critical view of the Gulf War as TFA takes of the Higgs discovery.
Possibly! I remember that but completely missed it as an inspiration here.
I think it is good this post was written, I learned a lot, but it makes me sad that it was prompted by such an obvious trolling attempt.
not to nitpick, but I think "reactionary" or "aspiring crank" are probably more descriptive :)
"This isn't music, back in my day we had Credence"
Here is Ben Recht’s response: https://www.argmin.net/p/toward-a-transformative-hermeneutic...
Oof.
A Berkeley academic invoking "it's actually your fault for believing the words that I wrote" and following it up with a "I'm not mad, I actually find this amusing" ... it's just disappointing.
Which is actually very reasonable, it ends with
> In any event, I use irreverence (i.e., shitposting) to engage with tricky philosophical questions. I know that people unfamiliar with my schtick might read me as just being an asshole. That’s fair.
People are piling the hate on Ben Recht here. I appreciate that he's calling his post what it is rather than doubling down.
It's also a great chance to lecture people on 4-momentum, thanks everyone!
That is some fancy backpedaling.
For every time I see a criticism like Recht's (and Hossfelder's), I ask "could this theoretical scientist go into the lab and conduct a real experiment". I mean, find some challenging experiment that requires setting up a complex interferometer (or spectroscope, or molecular biology cloning), collect data, analyze it, and replicate an existing well-known theory?
Even though I'm a theoretical physicist I've gone into the lab and spent the time to learn how to conduct experiments and what I've learned is that a lot of theoretical wrangling is not relevant to actually getting a useful result that you can be confident in.
Looking at Recht's publication history, it looks like few of his papers ever do real-world experiments; mostly, they use simulations to "verify" the results. It may very well be that his gaps in experimental physics lead him to his conclusion.
The article this is responding to is some of the worst anti-science, anti-intellectual FUD I've seen in a while, with laughably false conceits like (paraphrased) "physics is too complicated, no one understands it" and thus "fundamental research doesn't matter".
Worse, the author of the original FUD is a professor of EE at Berkeley [1] with a focus in ML. It almost goes without saying, but EE and ML would not exist without the benefit a lot of fundamental physics research over the years on things that, according to him, "no one understands".
[1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/
> ...is too complicated, no one understands it.
Quoth the AI researcher.
Honestly, while it's an interesting article, I'm not sure why one would even give the nonsense it's addressing the dignity of a reply.
Hadn't realised Higgs' boson denialism was really a thing.
The parent-poster is a very well known professor in ML/Optimization at Berkeley EECS.
One of the smaller trade journals of EE was Wireless World. (It closed in 2008.)
In its pages you could find EE professors and chartered engineers arguing that Einstein was so, so wrong, decades after relativity was accepted.
I'd trust an EE to build me a radio, but I wouldn't let an EE anywhere near fundamental physics.
I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism. Engineers are also unusually likely to be Islamist terrorists, though there are many reasons for that. [1] There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
> I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism.
If it's the same thing I'm thinking of, it was kinda flawed, IMO, in that it was a comparison of such beliefs amongst various types of scientists, with, for some reason, engineers thrown in, too. And yeah, it's kind of unsurprising that engineers are more into unscientific nonsense than various types of scientists, because engineers aren't scientists. It would be more surprising if they were significantly worse than the _general population_, but I don't think that it showed that.
> There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else.
Lots of failed theorists with that personality type/flaw as well.
What the heck did I just read. It feels like BS - Isn't the sample too small?
https://archive.is/FfEK4
it's sociology- a field which frequently does not provide evidence for its claims.
You mean 400 people? No, that isn't too small. Why would you think it was?
All this suggests is that chartership, professorship and shitty journal authorship are poor metrics for credibility.
Keeping EEs and any E for that matter away from fundamental physics is a shortcut to producing a whole lot of smoke and melted plastic.
Uh huh. And that makes said professor an expert in 1) epistemology, and/or 2) experimental particle physics? Why, no. No, it doesn't.
I mean, I'm as prone to the "I'm a smart guy, so I understand everything" delusion as the next person, but I usually only show it in the comments here. (And in private conversations, of course...)
to be fair, maybe there is a decent overlap of people who saw the original and this. At least that might dispel the 'myths' raised in the original. Also, since this rebuttal article was written by a physicist (much more involved in the field), its also defending their own field
I think the person this article is responding to is just a crank, but it is interesting as a layperson to see the basic mechanisms for making this discovery laid out here.
Any fool on a hill can confidently state that they don’t believe in gravity because there’s no proof for it and the matematisk theories are all complicated and bureaucratic. Why should he believe it?
But so what?
Good gracious! C'mon! ... science people want science not nonsense not cheap symbolism.
The article to which the link responds is cynical. And in my experience cynical assessments are made by people more likely to engage in the cynical BS artistry they complain about. Moreover, social media in general in conducive to whining, and what-about-ism which detracts from what science and all natural philosophers take seriously.
We're trying really hard to get away from the shadows on the the cave wall to the light whenever possible, and as often as possible.
And you know what else? The ``rush" is huge when we do so. There's a difference.
Just to pile on 'Ben', but sorry to break it to machine learning computing enthusiasts.
We(particle physicsts) have been performing similar, and in a lot of ways much more complex analyses using ML tools for decades in production.
Please stop shrouding your new 'golden goose' of AI/ML modelling in mystery it's 'just' massively multi-dimensional regression analyses with all of the problems, advantages and improvements that brings...
Why is there some beef that nature is complex, if you had the same vitriol toward certain other fields we'd be worrying about big-pharma's reproducibility crisis just at the top of the ice-berg of problems in modern science, not that most people are illiterate when it comes to algebra...
The team behind the LHC laid out the criteria for discovering the Highs Boson before beginning their experiments.
They never came close to what they said they needed.
But they now claim they succeeded in finding the Highs Boson.
And the paper setting out the criteria has been memory holed.
I call BS in the Highs Bozo team.
This debate reminded me Matt Strassler's recent post that most of the data observed in the accelerators are thrown away [1]:
I thought that was strange. It's like there is too much data and our technology is not up to it so let's throw away everything that we cannot process. Throwing data "in the smartest way possible" did not convince me.[1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data...
I would like a chance to jump into this point because this problem is a function of two things. The throughput that you can make your Tigger (Data acquisition system) save the data and transfer it to permanent storage. This is usually invlove multiple steps and most of them happens in real-time. The other problem is the storage itself and how it would be kept (duplicated and distributed to analysts) which at the scale of operation we are doing is insanely costly. If we are to say save 20% of the generated collision data then we would fill the entire cloud storage in the world in a couple of runs . Also the vasr majority of data is background and useless so you would do a lot of work to clean that and apply your selections which we do anyway but now you are dealing with another problem. The analysts will need to handle much more data and trying new things (ideas and searches) becomes more costly which will be discouraged. So you work in a very constrained way. You improve your capabilities in computing and storage and you present a good physics case of what data (deploy trigger line which is to pick this physics signal) that the experiment is sensitive to and then lets the natural selections take place (metaphorically of course).
Most of the experiments cannot because of the data acquisition problems.
The technology really is not up to it, though.
To give some numbers:
- The LHC has 40M "events" (bunch of collisions) a second.
- The experiments can afford to save around 2000 of them.
This is a factor of 20k between what they collide and what they can afford to analyze. There is just no conceivable way to expand the LHC computing and storage by a factor of 20k.
Valid question would be why they don't just collide fewer protons. The problem is that when you study processes on a length scale smaller than a proton, you really can't control when they happen. You just have to smash a lot and catch the interesting collisions.
So yeah, it's a lot of "throwing away data" in the smartest way possible.
-------------------
All that said, it might be a stretch to say the data is "thrown away", since that implies that it was ever acquired. The data that doesn't get saved generally doesn't make it off a memory buffer on a sensor deep within the detector. It's never piped through an actual CPU or assembled into any meaningful unit with the millions of other readouts.
If keeping the data was one more trivial step, the experiments would keep it. As it is they need to be smart about where the attention goes. And they are! The data is "thrown away" in the sense that an astronomy experiment throws away data by turning off during the day.
My 200Mhz Oscilloscope "throws away" a lot of data compared to the 4GHz scope I used at work, but for the signals I'm looking for, it doesn't matter at all.
The original blog post have a point in that much of scientific "established fact" springs from prestigious committee with great fanfare, a chain of reasoning is established, it's cast forth with great force and splashes into a brainless media dissemination apparatus and that's the truth we're stuck with for, give or take, a human lifetime.
Though specifically making it an argument about particle physics results in a rather nebulous punching power against something for most of us have very weakly defined.
I might digress but cosmologists deserve focal criticism like this more for the cocksure way they've sold dark matter and the age of the universe. Both the phlogiston and the luminiferous aether was discarded after less contradictory observations than we today have against the former.
It's lucky the predictions almost exactly matched. Otherwise the inference would have been a nightmare.
On the other hand, it would arguably have been more interesting had they not.
We have enough "interesting" things going on in particle physics. We needed a strong discovery is there haven't been as many of those as of late.
However the earlier predictions about which will be the energy where the resonance will be observed had been wrong.
The predictions have been revised a few times upwards after not finding a resonance at the predicted lower energies, then they have been proven wrong again and the cycle has been repeated until the actual discovery.
They got the simulation based inference going though, right? How high can they crank up the energy and still have that work?
> This bump is what physicists call a resonance. It follows directly from energy and momentum conservation and special relativity that we teach first year undergraduates (hardly the ivory towers).
> This bump or resonance is intimately tied to what physicists mean when they say ‘particle’. If you dig a bit deeper, the term resonance is also tied to one of the most elementary physical systems: the simple harmonic oscillator. Sure, when you treat these things quantum mechanically, it gets more sophisticated, but my point is it doesn’t require highfalutin mathematics and quantum field theory to say that we discovered a new particle at the LHC.
Goes on to completely omit this apparently trivial mathematics.
It doesn't take much to look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator
I assume that you do need maths but not something developed only decades ago. That's what physics students learn today and represent a very conservative body of knowledge, which would be never trivial though.
real data - background model = bump
This is all just counting statistics, it actually is that simple. (The resonance equals particle is quite a bit more complex, but for a basic treatment the bump is a particle could probably just be understood as jargon.)
> Goes on to completely omit this apparently trivial mathematics.
You're being somewhat unfairly downvoted because "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" is a huge problem in modern physics. All too often it turns out that the person teaching owl drawing has never seen an owl, has no idea how to draw any animal, but can explain at length the differences between the various pencil types.
For example, I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory.
Either you get a hand-wavey "it's an excitement of the field" with zero elaboration, or they talk only about the secondary properties of the particles such as their symmetries.
Imagine explaining cars in one of only two ways, and flat refusing to ever describe them in any other terms:
1. Cars are personal automobiles with three or more wheels.
2. Cars are largely left-right symmetric objects that can fit into a tunnel but not through a sieve. When set into motion they have a decreased longitudinal resistance compared to lateral. If two cars are smashed together a loud siren noise can often be briefly heard after a delay of a few minutes.
Now you know what a car is!
> ...and flat refusing to ever describe them in any other terms.
This is a completely unjustified insinuation against physics and physicists. While there may be a few exceptions in the form of certain individuals, in general, nothing is being held back, and if the answers are not satisfactory, it is because no satisfactory answer has yet been found. I have found physicists usually eager to a fault to talk about physics.
To make sense of it requires some work on your part, of course, but it would be utterly unreasonable to fault physicists for being unable to put everything they collectively know in terms that are immediately clear to everyone whose education on the topic ended at high school.
> I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory.
Quantum physics PhD here. It's because, we don't know. We don't have an ontology for quantum mechanics. We don't know what any of the mathematical model "actually is"
It's the same for basically all modern physics. We lack an ontology for it, so no we can't tell you "what it really is". Literally no one knows
But yes, the mathematical model is: a unit of excitation of the quantum field. What that actually is, is totally unknown
There are reasonable & reasoned attempts to make sense of all this, such as Sunny Auyang's "How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?" (https://books.google.com/books/about/How_is_Quantum_Field_Th... )
I think such attempts are not widely disseminated / taught to young physicists because older / more experienced ones believe that quantum gravity will re-write the situation anyway. { QG itself seems necessary since in General Relativity you "solve for the metric aka solve for time" self-consistently with mass-energy and that very same "time" is the background for QFT (which is what "makes" mass-energy). So, we don't really understand this model element we call "time" - so elemental to all our ideas of dynamics - without QG. Of course, the most direct quantum gravitational phenomena are, at present, at a subtle experimental scale due to the size of 'G'. This need not remain the case -- once we know what to look for - e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines were beginning to reveal atomic quantum physics in 1802 almost a full century before Planck's black body work and barely after Benjamin Franklin-ian electrostatics and long before Maxwellian electrodynamics. }
I'm mostly just trying to strike a less hopeless note for jiggawatts and provide some reading material which might be accessible (if, as noted, is probably necessarily preliminary - EDIT and some might say this of all "Science" at all times, of course).
They are not taught because of two things. First it just philosophical opinions and the second is that it does not matter when you are actually working with quantum mechanics/ quantum field theory. So it is usually outside the realm of your standard course/s that have a lot to cover anyway.
Thanks for the reference! Looks like an intriguing book from a glance at the contents pages
Of course there are attempts and opinions but I'm pointing out that there is absolutely no consensus
Another take on this: what do you expect the cutting edge of science to look like? Of course it's going to be "these things work, we're not quite sure why", once you know why they work it's no longer the cutting edge.
Gödel's incompleteness Theorem, applied to QM, in three paragraphs.
Neither of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems apply to quantum mechanics.
The two theorems apply to logical systems which prove facts about the natural numbers. While this is an incredibly broad class of things, it doesn't include physical theories like quantum mechanics.
Guess I Dunning Kruegered, when I thought physics is based on mathematics and logical systems, to which a theory (itself having been proven) aught apply.
I always loved the following thought experiment:
Lets' assume the Higgs boson doesn't exist. A large group of scientists has spent 10 billion dollars of public tax payer money to create an experiment that will prove it's existence. It cost them many years to do, decades, and most scientists have staked their entire career on the outcome of the experiment. Turns out, they were wrong, and the particle doesn't exist.
Those scientists now have two options: 1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers (and income!), evoking the wrath of the taxpayer, and basically becoming the laughing stock of the scientific community. 2) Just make some shit up for a while and go on and enjoy your pension which is only a couple of years away.
What would you do?
You are right about the incentives being aligned a certain way. But, while the justification for the LHC might have been Higgs, what most high-energy physicists (theoretical and experimental) really cared about was validating beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) physics e.g. supersymmetry, hidden valleys etc.
Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.
So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.
What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.
The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.
Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf
Thank you for your explanation of what else could've been found with the LHC and that a lot of work was actually done to disprove the existence of a lot of stuff.
Kinda kills my thought experiment though, but I guess that's the point. Thanks.
There were lots of things people really were hoping to see from the LHC, and weren't seen. supersymmetry being one example. Not seeing those things is just as important to everyone involved as seeing them is, so although the theories may try to modify their theories to explain why nothing was seen at those energies, it isn't in any of the experimenters interests to pretend they observed something they didn't.
See also the number of experiments conducted to try and observe things like dark matter candidates with various properties. All those experiments are in competition to either show presence or absence, and absence is just as important because it's proving that you made an incredibly sensitive detector and have used that to show that a particular possibility really wasn't the right one.
By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?
I just said I loved the thought experiment. There's multiple ways to see the flaws in it. Like: how would that large group of scientists (be it at NASA or CERN) keep such a fraud a secret for such a long time? In NASA's case there'd be a lot of people coming clean on their death beds, which hasn't happened of course.
"thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.
>1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers
By writing this it seems like you are under the impression that no science happened until they discovered or "non-discovered" the particle. But that is of course wrong.
It would be no harm to the bureaucracy if they did not find the Higgs. The scientific community would have reacted with excitement and the search for the hole in the standard model would have been apace. In many ways this would have been better for particle physics funding. The standard model is now complete, and we still don’t have a unified field theory. I’m not a physicist but have been following this search through popular writing since I was a kid. Is there now any reason to build a bigger supercollider, and/or is there a risk of the entire field stagnating till someone comes along with a testable theory?
Any favorite resources for a fellow science-interested laymen interested in getting to your understanding level?
Off the top of my head, Hawking’s books talk a lot about the GUT and are still relevant, Greene’s book on string theory is an advancement of conceptual attempts to find one. It’s harder to point to now because so much of the public discourse since the mid-2000s has moved online.
Actually “No Higgs” would have been as big a scientific discovery as a Higgs, maybe bigger.
Yes? Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?
Not hardly. If there was no Higgs, then some other mechanism would be needed to cause the same effects the Higgs does. We’d need the LHC even more then.
No it would mean the standard model is wrong and there would be more to discover.
No, you keep running the machine, hoping to find a useful signal. More data means more fidelity. A lot of that has been probing the properties of the Higgs, but it's also spent a lot of time ruling out quite a lot of proposed extensions to the standard model.
Not even close. The party would seriously be on because then you'd need some alternative that explained the new hole in the standard model.
>Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?
No, not at all.
No. This has been answered multiple times up and down the thread.
The LHC wasn't built to discover the higgs. Another primary motivation was looking for supersymmetry and dark matter candidates. But really it was more general than that. Every time we've built a bigger collider we've found something new, and on some level, they just wanted to see what would happen. New data means new things to explain.
[dead]
From the perspective of the (real) physicists involved the outcome is the same. Most of my colleagues who have stayed in particle physics post Higgs are wishing it was never discovered. The motivation of scientists is not well-understood by others, but assuming people make a career in particle physics for the income or job stability is ridiculous. The alternative cost is so high it has to be that they actually really like what they do.
Yep, every single physicist I know would be twice as good at my job as I am and would have twice the earning potential if they switched with me. They don't do it because it sounds incredibly boring to them. "You mean someone might ask me to tweak the size of a button on a website? No thank you!"
Ironically, some physicists (specially maintaining webpage for their project on CERN) might actually have to tweak the button sometimes. But usually they rarely do it and usually without being asked /s.
> What would you do?
The scientist calling bullshit that can back it up gets in history books. The others eventually lost credibility.
So I (and pretty much all scientists I'e ever worked with) would call it a failure.
By your implication, nuclear fusion researchers would have "found" it decades ago. But since reality wins in the end, and scientists are generally not pathological liars, they did not. They continue to advance the field.
There's ample other cases demonstrating the flaws in your story. Bad scientists don't tend to last long under the gaze of reality.
Your options are reversed. Under the mass conspiracy scenario, any individual scientist could become famous and promote their own career by whistleblowing about the fraud. But if the scientists are truthful as a group, they can guarantee further research and grants because the standard model is wrong and more experiments will be needed.
Oh I like this argument a lot, thanks.
We know what they did because a _lot_ of scientists desperately wanted to find supersymmetry and various dark matter candidates with the LHC and they've found absolutely _nothing_ and didn't actually just "make some shit up".
Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.
This but it's HIV and circumcision.
"A new Tuskegee? Unethical human experimentation and Western neocolonialism in the mass circumcision of African men"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dewb.12285?...
> Being thruthful [sic] about the non-discovery
> Just make some shit up
Is that how it works in the scientific community? I'm not actively involved, but I feel like publishing my findings, one way or another, would require explaining how I arrived at them in a manner that would be reproducible (and thus, verifiable to an extent) by others. What am I missing?
Not asking rhetorically, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious.
The challenge with the results from the LHC is that there's no second one, so no completely independent reproduction. That said, there were two experiments which were seperate apart from using the LHC for the collisions, and both of them have published their full raw data and methods of analysis, so a fabrication would require falsifying quite a large quantity of raw data in a way that hasn't been detected yet, and co-ordination between quite a lot of people.
Imagine the earth isn't round!
You don't seem to understand what "thought experiment" is. It is not when you pull some contrived nonsense out of your ass and make conclusions from it.
You also don't really seem to understand how scientists view science. When something that nobody expects DOES happen, and similarly, when scientists expect very very much to see something and clearly do not, both of those outcomes are exciting for scientists.
Predicting something from a model or theory and then having it be confirmed very successfully sure is great for that theory or model, but is the most BORING outcome for the scientists working on it.
Confirming someone else's fairly successful and well developed model is rarely how you gain money or fame in science.
I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research.
If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.
Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".
Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.
You're quite wrong in your guess but that's ok. I work in a research lab actually, and there's lots of experimental physics going on here.
I never claimed people are choosing a career in physics research for the money, I just used the argument of having to choose to lose ones income. Also, I can't help but notice though that, when ascended high enough on the academic ladder, the income isn't a joke either.
Do you know what severely hurts your income as a scientist? Lying about the data and then other people finding out. With the amount of data both of LHC detectors were publishing covering up the lie would be impossible- it’s exceedingly difficult to fabricate data convincingly (see Jan Hendrik Schön).
I would be much more worried about errors in methodology than falsifications.
The income is a total joke compared to what those people would be able to make on any private sector job ladder. Anyone who can be a tenured research physicist could easily make seven figures (likely more) in finance.
>easily make seven figures (likely more)
I agree that income is a joke but... more than seven figures as in eight? That's quite a lot.
Yeah I guess this might be hyperbolic. But my sense is that quite a few quants make seven figures, and that people capable of being tenured research physicists could be at least in the top of that group, if not partners / executives at those firms, which I believe is often an eight figure job. If they could stomach the work, that is...