Slashdot Mirror
CERN May Not Have Discovered Higgs Boson After All
An anonymous reader writes Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson, but some scientists believe that the particle may not have been discovered yet at all. A new study by a group of scientists from the University of Southern Denmark raises the possibility that the data collected from the Large Hadron Collider could instead explain another type of subatomic particle. Mads Toudal Frandsen, a particle physicist, explained in a statement, "The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particular particle is the Higgs particle ... It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles."
These skeptics are going to destroy the planet.
"As you can see here, I have postulated another particle which would leave exactly the same evidence as the Higgs, but would not be the Higgs. I call it the 'Madds' particle."
OK, that's unfair, but "techni-quarks" which could make up dark matter? William of Ockham is going to need to set up a factory in Shenzhen at this point.
These are not the Higgs' you're looking for . . .
(Associate Editor turns towards reviewers) Let their paper through . . .
That's the problem with trying to prove something through inductive logic. It's not the first or the last time scientists will wrongly believe they have proved their theory true just because an experiment confirmed their hypothesis.
I'm pretty darn sure it proves the existence of Unobtainium.
It was Jesus all along.
There's a whole community out there of theoretical phycisists that do nothing but come up with alternatative theories explaining existing data.
This is their job, they might not beleive they're right, they just came up with the theory because it was not the currently believed one.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Many in the physics community were hoping for a "weird" Higgs boson, which might point the way towards new physics such as supersymmetry or technicolor.
Alas, the Higgs boson we actually discovered doesn't seem to require any new physics. It's covered by the Standard Model. It is, by physics standards, annoying dull. This has done a good job of killing off several people's pet theories (some models of supersymmetry and technicolor).
Rather than just admit that "when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras" (ie, the simplest explanation is usually the right one), they are busy adding epicycles to their pet theories to try to accommodate reality (which, admittedly, is how science works).
Being sensationalist and dumb, journalists hear things like "it *may be* that...", and trump up all sorts of stupid headlines like "ZOMG, scientists didn't discover Higgs after all." And we get Slashdot posts like this.
So if we're lucky this won't be the true Higgs partilce, as that would point to more discoveries involving a fifth force dubbed the technicolor force and allow us to see particles composed of techni-quarks. Should this come to be, then that probably more than justifies the expense of the LHC as just finding the Higgs would not really give us radically new knowledge.
Letter To Iran
There are loads of Higgs impostor models where something else mimics the Higgs. Perhaps they're unlikely but it's not easy to come up with alternative explanations that are both mathematically consistent and don't contradict observations.
This is just about how science is supposed to work, even when one model fits the observations its not necessary that its the right one. And as with the Higgs the standard model predictions are quite a dead-end when it comes to dreaming new and exiting physics so pretty much every theoretical physicist is trying to figure out a alternative, less boring, explanation for the LHC observations.
It would be great if this *wasn't* the Higgs, because then we would have some clue how to move past the Standard Model. It sucks when nature agrees with your predictions.
....Sheldon Cooper employed!
I am my own gestalt.
I wonder if the slashdot from the before time would have posted article such as this.
“None of the four known forces of nature (gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) are any good at binding techni-quarks together,” the University of Southern Denmark explained. “There must therefore be a yet undiscovered force of nature. This force is called the technicolor force.”
It sounds like it belongs in the loony bin, so it must be true.
http://xkcd.com/1437/
And in any case, throughout the whole discovery they were all really careful to repeatedly emphasise that they found a particle with Higgs-like properties, rather than outright stating that they found the Higgs.
So it's not really news that it could be something else with similar properties. Okay, someone came up with a model. Great. But why do those headlines make it sound like "in you face, CERN, you got it all wrong"?
Will a punishment prize be awarded?
You are technically correct (that it's possible) but you'll need to provide a model that fits the data better--and that's a LOT of data to get fitted. Otherwise, we're going with the electron (and assuming it's a particle, although the guy who invented the laser has other ideas about its nature. Google for it).
It's the Starbuck bosun.
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The summary was wrong: Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert did not win the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson. They (along with some others) predicted it, but didn't discover it. (More accurately, they won the Nobel for elucidating the Higgs mechanism of symmetry breaking as a means for massless particles to acquire mass).
This was a deduction (deducing that a particular field would lead to symmetry breaking with particular properties, from the mathematics of field theories), not an induction (fitting a model to theories).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I doubt many scientists believe that you can prove any scientific theory true.
In general, this is correct: you can prove a scientific theory false, but never prove it true. (You can prove mathematical theories true. But mathematical theories require assumptions, called postulates. To prove that a mathematical theory is true in the real world, you would need to find a way to prove the postulates true.)
Physical theories are confirmed by evidence, and well confirmed by large amounts of of evidence... but confirmation is not exactly the same as proof
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
may not cause cancer after all.
So what they should have done, is make a theory that says the Higgs Boson does not exist, and then prove that theory wrong. That would have been airtight.
*Doctor Sheldon Cooper
Why do we keep trying to extend theories that are wrong?
In construction, if you start building a building and you go "off code" or get to a point where the building is unsafe, work is halted. In physics, we keep trying to build Rube Goldberg contraptions. Why?
TFSFS, i.e. The First sentence of TFS, is a load of crap. Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for *predicting* the Higgs Boson, *not* for discovering it!
And the rest of the summary doesn't make me a bit interested in reading TFA either. There's been Higgs imposter models out there from before the discovery was made. And sure they have their merit. But as long as we have no new physics observed, the Standard Model covers it just fine.
Large amounts of evidence only confirms a theory if the evidence is independent. Unfortunately, for many scientific theories, we don't know whether the evidence is independent or not, so many physical theories are not as well confirmed as the "large amount of evidence" might lead you to believe.
This article really makes me think that journalism need to be laid to rest. In the case of physics specifically, there are some brilliant communicators. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, I'll even throw in Bill Nye (though he's a Mechanical Engineer) are all great examples of people who actually (this is the kicker) UNDERSTAND THE TOPIC they're talking about. I think if a "journalist" wants to report on something they aren't personally an expert on, or at least understand well, the whole article should be framed as in interview. An article like this just compromises the integrity of the journalist and journalism at large.
*editing note* The section below is me going off on a tangential rant. Thank you amphetamines.
I somewhat blame how writing is taught in schools and universities. It's nearly an essential requirement that you integrate quotations into your writing as if they were naturally part of your sentences. A question/response formation is forbidden, and while there is a special rule for including a block quotation, I've very rarely seen it used in practice. I understand a English 102 research paper is quite different from news piece like this, but that it is deeply ingrained not only into writers, but also readers (since we mostly did papers at least in high school) to expect that kind of quotation, mostly to the detriment of communication.
I think it's because there is an academic obsession with attribution, where you are given scary warning about PLAGIARISM and being banished from the university, should you fail to properly attribute! Yeah, if you pull a paper off the internet and present it as your own, that's clearly cheating. The academics are so obsessed, I suppose, because being published is some required right of passage. So then students spent half again the cost of tuition on textbooks every year, and then hardly use them. Why isn't Elizabeth Warren posing hard questions to the wealthy textbook barons and the academics who support their industry? I suspect that a non-trivial amount of student loan debt was acquired buying textbooks. Yes is complicated, but at the end of the day, we're collectively paying to prop up this system, and the end result is crappy journalism like this. (editing note: surprised I managed to bring that full circle.)
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
Spend umpteen billion on your own accelerator and prove to 5 sigma standard, that the particle discovered by Cern is not the Higgs, until then, quit your whining!
Large amounts of evidence only confirms a theory if the evidence is independent.
Yep. That's why you want independent confirmation. Replication is what makes science.
Never rely on scientific results until they're independently confirmed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Technicolour models have been around for ages and this does not seem to be anything significantly new. Indeed it is no different from Supersymmetry which also has a Standard Model-like Higgs boson...plus another 4 on top two of which are electrically charged. SUSY can also explain Dark Matter if the lightest SUSY particle is stable and has far better theoretical motivation than techni-colour models.
While this does not make it any more likely to be correct I really hope techni-colour is not how the universe works. Having a smaller scale for the fundamental particles will push the energy of any new physics likely to solve the fundamental questions we have far higher and probably beyond the reach of current accelerator technology.
In general, this is correct: you can prove a scientific theory false, but never prove it true.
Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference.
Because science is at heart applied Bayesian reasoning it is not in the business of certainty of any kind: theories become more plausible or less plausible, and are never "true" or "false", which would imply that they are immune to any further evidence whatsoever. This state simply cannot be achieved within the Bayesian formalism.
The quest for certainty is science's equivalent of alchemy: alchemists weren't wrong because of their investigative techniques (which were often quite good) but because they were pursuing the wrong goal (transmutation of the elements). The proper goal of science is not certainty but knowledge, which is inherently uncertain. Philosophers don't understand this, and will no-doubt continue to promulgate the model of Poperian method for generations to come.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Interesting. I had never looked into the technicolor theories in detail, but I thought the CERN team has measured some of the decay modes of the particle detected and that they were also consistent with a Higgs particle. I guess more decay modes and data will let us know what it really is. Historically this reminds of the Yukawa meson pi particle... which turned out not to be the mediator of the strong force kind of idea.... I'll need to read up on technicolor now in my personal library. I'm cheering for both sides... will be cool to find out which it is.
Stephen Hawking told us there is no god, not even a particle. :-)
http://www.cnet.com/news/steph...
this is about funding...and ego
they wanted to find the "God Particle" and don't care if it actually advances science
they didn't choose inductive reasoning from a list, after debating pros and cons...
the popular press (which loves "Science!") jumped on it...anyone w/ a PhD can convince a dumb journalist of anything
Thank you Dave Raggett
given a choice between you and him...well, he's the one who is right.
on what?
choice of analogy?
he chose that b/c it lent significance to his work...which was not new theoretical work but confirming a model we already know is incomplete
getting academic accoloades doesn't mean you are immune from criticism of language choices
"God particle" is not a good analogy...what about the Higgs/Boson does it help you understand?
it's more like trolling Creationists than anything else...
"god particle"....please
Thank you Dave Raggett
the whole "Higgs Boson!!" hype makes me sick
the Standard Model is already obsolete...we know it is insufficient
all the CERN press was just hype
confirming (or not!) a model that we already know needs to be revised is the opposite of science
Thank you Dave Raggett
'theories become more plausible or less plausible, and are never "true" or "false", which would imply that they are immune to any further evidence whatsoever. This state simply cannot be achieved within the Bayesian formalism.'
Really? What in the formalism prevents a prior of 1? Is Cromwell's rule enforced in some way by the math? Or is it a heuristic outside of the formalism, a guideline, easy enough to overlook? Inferences on new never-seen-before samples have to use such hacks as smoothing to prevent breaking the Bayes model. Are all those hacks included in the formalism?
CERN recognizes that the observation of the Higg's particle will cause the universe to immediately recycle.That's what the Higg's field does. Somebody will make that observation someday, but not on their shift.
Told you so. Like magnetic monopoles, they're more a "the equations would be prettier if this existed" but do not represent a fundamental physics requirement. They *can't*, because the original gaps the Higgs Boson was supposed to fill are not filled by any detected particle after 50 years of search, including the one that CERN claims to have discovered. If they were such a critical and ubiquitous particle, it should have been verified within the first year of operation of CERN or of notably smaller accelerators.
confirming or not finding the Higgs boson is exactly science
but according to TFA, they didn't do that
i understand your greater point that it's research and it increases our knowledge, but i'm criticizing the research design, and the context/reporting of the findings
Thank you Dave Raggett
They just made some iodine/anti-iodine!
Despite the flood of high-precision data from particle accelerators, in some sense particle physics is a data-starved science. It's much easier to come up with a new hypothesis than to perform an experiment that can distinguish it from others, and so there is usually a plethora of theories that match any given new observation, and all the ones before it. But some of these hypotheses will be simpler and hence more predictive (fewer free parameters) than others. As far as I'm aware, the "standard model Higgs" is the simplest and oldest hypothesis that matches all the data. There is good reason to prefer it, though of course there are always other possibilities.
It's a bit like trying to determine the species of a bird. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quaks like a duck, etc, then "it's a duck" would be your nr. 1 hypothesis. But it could still be some some alien creature from another planet that just came out of an invisible UFO. Perhaps it's been engineered to look just like a duck. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence. I think most of us wouldn't spend too much time worrying about those possibilities.
Thechnicolor higgs and other alternative hypotheses are much more reasonable than the alterntaive hypotheses above, but the standard model higgs is still the default explanation.
Physical theories are confirmed by evidence, and well confirmed by large amounts of of evidence... but confirmation is not exactly the same as proof
Who's replicated the Higgs?
The Higgs discovery was done by two groups, working independently and doing different experiments, although using the same accelerator, so that's a good start.
I would not call the Higgs discovery well confirmed, though; not yet. You definitely want to keep on doing experiments to nail this one down more confidently.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Regardless, however crappy the reporting was does not make the work suddenly "the opposite of science."
regardless of the crappy reporting, the research design was bad
as i said before, when I addressed the research design, the idea that we needed to "confirm" a model that is already full of holes, and that, as you even admit, the are other particles that can produce the same data....
it's bad research design...why test that?
test another, more relevant hypothesis with your CERN supercollider
Thank you Dave Raggett
...they can turn it into a YouTube video