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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 . . .
I'm pretty darn sure it proves the existence of Unobtainium.
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 doubt many scientists believe that you can prove any scientific theory true.
Color charge in physics was named because it behaves abstractly like the addition of primary colors, and that made a decent analogy for the description. Technicolor is the name of a theory that extends the Standard model with some stuff that originally was similar to the color charge, so the name reflects that. The theory does a nice job of wrapping up some loose ends from the Standard model, and doesn't require fine-tuning. But like most extensions to the Standard model, it will be a while before alternative theories are confirmed or strongly eliminated because the most obvious results of models extending to high energies require particle accelerators large than what we have.
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"?
+1 thank you. Fucking idiots don't know how science works. Science doesn't deal in "proof", just in making iteratively better models. Another gripe about a lot of commenters here: Science is also not reality. Physics is not reality. Math is not reality. These are all human created abstractions to help us model the underlying reality. The model is not reality.
Except for when we find out that we're living in a simulation - then the model is reality.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Actually, it is Turtles. All the way down.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Well, who's a tetchy Anonymous Coward then?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Nice. But please use a proper link
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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
Just to tune that even further, a proper link would not read "a proper link" but XKCD #1437. :)
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
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.
Well, then _a_ model is reality. But it's not our model.
*Doctor Sheldon Cooper
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.
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
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
jigawatt's first rule of slashdot: Every scientific discussion on slashdot devolves into a heated argument about what science actually is.
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.
Stephen Hawking told us there is no god, not even a particle. :-)
http://www.cnet.com/news/steph...
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
'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?
Double-click + double-click (or double-click + drag to tab bar) WFM.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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
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
But there's still the distinction between the external model, and our internal model which can be incomplete.
Ezekiel 23:20
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