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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.
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.
It's got nothing to do with those theories being 'imposters', it has everything to do with the the fact that no theory should ever be unchallenged, even if a theory is correct (as the Standard Model might very well be) it does not mean we should not try to come up with alternative explanations for the phenomena we observe in experiments.
If the Standard Model is correct it should ideally be "more" correct than those "imposter" theories.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Yeah, perhaps, but science isn't religion and having hopes and strong beliefs into a replacement model doesn't make it real and valid. The most probable explanation for the bump in data observed at CERN LHC is the Higgs. The techni-higgs is much, much less probable, by many magnitudes of order because it relies on a yet to discover techni-force and so on.
So, unless we have a load of new data we cannot explain with the Standard Model, it is very unlikely this particle is something than Higgs.
But the guy got his 15 minutes fame.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
It's got nothing to do with those theories being 'imposters',
The theories are not imposters, the specific category of theories the GP was referring to contain "Higgs imposters", i.e. particles that to various degrees look like what is expected for the Higgs boson. What the poster said was correct, that as more observations are made, it can be more and more difficult to come up with alternative theories that are consistent. That isn't a statement about what should and shouldn't be done, only that it becomes harder.
If the Standard Model is correct it should ideally be "more" correct than those "imposter" theories.
We already know that the Standard Model is wrong on some level, and have accumulated quite a few theories that extends the Standard Model to deal with some of its shortcomings. The big question at this point isn't if the Standard Model is more correct, but which of the competing extensions is more correct, especially considering they often are a superset of a large part of the Standard Model.
+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
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
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.
Theories are not "correct", just strongly supported by experimental evidence.
That was kind of my point. The point of these alternative theories is not to attempt to disprove the current leading theory but to offer an explanation that also could explain the data. Then new data is found that does not support the alternative theories but do support the main leading one, and you come up with new alternative ones.
If you only work with one theory you are falling victim to confirmation bias.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
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
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.
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.