Yes, we did discover the Higgs
19 comments
·October 23, 2024stephantul
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.
scaramanga
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"
lokimedes
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.
rsynnott
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.
thowfeir234234
The parent-poster is a very well known professor in ML/Optimization at Berkeley EECS.
Vecr
It's lucky the predictions almost exactly matched. Otherwise the inference would have been a nightmare.
adrian_b
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.
scrubs
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.
haccount
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.
vurtdee
> 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.
verzali
It doesn't take much to look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator
yk
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.)
lifthrasiir
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.
jiggawatts
> 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!
bowsamic
> 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
Galatians4_16
Gödel's incompleteness Theorem, applied to QM, in three paragraphs.
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