[HN Gopher] Yes, we did discover the Higgs
___________________________________________________________________
Yes, we did discover the Higgs
Author : EvgeniyZh
Score : 245 points
Date : 2024-10-23 16:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theoryandpractice.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (theoryandpractice.org)
| vurtdee wrote:
| > 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.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| 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.
| verzali wrote:
| It doesn't take much to look it up:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Godel's incompleteness Theorem, applied to QM, in three
| paragraphs.
| eigenket wrote:
| Neither of Godel'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.
| cb321 wrote:
| 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).
| bowsamic wrote:
| Of course there are attempts and opinions but I'm
| pointing out that there is absolutely no consensus
| elashri wrote:
| 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.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Thanks for the reference! Looks like an intriguing book
| from a glance at the contents pages
| mannykannot wrote:
| > ...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.
| yk wrote:
| 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.)
| Vecr wrote:
| It's lucky the predictions almost exactly matched. Otherwise the
| inference would have been a nightmare.
| rsynnott wrote:
| On the other hand, it would arguably have been more interesting
| had they not.
| j_maffe wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| Vecr wrote:
| They got the simulation based inference going though, right?
| How high can they crank up the energy and still have that
| work?
| scrubs wrote:
| 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.
| stephantul wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The parent-poster is a very well known professor in
| ML/Optimization at Berkeley EECS.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| 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.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| 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....
| yard2010 wrote:
| What the heck did I just read. It feels like BS - Isn't
| the sample too small?
|
| https://archive.is/FfEK4
| dekhn wrote:
| it's sociology- a field which frequently does not provide
| evidence for its claims.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| You mean 400 people? No, that isn't too small. Why would
| you think it was?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| stracer wrote:
| > 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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...)
| hydrolox wrote:
| 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
| lokimedes wrote:
| 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.
| louthy wrote:
| > 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?
| fnands wrote:
| 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.
| nick3443 wrote:
| Like this one? https://cds.cern.ch/record/1546765/files/fig
| s_gamma_gamma_ma...
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > 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.)
| Filligree wrote:
| _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.
| dguest wrote:
| 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).
| Filligree wrote:
| 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.
| dguest wrote:
| 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#Minkow
| ski_metr...
| sixo wrote:
| you use the same units on both sides of the equation,
| it's fine, it's like counting "meters squared"
| WalterBright wrote:
| What about the loss of mass released as energy inherent to
| the decay process?
| cwillu wrote:
| "Energy" is only released as the energy and momentum of
| the resulting particles.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> 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!
| biofox wrote:
| 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| 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.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| IX-103 wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > 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.
| zehaeva wrote:
| 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...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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).
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| 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."
| hn72774 wrote:
| > 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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
| hn72774 wrote:
| It is still nascent according to this
| https://rubinobservatory.org/news/multi-messenger-astro
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| By that line of reasoning, the moon does not exist.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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.
| maxnoe wrote:
| 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
| dguest wrote:
| 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.
| haccount wrote:
| 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| 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
| ttpphd wrote:
| A computer scientist/electrical engineer who is arrogant? I
| dunno, I need to see the statistical test to believe that's
| possible.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| 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.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| 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.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Great explanation, thank you.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > 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.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| 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.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > 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?
| spookie wrote:
| Other systems might not be part of a field as mature as
| yours, I would argue.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| 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....
| jaculabilis wrote:
| > 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Possibly! I remember that but completely missed it as an
| inspiration here.
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| 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?
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| 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?
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| 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.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| "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.
| kjrfghslkdjfl wrote:
| 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.
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| 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.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| 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...
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| 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 Schon).
|
| I would be much more worried about errors in methodology
| than falsifications.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Actually "No Higgs" would have been as big a scientific
| discovery as a Higgs, maybe bigger.
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| 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?
| ejolto wrote:
| No it would mean the standard model is wrong and there
| would be more to discover.
| Filligree wrote:
| 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| fastasucan wrote:
| >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.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| No. This has been answered multiple times up and down the
| thread.
| lokimedes wrote:
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| 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!"
| elashri wrote:
| 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.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| 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.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Imagine the earth isn't round!
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| Oh I like this argument a lot, thanks.
| flatline wrote:
| 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?
| nick3443 wrote:
| Any favorite resources for a fellow science-interested laymen
| interested in getting to your understanding level?
| flatline wrote:
| 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.
| g4zj wrote:
| > 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| 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.
| blahblahblah10 wrote:
| 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
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| fastasucan wrote:
| >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.
| ttpphd wrote:
| 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?...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| SideQuark wrote:
| > 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.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| 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/
| xeonmc wrote:
| > ...is too complicated, no one understands it.
|
| Quoth the AI researcher.
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Here is Ben Recht's response: https://www.argmin.net/p/toward-a-
| transformative-hermeneutic...
| dguest wrote:
| 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!
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| 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_.
| munchler wrote:
| That is some fancy backpedaling.
| nyc111 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-
| data...
| elashri wrote:
| 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.
| dguest wrote:
| 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.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| 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.
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