Rather than assuming they'll find it, physicists at CERN publicly describe their efforts to determine IF the Higgs boson exists.
Credit: CERN / Science & Society
I've watched quite a few interviews lately in which eminent, or at least prominent, scientists speak on a variety of topics ranging from evolution to the workings of the human mind.
One of the disturbing trends I've noticed in such popular science interviews is a slow erosion of the scientific method.
Whilst the technical details of many scientific topics may be beyond a lay audience, the underlying philosophy of the scientific method isn't.
The most common and perhaps serious mistake that has me throwing things at the TV is glib statements predicting what science 'will' discover in the future.
It usually goes something like this. "We've discovered x and soon we'll discover y." The problem there is that you're essentially beginning with your conclusion and confidently predicting that the data will ultimately support it and that's the antitheses of science.
If you knew what you were going to discover before you'd done the experiment, there would be no point doing it.
For example if you understand how the brain processes certain sounds - that's great. Perhaps you'll also understand how it does more complex things one day. But unless you actually know how the more complex function works how can you be sure what you will or won't discover?
Perhaps it will be totally different to the way you expect and that's what should make science exciting.
The history of science is filled with examples of concepts that seemed so clever and so well tested that aside from a few details, everything was pretty much all wrapped up.
For example, people just as intelligent as ourselves were once convinced that the various constituents of the Solar System orbited the Earth. Observations of the outer planets fitted the model pretty well and all that was left to figure out were a few annoying little deviations in the data for the inner ones.
Crazy ideas like Mars moving in little circuits as it orbited the Earth were introduced to make the observed data fit a concept that simply 'must' be correct. Of course in the end it turned out that this model was completely and utterly wrong. But brilliant minds - and they really were brilliant minds - were so in love with an idea of how the world 'must' be that they didn't allow themselves or anyone else for that matter, to contest it. Sadly this tendency is still alive and well today in places.
I admit to an element of bias here, but in my experience modern physicists are the least guilty of this kind of presumption. I guess a couple of centuries of discoveries that radically changed our view of the universe have beaten most of that out of us.
Physicists at CERN publicly describe their efforts to determine IF the Higgs boson exists. They don't say "we will discover it at these energies", they say, "IF it exists and IF the Standard Model is correct, then we expect it around this particular energy range".
That's the kind of language that keeps my TV screen safe from projectiles. It's science the way it should be done. Because nature's a tricky little beast and can be very hard to predict. That's what's so cool about science, it's full of surprises.
Perhaps one of the biggest shake-ups in our view of the universe was the emergence of quantum mechanics. It very much threw the cat amongst the pigeons - no clever play on words intended! A universe that was once seen as so linear and rigidly deterministic began to look a whole lot weirder and truthfully, more interesting.
Quantum mechanics is one of my personal favourite areas of science. Not because of the physics per se, but because of that inherent weirdness. It often seems that the stranger the theory, the more likely the data are to support it and that amuses me in a strange kind of way.
In a sense, quantum mechanics keeps science open minded. It throws up crazy sounding ideas that often turn out to be spot on. And most of all, it teaches us not to be drawn into that arrogant mindset of thinking we're so clever that we'll soon understand everything. I have a feeling nature has quite a few surprises up her sleeve yet!
Tim Wetherell is the editor of ScienceWise, the Australian National University's science magazine.
Why? There's a possible reason
They already know something else.
Sure, Higgs boson never explained the whole. But attempted to explain the oldest concepts of modern physics in quantum framework, which was given a raw demonstration by Galileo in 1589 by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We start learning Physics with his laws of force and friction but never learn more than that ever during our whole tenure as students. A quantum explanation of mass and gravity thus will give a body to the 100 year old painting of quantum mechanics.
However, it's not Higgs boson, but unnamed particles of two origins, which create gravity between 'masses'. The discovery already took place in 2010 and has now been reported as a USPTO application which will be officially published by the US Patent Office. Some general landmarks are on my site http://www.anadish.com/. I have refrained from giving details, as the details are already under publication.
Galileo mistakes.
This post seems to be nonsensical. To begin, Galileo never dropped anything off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, nor performed any such experiments. Secondly, what are Galileo's 'Laws of force and friction'? I was never taught any such things in my science courses, nor have heard of any since. Secondly, I learned a whole lot more about Physics than this, even 45 years or so ago, so just what is this correspondent on about? Whoever it is has nothing right so far so I seriously doubt they are worth taking seriously
LHC experiment in an inertial lock
It seems that on earth there is an inertial lock which prevents particles to behave exactly as they behaved moments after so called 'big bang'. You can refer to my research and await a formal detailed disclosure. So LHC would not be able to exactly recreate conditions the conditions as expected. Doomsday fearing persons may take heart, it may not be possible for LHC to gobble up the earth, after all.
inertial lock
seems to be more gobbledegook like the preceding one about Galileo. This subject is attracting nutters
May contain nuts!
This sort of topic will always attract nutters as it gives them the perfect excuse as to why 'science' is ignoring them. Rather than it simply ignoring them because they are nutters.
OTOH, more than one 'nutter' has turned out to be right. It's a hard call without the benefit of hindsight, but I agree that incoherent gobbledegook is generally a pretty accurate indicator of nutterdom as opposed to too-far-aread-of-their-time-ism :-).