Data hint at 'five God particles' | Hacker News Reader

Data hint at 'five God particles'

news.bbc.co.uk

41 pointsmebassett26 comments

The hunt for the higg's boson reminds me of the attempts to measure the speed of the earth using light beams. Everything we thought we knew about physics told us that we should be able to measure the speed the earth was orbiting by measuring the difference in speed between two beams of light. When the experiments failed, the response was develop more precise measuring techniques, and more perfect mirrors. It wasn't until Einstein that people realized these failed experiments were not failures at all, but evidence that the universe doesn't work quite how we thought. The hunt for the Higg's Boson, and the "failure" to find it after all these years just seems like a reminder that empirical evidence > theoretical models. Just because the math seems elegant doesn't mean it necessarily applies to the universe we are living in.

Of course, they may find the Higg's boson tomorrow, and then my little theory about them being wrong would be proved wrong, but that's science for you.

While it would be very surprising if the Higgs turned out to be a boring, Standard-Model Higgs, there are very good reasons to believe that something Higgs-like has to happen at the multi-TeV scale. Basically, without a Higgs the Standard Model yields non-physical predictions (e.g. probabilities for certain processes exceed unity).

In other words, the Standard Model isn't even consistent above a TeV or so without the Higgs. Something has to give.

Edit: to make contact with your example, everyone knew that if you didn't find evidence for the ether, than the model of electromagnetism was very wrong. In fact, that was great justification for carrying out Michelson-Morely type experiments.

The two aren't really comparable. With Newtonian physics there were clear signs decades before Einstein that something wasn't right, the clearest example being the perihelion precession of Mercury: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_problem_in_general_relat...

In modern particle physics the main limitation is lack of experimental data. To get that data we have to build giant and expensive experiments like the LHC. Even if the LHC is completely successful we're still going to need bigger colliders to test other things at even higher energies.

Another problem is that the current theories make predictions about things that we probably won't ever be able to measure directly due to the microscopic scales involved.

To name an example. We think that gluons exist inside atomic nuclei, but we can't observe them unless we break the nuclei apart, thus destroying the gluon's habitat. We think it's there because we see what looks like the energy of a gluon falling apart, and because mathematical models back it up.

At the time, no one (not even Einstein) thought the precession of Mercury had anything to do with the lack of experimental detection of the Ether. Einstein figured out special relativity, solving the Ether problem, almost a decade before doing general relativity and thereby solving the precession or Mercury.

Your early history of relativity isn't quite correct. The experimental results posed no convincing challenge to the established theory. After all, Lorentz' theory of ether contraction in the vicinity of moving bodies (the exact same mathematical operations that we today see as a fundamental building block of special relativity that still go by the name Lorentz contraction) could adequately explain those experiments (the maths is exactly the same as for a relativistic interpretation, yielding the exact same predictions for all experiments possible around 1900).

What motivated Einstein's work (and that of other, less successful theoretical physicists at the time) was the mathematical impossibility of classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics both being correct at the same time. After all, his paper that introduced special relativity was called "on the electrodynamics of moving bodies." There were no mirrors involved.

> The hunt for the Higg's Boson, and the "failure" to find it after all these years just seems like a reminder that empirical evidence > theoretical models.

That assertion doesn't make sense as you invoke Einstein to support it. Einstein was a theoretical physicist. A more accurate and less sensationalistic assertion could have been : one theoretical model > another theoretical model.

The hunt for the Higg's Boson, and the "failure" to find it after all these years just seems like a reminder that empirical evidence > theoretical models. Just because the math seems elegant doesn't mean it necessarily applies to the universe we are living in.

I presume you're using quotes around "failure" to remind us that, in fact, there has been no such thing.

We haven't explored the full energy range where our models suggest the Higgs boson(s) could live, and even where we have searched, we haven't accrued enough data for a statistically significant result--positive or negative.

Claiming we have failed to find the Higgs is like claiming tigers don't exist without leaving New York.

"""The Higgs boson's nickname comes from its importance to the Standard Model; it is the sub-atomic particle which explains why all other particles have mass."""

That's not the story I heard: Leon Lederman named the hypothesized Higgs boson the "God particle" as a joke, because its effects were everywhere yet nobody had ever seen it in the flesh--not because it was in any way powerful or dangerous or numinous or terrifying.

The growing number of elementary particles reminds me of the epicycles-upon-epicycles in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. The question is when are we going to have our "Newton moment" and figure out that they're all just manifestations of one elementary particle or string or something else?

That would be nice, but isn't that metaphysics? The thought that there is something simple underneath it all appeals to our aesthetics, but it needn't be that way...

No you're totally right, there's nothing that says it has to be that way. But since it seems that all of the elementary particles coalesced out of a relatively homogenous energy field after the Big Bang, it doesn't seem unlikely that all of the particles could be explained by tiny permutations in an underlying universal field.

If that's metaphysics, then every famous physicist--Newton to Einstein to Feynmann--has been a strong believer in the power of metaphysics.

Well, I agree with that, it's been a fruitful heuristic, but it doesn't need to hold in every case.

Fine, but that doesn't make the "power " any more or less valid, only that it seems to be useful thus far.

Well, then this just basically becomes a philosophical argument about the justification for empiricism/inductive-reasoning. Can we axiomatically prove that just because the sun has risen in the morning for the last 10,000 mornings that it will do so tomorrow? No. Neither can be sure that just because every single major advance in physics has come because of simplification/beauty that the next one will come the same way.

But you'd be a fool to bet otherwise.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to be a fool. I might be of course, especially compared to the many people I know who are smarter than myself.

I think though that your argument is basically an 'appeal to ridicule' fallacy. You are making it sound like my statement is the philosophical equivalent of 'we can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow'. It isn't, it is simple the statement that the current zoo of particles may well all be fundamental, with no 'simpler' theory underlying them.

Secondly, I think your statement that 'every single major advance in physics' has been a simplification is debatable.

Thirdly, extrapolating from that that every new advance will be found using the same heuristic is also debatable. If there really is to be a scientific breakthrough of the magnitude of a Newton, it seems likely (almost by definition) that it will be from an unexpected avenue of thought - seeing that the expected ones have been well researched and haven't been all that productive.

I guess it makes sense to bet on a unifying theory if you are a career particle physicist. There's a Nobel prize in it. It doesn't make sense to bet on the opposite notion, since there are probably no breakthroughs that way.

I do think your statement is the philosophical equivalent of 'we can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow', except that it differs by degree. (The sun has risen thousands of times in my personal experience, and bazillions of times in the experience of humans, while only a handful of fundamental physics discoveries have been made.) In either case, it's a question of justifying the claim that "In situations of type A, X has always been true in the past. Therefore, in situations of type A in the future, X will be true".

Likewise your simple statement that "the current zoo of particles may well all be fundamental, with no 'simpler' theory underlying them." is analogous to "the sun will collapse into a black hole tomorrow". Again, just a difference of degree.

[I should stress here that the justification for empiricism is an age-old philosophical problem which isn't easy to understand, much less solve. However, I think that a proper understanding of the history of physics gives very convincing (though maybe not the-sun-will-rise convincing) evidence that simplicity and beauty will be found at the bottom of the particle zoo.]

I don't understand what the true statement

>If there really is to be a scientific breakthrough of the magnitude of a Newton, it seems likely (almost by definition) that it will be from an unexpected avenue of thought - seeing that the expected ones have been well researched and haven't been all that productive.

has to do with our current discussion.

Lastly, (basically) no career particle physicist think that any Nobel prizes will be awarded for a unifying theory in their lifetime. (See, for instance, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2998). Perhaps, if we're lucky, there will be a somewhat simplifying theory (which gets a Nobel prize) but that certainly couldn't come from the dominant research avenue, string theory.

If I see a coin come up heads twenty times in a row, I'm going to use the power of induction to predict that the coin is biased towards heads. Induction tells me that, the more something has happened in the past, it's more likely to continue to do so in the future. I trust induction because induction has worked for me before.

Somewhere out there in mind-space is someone who believes in anti-induction: each coin flip of heads convinces him that the coin is biased toward tails. Anti-induction tells him that, the more something has happened in the past, the less likely it is to do so in the future. If asked why he trusts anti-induction, he exclaims: "Because it's never worked before!"

That said, just because these two minds are possible in mind-space, doesn't mean that they're equally likely to form naturally in any given physical universe. In fact, to our intuition, one of the two seems particularly unlikely...

Credit to http://lesswrong.com/lw/t9/no_license_to_be_human/

It's not just metaphysics though, right? More complex models have more moving parts and require more energy and information to specify. I feel like, in a wholly qualitative but empirically guided fashion, there is a natural savings to simplicity.

Ptolemy, and his intellectual descendants, didn't actually use epicycles-on-epicycles. Just a single epicycle on a deferent. Although "epicycles-on-epicycles" might be traditionally emblematic of "incorrectly formulated over-complicated theories", it has no sound basis in the history of astronomy.

The Ptolemaic model, while ineffective at meeting the measurements of planetary movement, was a fairly simple, and elegant, mathematical model.

Where have you seen a growing number of elementary particles? The number hasn't changed since the formulation of the Standard Model some thirty years ago.

That has already happend in the 70ies when the unexplained zoo of hundreds of elemenary particles has been reduced to a handful of more elementary particles (12, called quarsks and leptons) and a set of dynamic theories that use even fewer bosons to describe the interactions between them. This post-copernican model of elementary particle physics is the standard model.

Particle physicist have been expecting the next copernican revolution that replaces this model really soon now with the next accelerator upgrade since at least 1980 (look for example for conference talks by Haim Hariri from that time), but fundamental shifts don't happen that often.

Can anybody explain how they get the number of five Higgs particles?

If they count one doublet as 4 particles, two doublets would be 8 particles, right?

From the news story:

Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons.

They say the data points to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges.

Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.

And:

The Standard Model only has one Higgs "doublet". Although we tend to think of the Higgs boson as one particle, it actually comes in a package of four, explained Dr Martin.

"In the Standard Model, you only see one of them because the other three are absorbed into [other parts of the scheme] such as the W and the Z bosons. There's only one left," he told BBC News.

"So if you want to add another Higgs doublet - you actually have to add four more particles."

FTA: > The Standard Model only has one Higgs "doublet". Although we tend to think of the Higgs boson as one particle, it actually comes in a package of four, explained Dr Martin.

> "In the Standard Model, you only see one of them because the other three are absorbed into [other parts of the scheme] such as the W and the Z bosons. There's only one left," he told BBC News.

> "So if you want to add another Higgs doublet - you actually have to add four more particles."

This theory would tend to suggest that there are indeed several undiscovered particles

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/how-a-surfer--1...

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