Yes, we did discover the Higgs
theoryandpractice.org
theoryandpractice.org
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.
For the idiots in this post (me), could you please explain what that entails and why it helps confirm the discovery?
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.
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.)
I'm only an amateur, but wouldn't that give different results depending on choice of units? I.e, I usually use C=1.
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).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space#Minkowski_metr...
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.
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!
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5155997/influenza-strai...
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).
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.
I certainly don't believe in black holes in the same manner that I believe in the breakfast I'm eating right now.
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.
1 for 29 by 2019:
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.
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
Also he makes many factual claims that are just incorrect.
Just seems like an extremely arrogant guy who hasn't done his homework
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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....
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.
"This isn't music, back in my day we had Credence"
> 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!
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.
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.
We(particle physicsts) have been performing similar, and in a lot of ways much more complex analyses using ML tools for decades in production.
Please stop shrouding your new 'golden goose' of AI/ML modelling in mystery it's 'just' massively multi-dimensional regression analyses with all of the problems, advantages and improvements that brings...
Why is there some beef that nature is complex, if you had the same vitriol toward certain other fields we'd be worrying about big-pharma's reproducibility crisis just at the top of the ice-berg of problems in modern science, not that most people are illiterate when it comes to algebra...
Hadn't realised Higgs' boson denialism was really a thing.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
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.
Lots of failed theorists with that personality type/flaw as well.
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...)
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".
Quoth the AI researcher.
You know, when I first read this thread and the 3 posts involved, I find the original post Ben wrote arrogant and hard to swallow. But once I searched who he is, and recognized him, knowing his character I immediately “get his point”. While not an expert in the fields, I have both graduate level educations in HEP and ML. My point is that my conclusion is unlikely due to the lack of understanding of these fields, but more because of my understanding of who he is…
Admittedly, he should not assume people read it as he intended how people would perceive. It took a lot of contextualizations, including the expectation from the title he explained in the later posts, to really take his posts seriously.
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.
[1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data...
Most of the experiments cannot because of the data acquisition problems.
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.
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.
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.
But so what?
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
I agree that income is a joke but... more than seven figures as in eight? That's quite a lot.
I would be much more worried about errors in methodology than falsifications.
No, not at all.
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.
> 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.
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
Kinda kills my thought experiment though, but I guess that's the point. Thanks.
Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.
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.
"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?...
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.
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.