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It should be easy to find counterexamples, look at experimental physics. The measure of the Higgs was not a small insignificant result, but it didn't go from u
by tux3 5y ago
It should be easy to find counterexamples, look at experimental physics.
The measure of the Higgs was not a small insignificant result, but it didn't go from unexpected to obvious. It was expected and honestly unknown, until new instruments and fancy statistics could just barely push it over the significance line. It was in a sense a disapointment, but arguably the last big breakthrough for the standard model..
Look at gravitational waves. Suddenly we have a whole new force we can measure the universe with! This one breakthrough opened a whole new field of study. And yet it's at the edge of what we can measure, and even when the data looks consistent with the explanation, it's far from an obvious thing.
- a1369209993 5y agoBoth of those are things that are not revolutionary, but rather logical extensions of what the established models already predict. The Higgs boson was a direct confirmation of what is literally called the "standard model" of particle physics, and gravitational waves follow fairly directly from orbital decay + conservation of energy. Actually detecting them is a fairly impressive feat of engineering, but scientifically it's "yep, the thing we figured was probably true turned out to be true".
- heisenzombie 5y agoI should point out that many fields have commonly used p ≤ .05 as a "significance line". The significance line in particle physics is generally 5-sigma, or p ≤ 3x10⁻⁷. The Higgs is now at p ≤ 1x10⁻⁹. I think that meets GP's criteria of obviousness, at least in spirit. Also -- you can look at the plots in the Higgs discovery papers and go "oh yeah, there's definitely a bump there".
- bpodgursky 5y agoYeah exactly. Once identified, the measurements and graphs made it blindingly obvious that they'd found it.