10 ms·
RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)
- Eliezer 15y agoIt's too early to call this one for sure, but still, I'm proudly on the record as betting against the Higgs. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bets_registry http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bets_registry
- archgoon 15y agoYou bet even odds. Does this mean you are equally likely to expect a Higgs as not, or simply that your belief of there being no Higgs is equal to that of RolfAndreassen's belief that there is one? Genuinely curious here.
- gjm11 15y agoThe odds (and size of bet) were proposed by the other party. So all you can deduce is that Eliezer thinks Pr(Higgs)<1/2. (If you have a good estimate of Eliezer's risk aversion level for bets of that size, you might be able to get a slightly better estimate, but my guess is that it's extremely close to zero.)
- archgoon 15y agoYes, that's why I asked him.
- Eliezer 15y agoAt this point I'd probably bet 10:1 against the Higgs, even taking into account risk aversion.
- indrax 15y ago>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong. Europe explored the universe where America did not.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago> Europe explored the universe where America did not. What did they get out of it? (Honest question.) Also, supposing the Higg's Boson did exist and this experiment found it, how much benefit would the average European derived? How much less benefit would people from other countries enjoy?
- lucasjung 15y agoIndeed. The question isn't, "Did this experiment advance scientific knowledge," the question is, "Was this a prudent and appropriate use of tax money, especially in light of the enormous opportunity costs inherent in any expenditure of tax money?"
- henrikschroder 15y agoThat is ridiculous, ROI is relevant if you're talking about applied research where you have a short-term goal and can make the calculation. But the LHC is basic research, you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago> and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. How do you know that? Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?
- bane 15y agoHas all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line? That's the wrong question. "Has blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?" is a better one and the answer is a most definitive yes, many many many times the amount of money put into it, on the order of trillions of dollars. Do each and every blue sky pure R&D experiment yield such results? Heck no! Neither does any known investment vehicle.
- quandrum 15y agoIncorrect, exaggerated title. They have 95% confidence that it's not in the 145-466 GeV range. They haven't searched the 114-145 GeV range. There's still plenty of work to be done, and sensationalist headlines only serve to mis-inform.
- MaxGabriel 15y agoI don't know how likely other accelerators are to have found the Higgs-Boson, but the article at least makes an attempt to back up its claim: "Lower energy levels have been accessible to smaller accelerators, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab and the LEP—the LHC’s predecessor at CERN—and neither collider had found it. Perhaps the Higgs does not exist at all."
- idlewords 15y agoNeither collider has enough data in those mass ranges to give any useful result. That's WHY the LHC got built.
- modeless 15y agoWhat about the >466 GeV range? Is that considered a possibility? Can the LHC explore that high?
- idlewords 15y agoSee http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-of-closet-part-ii.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-... for discussion. Basically, it's possible, but requires physics beyond the Standard Model.
- melling 15y ago"Congress may feel that even though its 1993 decision to cancel the American alternative to CERN—the Superconducting Super Collider—was generally met with chagrin by the American physics community, it may have been the right move one after all: to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful." I'm a little surprised by that comment. The SSC would have be almost 3x more powerful than the LHC. I still feel like particle physics has been set back decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- idlewords 15y agoIt was, especially considering what that program was cut for - the International Space Station!
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoI should place a long bet regarding dark matter...
- teraflop 15y agoThe Higgs boson has essentially nothing to with dark matter, as far as we know. In fact, they're not even in the same category: the Higgs boson is a theoretical prediction that has yet to be observed (or conclusively ruled out), whereas dark matter is a real, observable thing in the cosmos that we don't yet have a theory to explain.
- zzzmarcus 15y agoDark matter has not been observed, hence the name. We know something is there, but we don't know what is is and we have not seen it.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoIts gravitational effects have been observed, that is how we know it is there. Nobody has seen it, but little in the sky is actually accessible via visible wavelengths.
- evgen 15y agoA gravitational anomaly has been observed, but the source of this anomaly is not just invisible to the visible wavelengths but from all wavelengths we can measure. "Dark matter" sounded a bit better than "unicorn turds" I guess, but at the moment each is equally likely.
- gjm11 15y ago> at the moment each is equally likely. Impossible. Unicorn turds would be a variety of dark matter; if most of the apparent mass in the universe were made of unicorn turds, the dark matter hypothesis would be correct. (Unless they were very sparkly unicorn turds, emitting enough light for us to detect from far off.) Further: they'd be a very boring kind of dark matter: the same kind of stuff as we, the earth, the moon, etc., are made of. And there's very good reason already to believe that there isn't enough of that to account for the gravitational anomalies you get if you assume no dark matter. I therefore declare: Pr(anomaly comes from unicorn turds) is much smaller than Pr(anomaly comes from dark matter).
- mathattack 15y agoThe should/shouldn't argument is really about Free Riding basic research. For most companies this problem means deferring basic rEsearch to govt. Both directly (funding research) and indirectly (IP protection and care policy) governments free ride each others research. The US isn't perfect but generally we are the the horse and not the rider.
- idlewords 15y agoThat's an utterly misleading headline. The Higgs boson is not excluded in the mass range 115-145 GeV, and there won't be enough evidence for a null result (or discovery) until at least November. More context here: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-of-closet-part-ii.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-...
- andrewflnr 15y agoMaybe its irrational, but kind of hope they don't find it. It's almost gratifying, definitely exhilarating, to know that particle physics is still a fresh frontier with plenty of territory to be discovered. Supersymmetric particles seem to be unlikely too. It seems like we're almost back at the drawing board. So if it turns out that it doesn't exist, where do we go from here? What are the alternative theories? It's been a while since I went into particle physics at all deeply, so I don't know all the leading theories and their pros and cons.
- idlewords 15y agoParticle physics has been chugging along for thirty years without a major discovery. Everything fits the Standard Model to a depressing degree. The worst-case scenario is that we'll actually find a Higgs boson in the expected range... and then nothing else. It's perfectly possible that further interesting physics takes place at energy scales too far beyond the reach of any accelerator we can build in the next few hundred years.
- hypersoar 15y agoThis is rather beside the point, but why must they call it the "God Particle"? According to Wikipedia, it was coined in a popsci book when the writer's editor wouldn't let him call them "goddamn particles". So now we're stuck with this hollow, cliché, uninformative phrase for eternity.
- wlievens 15y agoPlus it feeds the religious nuts, and Dan Brown.
- guygurari 15y agoI'm a particle physics grad student. My god, what utter nonsense. The only reasonably accurate paragraph is this: "And, more importantly, the lower energy range from 114 to just under 145 billion electron volts, a region of energy that Fermilab has determined, through earlier experiments, may harbor the Higgs, has not been ruled out. But the Higgs is quickly running out of places to hide." The region of higher Higgs mass is indeed ruled out (at 95% confidence), and currently the bound is even stronger than stated -- the Higgs mass is expected to be between 114-130 GeV if it exists. The article's main flaw is its assumption that, because the remaining mass window is "small", it decreases our chances of finding the Higgs. This is not the case for several reasons. Most importantly, it has been known since the planning stages of the accelerator that a Higgs with such a low mass is more difficult to find, in the sense that it requires running the experiment for longer, collecting more statistics, before we can decide whether or not it exists. So it comes as no surprise that we first have conclusive results about the higher mass range. It just happens that the Higgs, if it exists, doesn't have a high mass, so we keep looking. It is expected that in 1-2 years we will have enough statistics to either discover or rule out the Higgs in the remaining mass window. The second mistake the article makes is in claiming that not finding the Higgs is somehow a bad thing. That it means the LHC was a waste of taxpayer money. I would say quite the opposite. If the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing else, then it will only confirm our existing model and we will learn nothing new about the world (except for the value of the Higgs mass). This is the worst possible outcome. On the other hand, not finding the Higgs would be an extremely exciting result, since it would open the way to less well-explored ideas about the origin of mass. The goal of the LHC is to teach us about the world, not stroke physicists' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are.
- maaku 15y agoI am reminded of an observation made by my former boss, a planetary scientist at NASA, about that same statistical effect: When a new Earth-crossing asteroid or comet is discovered, it's orbit is rarely known with any great certainty. The cross sectional area of the Earth divided by the area of space the object might possibly pass through yields the chance of a collision. With each successive night of observation, the orbital characteristics are determined to greater accuracy, and the cone of potential trajectories is reduced. As a not-so-intuitive result, the reported probability of a doomsday scenario grows geometrically higher with each successive night of observation. In some cases it makes national or world-wide news as the probability of mass extinction grows from 1 in a billion, to 1 in a million, to one in 10,000... Obviously there's a trend there, right? Some journalists think so, then mass hysteria ensues and NASA receives correspondence from mothers asking if they should euthanize their children to protect them from the horrific event (a true story, sadly). Then at the height of mass hysteria, the next night's observation brings the circle of uncertainty just small enough to exclude the passage of the Earth, and instantly the probability of Armageddon drops to zero. Those media outlets who hyped the doomsday scenario then accuse the scientists of fear mongering (ironic), and the public forgets until the next big object is found looming our way, and the cycle continues. It's sad, but not unexpected that the general public lacks the mathematical literacy to understand these statistical quirks. It's truly sad, and perhaps even criminal that journalists, and especially science journalists fall victim to those same misconceptions.
- mikk0j 15y agoWell, Higgs Boson is aptly named the "God particle" - it seems likelier and likelier that it doesn't exist.
- bcl 15y agoThe LHC hasn't been running at 7GeV since March. AFAIK they have not fixed all the splices and are currently maxing out at around 3.5GeV You can watch it live here (currently it is off): http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC1 http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...