10 ms·

Yes, we did discover the Higgs

281 points by EvgeniyZh 2y ago

vurtdee 2y ago
> This bump is what physicists call a resonance. It follows directly from energy and momentum conservation and special relativity that we teach first year undergraduates (hardly the ivory towers). > 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.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  I assume that you do need maths but not something developed only decades ago. That's what physics students learn today and represent a very conservative body of knowledge, which would be never trivial though.
- verzali 2y ago
  It doesn't take much to look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > 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!
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    > I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory. 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
    - Galatians4_16 2y ago
      Gödel's incompleteness Theorem, applied to QM, in three paragraphs.
      - eigenket 2y ago
        Neither of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems apply to quantum mechanics. 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.
        Galatians4_16 2y ago
        Guess I Dunning Kruegered, when I thought physics is based on mathematics and logical systems, to which a theory (itself having been proven) aught apply.
        bowsamic 2y ago
        Physics isn’t based on mathematics and logical systems, it’s based on measurements that the mathematics are chosen to fit
    - cb321 2y ago
      There are reasonable & reasoned attempts to make sense of all this, such as Sunny Auyang's "How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?" (https://books.google.com/books/about/How_is_Quantum_Field_Theory_Possible.html?id=rcrf0P8DSe0C https://books.google.com/books/about/How_is_Quantum_Field_Th... ) 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 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).
- yk 2y ago
  real data - background model = bump 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.)
Vecr 2y ago
It's lucky the predictions almost exactly matched. Otherwise the inference would have been a nightmare.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  On the other hand, it would arguably have been more interesting had they not.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    We have enough "interesting" things going on in particle physics. We needed a strong discovery is there haven't been as many of those as of late.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  However the earlier predictions about which will be the energy where the resonance will be observed had been wrong. 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.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    They got the simulation based inference going though, right? How high can they crank up the energy and still have that work?
scrubs 2y ago
Good gracious! C'mon! ... science people want science not nonsense not cheap symbolism. 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.
stephantul 2y ago
I think it is good this post was written, I learned a lot, but it makes me sad that it was prompted by such an obvious trolling attempt.
- scaramanga 2y ago
  not to nitpick, but I think "reactionary" or "aspiring crank" are probably more descriptive :) "This isn't music, back in my day we had Credence"
rsynnott 2y ago
Honestly, while it's an interesting article, I'm not sure why one would even give the nonsense it's addressing the dignity of a reply. Hadn't realised Higgs' boson denialism was really a thing.
- thowfeir234234 2y ago
  The parent-poster is a very well known professor in ML/Optimization at Berkeley EECS.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    One of the smaller trade journals of EE was Wireless World. (It closed in 2008.) 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.
    - fecal_henge 2y ago
      All this suggests is that chartership, professorship and shitty journal authorship are poor metrics for credibility. 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.
    - MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
      I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism. Engineers are also unusually likely to be Islamist terrorists, though there are many reasons for that. [1] There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
      - 2y ago
lokimedes 2y ago
Not long after the initial discovery, we had enough data for everyone at the experiments to simply run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up. 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.
- louthy 2y ago
  > run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up. For the idiots in this post (me), could you please explain what that entails and why it helps confirm the discovery?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fnands 2y ago
    Not the original commenter, but also ex-HEP person: 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.
haccount 2y ago
The original blog post have a point in that much of scientific "established fact" springs from prestigious committee with great fanfare, a chain of reasoning is established, it's cast forth with great force and splashes into a brainless media dissemination apparatus and that's the truth we're stuck with for, give or take, a human lifetime. 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.
mellosouls 2y ago
The article here is responding to an original blog post [1] that is not really saying the Higgs was not discovered (despite its trolling title), but raising questions about the meaning of "discovery" in systems that are so complicated as those in modern particle physics. 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 https://www.argmin.net/p/the-higgs-discovery-did-not-take
- noslenwerdna 2y ago
  He is implying that the scientists involved haven't thought of those questions, when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc Also he makes many factual claims that are just incorrect. Just seems like an extremely arrogant guy who hasn't done his homework
  - ttpphd 2y ago
    A computer scientist/electrical engineer who is arrogant? I dunno, I need to see the statistical test to believe that's possible.
    - eightysixfour 2y ago
      Computers are a “complete” system where everything they do is inspectable and, eventually, explainable, and I have observed that people who work with computers (myself included) over estimate their ability to interrogate and explain complex, emergent systems - economics, physics, etc. - which are not literally built on formal logic.
      - dekhn 2y ago
        a single computer might be complete (even then, not everything is inspectable unless you have some very expensive equipment) but distributed systems are not. 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.
BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
I always loved the following thought experiment: 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?
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?
  - BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
    I just said I loved the thought experiment. There's multiple ways to see the flaws in it. Like: how would that large group of scientists (be it at NASA or CERN) keep such a fraud a secret for such a long time? In NASA's case there'd be a lot of people coming clean on their death beds, which hasn't happened of course.
    - bdndndndbve 2y ago
      "thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
  I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research. 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.
12_throw_away 2y ago
The article this is responding to is some of the worst anti-science, anti-intellectual FUD I've seen in a while, with laughably false conceits like (paraphrased) "physics is too complicated, no one understands it" and thus "fundamental research doesn't matter". 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". [1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/ https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/
- xeonmc 2y ago
  > ...is too complicated, no one understands it. Quoth the AI researcher.
- KolenCh 2y ago
  Having been in his lectures in the past, he is the kind of person who teach you to question what you are told/taught. You should know he basically does the same thing to the field of ML (as this does to HEP). 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.
plorg 2y ago
I think the person this article is responding to is just a crank, but it is interesting as a layperson to see the basic mechanisms for making this discovery laid out here.
dekhn 2y ago
For every time I see a criticism like Recht's (and Hossfelder's), I ask "could this theoretical scientist go into the lab and conduct a real experiment". I mean, find some challenging experiment that requires setting up a complex interferometer (or spectroscope, or molecular biology cloning), collect data, analyze it, and replicate an existing well-known theory? 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.
ayhanfuat 2y ago
Here is Ben Recht’s response: https://www.argmin.net/p/toward-a-transformative-hermeneutics https://www.argmin.net/p/toward-a-transformative-hermeneutic...
- dguest 2y ago
  Which is actually very reasonable, it ends with > 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!
- 12_throw_away 2y ago
  Oof. 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.
- munchler 2y ago
  That is some fancy backpedaling.
nyc111 2y ago
This debate reminded me Matt Strassler's recent post that most of the data observed in the accelerators are thrown away [1]: 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. I thought that was strange. It's like there is too much data and our technology is not up to it so let's throw away everything that we cannot process. Throwing data "in the smartest way possible" did not convince me. [1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data-collection-at-the-lhc/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data...
- elashri 2y ago
  I would like a chance to jump into this point because this problem is a function of two things. The throughput that you can make your Tigger (Data acquisition system) save the data and transfer it to permanent storage. This is usually invlove multiple steps and most of them happens in real-time. The other problem is the storage itself and how it would be kept (duplicated and distributed to analysts) which at the scale of operation we are doing is insanely costly. If we are to say save 20% of the generated collision data then we would fill the entire cloud storage in the world in a couple of runs . Also the vasr majority of data is background and useless so you would do a lot of work to clean that and apply your selections which we do anyway but now you are dealing with another problem. The analysts will need to handle much more data and trying new things (ideas and searches) becomes more costly which will be discouraged. So you work in a very constrained way. You improve your capabilities in computing and storage and you present a good physics case of what data (deploy trigger line which is to pick this physics signal) that the experiment is sensitive to and then lets the natural selections take place (metaphorically of course). Most of the experiments cannot because of the data acquisition problems.
- dguest 2y ago
  The technology really is not up to it, though. 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.
RecycledEle 2y ago
The team behind the LHC laid out the criteria for discovering the Highs Boson before beginning their experiments. 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.
rob_c 2y ago
Just to pile on 'Ben', but sorry to break it to machine learning computing enthusiasts. 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...
gklitz 2y ago
Any fool on a hill can confidently state that they don’t believe in gravity because there’s no proof for it and the matematisk theories are all complicated and bureaucratic. Why should he believe it? But so what?

281 points by EvgeniyZh 2y ago

> This bump is what physicists call a resonance. It follows directly from energy and momentum conservation and special relativity that we teach first year undergraduates (hardly the ivory towers). > 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.

lifthrasiir 2y ago
I assume that you do need maths but not something developed only decades ago. That's what physics students learn today and represent a very conservative body of knowledge, which would be never trivial though.
verzali 2y ago
It doesn't take much to look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator
jiggawatts 2y ago
> 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!
- bowsamic 2y ago
  > I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory. 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
  - Galatians4_16 2y ago
    Gödel's incompleteness Theorem, applied to QM, in three paragraphs.
    - eigenket 2y ago
      Neither of Gödel's two incompleteness theorems apply to quantum mechanics. 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.
      - Galatians4_16 2y ago
        Guess I Dunning Kruegered, when I thought physics is based on mathematics and logical systems, to which a theory (itself having been proven) aught apply.
        bowsamic 2y ago
        Physics isn’t based on mathematics and logical systems, it’s based on measurements that the mathematics are chosen to fit
  - cb321 2y ago
    There are reasonable & reasoned attempts to make sense of all this, such as Sunny Auyang's "How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?" (https://books.google.com/books/about/How_is_Quantum_Field_Theory_Possible.html?id=rcrf0P8DSe0C https://books.google.com/books/about/How_is_Quantum_Field_Th... ) 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 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).
yk 2y ago
real data - background model = bump 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.)

Vecr 2y ago

It's lucky the predictions almost exactly matched. Otherwise the inference would have been a nightmare.

rsynnott 2y ago
On the other hand, it would arguably have been more interesting had they not.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  We have enough "interesting" things going on in particle physics. We needed a strong discovery is there haven't been as many of those as of late.
adrian_b 2y ago
However the earlier predictions about which will be the energy where the resonance will be observed had been wrong. 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.
- Vecr 2y ago
  They got the simulation based inference going though, right? How high can they crank up the energy and still have that work?

scrubs 2y ago

Good gracious! C'mon! ... science people want science not nonsense not cheap symbolism. 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.

stephantul 2y ago

I think it is good this post was written, I learned a lot, but it makes me sad that it was prompted by such an obvious trolling attempt.

scaramanga 2y ago
not to nitpick, but I think "reactionary" or "aspiring crank" are probably more descriptive :) "This isn't music, back in my day we had Credence"

rsynnott 2y ago

Honestly, while it's an interesting article, I'm not sure why one would even give the nonsense it's addressing the dignity of a reply. Hadn't realised Higgs' boson denialism was really a thing.

thowfeir234234 2y ago
The parent-poster is a very well known professor in ML/Optimization at Berkeley EECS.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  One of the smaller trade journals of EE was Wireless World. (It closed in 2008.) 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.
  - fecal_henge 2y ago
    All this suggests is that chartership, professorship and shitty journal authorship are poor metrics for credibility. 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.
  - MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
    I can't find the source at the moment, but I've seen it reported in the past that engineers are actually unusually likely to be fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism. Engineers are also unusually likely to be Islamist terrorists, though there are many reasons for that. [1] There's a certain personality type that is drawn to engineering that believes the whole world can be explained by their simple pet model and that they are smarter than everyone else. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
    - 2y ago

lokimedes 2y ago

Not long after the initial discovery, we had enough data for everyone at the experiments to simply run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up. 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.

louthy 2y ago
> run a basic invariant-mass calculation and see the mass peak popping up. For the idiots in this post (me), could you please explain what that entails and why it helps confirm the discovery?
- deleted 2y ago
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- fnands 2y ago
  Not the original commenter, but also ex-HEP person: 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.

haccount 2y ago

The original blog post have a point in that much of scientific "established fact" springs from prestigious committee with great fanfare, a chain of reasoning is established, it's cast forth with great force and splashes into a brainless media dissemination apparatus and that's the truth we're stuck with for, give or take, a human lifetime. 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.

mellosouls 2y ago

The article here is responding to an original blog post [1] that is not really saying the Higgs was not discovered (despite its trolling title), but raising questions about the meaning of "discovery" in systems that are so complicated as those in modern particle physics. 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 https://www.argmin.net/p/the-higgs-discovery-did-not-take

noslenwerdna 2y ago
He is implying that the scientists involved haven't thought of those questions, when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc Also he makes many factual claims that are just incorrect. Just seems like an extremely arrogant guy who hasn't done his homework
- ttpphd 2y ago
  A computer scientist/electrical engineer who is arrogant? I dunno, I need to see the statistical test to believe that's possible.
  - eightysixfour 2y ago
    Computers are a “complete” system where everything they do is inspectable and, eventually, explainable, and I have observed that people who work with computers (myself included) over estimate their ability to interrogate and explain complex, emergent systems - economics, physics, etc. - which are not literally built on formal logic.
    - dekhn 2y ago
      a single computer might be complete (even then, not everything is inspectable unless you have some very expensive equipment) but distributed systems are not. 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.

BurnGpuBurn 2y ago

I always loved the following thought experiment: 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?

bdndndndbve 2y ago
By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?
- BurnGpuBurn 2y ago
  I just said I loved the thought experiment. There's multiple ways to see the flaws in it. Like: how would that large group of scientists (be it at NASA or CERN) keep such a fraud a secret for such a long time? In NASA's case there'd be a lot of people coming clean on their death beds, which hasn't happened of course.
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    "thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.
kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research. 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.

12_throw_away 2y ago

The article this is responding to is some of the worst anti-science, anti-intellectual FUD I've seen in a while, with laughably false conceits like (paraphrased) "physics is too complicated, no one understands it" and thus "fundamental research doesn't matter". 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". [1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/ https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/

xeonmc 2y ago
> ...is too complicated, no one understands it. Quoth the AI researcher.
KolenCh 2y ago
Having been in his lectures in the past, he is the kind of person who teach you to question what you are told/taught. You should know he basically does the same thing to the field of ML (as this does to HEP). 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.

plorg 2y ago

I think the person this article is responding to is just a crank, but it is interesting as a layperson to see the basic mechanisms for making this discovery laid out here.

dekhn 2y ago

For every time I see a criticism like Recht's (and Hossfelder's), I ask "could this theoretical scientist go into the lab and conduct a real experiment". I mean, find some challenging experiment that requires setting up a complex interferometer (or spectroscope, or molecular biology cloning), collect data, analyze it, and replicate an existing well-known theory? 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.

ayhanfuat 2y ago

Here is Ben Recht’s response: https://www.argmin.net/p/toward-a-transformative-hermeneutics https://www.argmin.net/p/toward-a-transformative-hermeneutic...

dguest 2y ago
Which is actually very reasonable, it ends with > 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!
12_throw_away 2y ago
Oof. 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.
munchler 2y ago
That is some fancy backpedaling.

nyc111 2y ago

This debate reminded me Matt Strassler's recent post that most of the data observed in the accelerators are thrown away [1]: 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. I thought that was strange. It's like there is too much data and our technology is not up to it so let's throw away everything that we cannot process. Throwing data "in the smartest way possible" did not convince me. [1] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data-collection-at-the-lhc/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/10/21/innovations-in-data...

elashri 2y ago
I would like a chance to jump into this point because this problem is a function of two things. The throughput that you can make your Tigger (Data acquisition system) save the data and transfer it to permanent storage. This is usually invlove multiple steps and most of them happens in real-time. The other problem is the storage itself and how it would be kept (duplicated and distributed to analysts) which at the scale of operation we are doing is insanely costly. If we are to say save 20% of the generated collision data then we would fill the entire cloud storage in the world in a couple of runs . Also the vasr majority of data is background and useless so you would do a lot of work to clean that and apply your selections which we do anyway but now you are dealing with another problem. The analysts will need to handle much more data and trying new things (ideas and searches) becomes more costly which will be discouraged. So you work in a very constrained way. You improve your capabilities in computing and storage and you present a good physics case of what data (deploy trigger line which is to pick this physics signal) that the experiment is sensitive to and then lets the natural selections take place (metaphorically of course). Most of the experiments cannot because of the data acquisition problems.
dguest 2y ago
The technology really is not up to it, though. 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.

RecycledEle 2y ago

The team behind the LHC laid out the criteria for discovering the Highs Boson before beginning their experiments. 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.

rob_c 2y ago

Just to pile on 'Ben', but sorry to break it to machine learning computing enthusiasts. 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...

gklitz 2y ago

Any fool on a hill can confidently state that they don’t believe in gravity because there’s no proof for it and the matematisk theories are all complicated and bureaucratic. Why should he believe it? But so what?