No Higgs Just Yet 190
gbrumfiel writes "Last month, scientists reported a number of 'excess events' that could be caused by the appearance of the long-sought Higgs boson inside the LHC. But it looks like they'll have to put the champagne back on ice. New data presented at a conference in India shows no new signs of the Higgs. The signal was probably just a statistical fluctuation."
Probably (Score:4, Funny)
just a higg-up.
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That's what it wants you to think.
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A butterfly fart is enough to screw with them.
Butterflies don't fart; air tunnels through their gut.
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It's a physics joke. It's...just...oh, nevermind.
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The Higgs Deception (Score:2)
"probably just a statistical fluctuation"...or is that exactly what the Higgs Boson WANTS us to think???
That sneaky particle...
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There is an 87.7% certainty that HB is a statistical fluctuation.
such is the life of a bump hunter (Score:3, Insightful)
I did bump hunting for my PhD in particles a decade and a half ago. This is the way life goes -- you get a signal that almost has enough significance to really believe -- then it collapses when you pile in more data. If a journal is filled with papers each having a single p=0.05 result, then one out of 20 of them is reasonably expected to be wrong!
Re:such is the life of a bump hunter (Score:4, Funny)
"What did you get your PhD in?"
"Bump hunting."
Makes it sound like you had much more fun in grad school than most people do, somehow ...
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I guess you missed the other kind of bumps you might pursue in grad school, at least you missed the joke...
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May well be worse than that in practice thanks to publication bias.
Of course, in particle physics p=0.05 (a mere 2 sigma) is nowhere near enough to claim a discovery.
I'm not surprized they are not progressing (Score:2)
My Bet (Score:2)
I've heard this before, and it didn't end well (Score:2)
this just in... (Score:2)
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"The previous news was wrong" is news.
Also, each day that people don't find it puts us farther away from the Higgs bosson. In a year or two the information that "researches still didn't find the bosson" will be very newsworth.
No Higgs Boson? (Score:2)
How about some theories! (Score:2)
I know you're not particle theorists but I do expect some entertainment! Where are your stones! Man up and spew some malarkey!
Why am I not suprised? (Score:2)
Maybe the Higgs is just a statistical fluctuation (Score:2)
Has anyone considered that the Higgs may actually be just a statistical fluctuation, a mathematical artifact required to both satisfy the symmetry of the fundamental particle structure and at the same time insure the uncertain nature of... well, nature.
I know this may sound like (and it may actually be) a silly question, but I am serious in asking it.
We have had to learn to d
Re:Huzzah! (Score:4, Informative)
That's not an accurate way of looking at the statistics, but it's a common mistake (and most likely one I've made myself).
The confidence levels (such as 99%, 95%) tell you very little directly about the probability that a result is correct. What they do tell you is the probability of getting a false positive - if you were to do 100 separate searches at a 95% confidence interval, you'd get a positive result in about 5 even if there were no Higgs there.
Given the number of potential places to search and the number of experiments done, you'd expect some false positives at these confidence levels. The standard for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma, which is something like a 99.9999% confidence level.
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The standard for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma, which is something like a 99.9999% confidence level.
Ah, if only all sciences were this rigorous. Meanwhile, much of psychology, sociology, and even medicine is out there looking at 95% confidence levels (often even juggling enough variables that a number of correlations will shake out of random data)...
I know it's impossible to hold all sciences to such a standard, given the cost of subjects for many human science experiments, but I do wish we could put something like your post in bold at the beginning of most articles.
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It's an artifact of the fact that they operate on a higher layer of abstraction of the problem.
When working at larger scales with many more individual events (think biology as opposed to chemistry) going through and monitoring every single event occurring at the same level of detail as pure physics just can't be done.
So we abstract it away adding error to the results while still typically coming up with hypothesis that are right enough to be useful.
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The confidence levels ... tell you very little directly about the probability that a result is correct.
More than that -- in frequentist statistics, there's no such concept as the "probability that a result is correct" once it's been observed; it is either correct or not. The probability only applies when observations haven't been made yet. Your explanation is probably the best way to think about p values and such, in that it is both correct and intuitive -- a 95% confidence means that before you did the experiment, that is the probability that the result you'd get after doing it would be correct.
Furthermo
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If you didn't read that in Professor Farnsworth's voice, you lose.
Good news everybody; there is Hawking radiation coming from the lab.
Re:God Particle (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of "faith" exposes itself to falsification through experimentation? What kind of "faith" in an entity has all of its greatest practitioners carving out all the places where we can be sure it doesn't exist, and prepared to face the potential truth that it simply doesn't at all? What kind of "faith" is based on making educated guesses at first, but ultimately wanting to know one way or another, of demanding evidence?
Oh right, no kind of faith. That's kinda what "faith" means.
But go ahead and keep on projecting.
Re:God Particle (Score:5, Funny)
In this case, it looks like he really is projecting. Projecting a giant "WHOOOOOOSH!" right past you.
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Read their other replies; they aren't joking.
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Perhaps you aren't acquainted with Buddhism. From the Kalama Sutra (http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.than.html):
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In practice, faith in God is much like faith in the Higgs boson.....scientists believe (faith is just the noun form of believe), or have faith, that a Higgs boson exists, so they are performing experiments to see if they can find it. Similarly, if you have faith in religion, you will follow that religion, and eventually you either will or won't see the results the religion promised if you fo
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While there is no proof it exists, there is an objectively rational basis to presume that it does.
However, it presumes that our current understanding of the physical universe is actually right.
This has worked before for discovering new particles... so there is some precedent, but it's still hardly irrefutable.
Cite a single objectively rational basis for believing in God.
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Throw in a dose of entropy (how can chaos organize itself into a stable state for the big bang?
You ask some reasonable questions, but this is the one that I feel like replying to-
You would do better to ask how chaos can avoid organizing itself into a stable state for the big bang. By definition, anything that can happen in a chaotic system must eventually happen, no? One of the better analogies I've heard is that if an immortal were to patiently and repeatedly shuffle a deck of cards, the shuffling would ev
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we know that the universe hasn't always existed?
No such thing is known- consensus is that the big bang occurred at a given time, and before that, our current model breaks down as all the universe's mass converges on a point particle and we get errors from plugging values of zero in for certain variables. That's my understanding, anyway. What happened before that is by no means certain, but saying "A prime mover (who always existed) caused the big bang" only moves the mystery further away without clarifying
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So what does that mean, exactly, when we know that the universe hasn't always existed?
By definition of "universe", that statement is always false. There is no sense of physical existence outside of the universe. That the more restricted component, the observable universe has an apparent start date is peculiar, but it doesn't imply a cause.
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I am probably paraphrasing it badly, but in either definition it would seem that gathering information about its formation or what is outside it is impossible from human perspective.
There are deeper problems here than paraphrasing, No information means it is not part of our universe. Period. "All that is" has no meaning when you have no knowledge about what is "all", "is", or even if there is an "all" or "is" to speak of outside of what you can observe. Similarly, formation of the universe or the concept of "outside" has no meaning beyond what we can observe.
In other words, empirically we have hard limited on what we can know or deduce philosophically. This goes back to the original
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And God created Science and Science was good.
It's worth noting here that science is a human creation by any of its definitions, whether it be a formal, methodical study of an arbitrary field of knowledge, or the empirical sense of one of our best attempts to understand reality. It is our attempt to understand something.
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I have always thought of God (If he exists) and the Big Bang as one.
An infinite amount of potential energy seething chaotically, timelessly.
Whatever works for you, but the dictionary does not list "An infinite amount of potential energy seething chaotically, timelessly." among its definitions for "god". If you're willing to alter the definition until it fits the phenomenon, then why not cut to the chase and define god as "An imaginary friend used by fanatics to lend a sense of substance and meaning to their
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This is as good an argument against god as it is against the big bang.
Couldn't have said it better. The number of people i've heard say 'but it makes no sense that the universe just appeared' but are happy to just accept that some god presence can do exactly the same thing they just dismissed as nonsense astounds me.
To me it is the equivalent of answering 'but how does....' with 'magic'.
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the logic falls down, however, when you note that something that cannot change cannot create. to create implies action and action implies changing of state.
if 'god' cannot change (by your logic) then he/she/it cannot have created the universe, which brings the same problems as 2 and 3.
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But what I am postulating is that God is the prime cause, and not an effect at all-- that he is unchanging and eternal.
You've just wrapped up a bunch of incomprehensible quantities and called it "God" (itself an incredibly overloaded term) and then pretend this answer is more satisfactory than a universe that starts from a mathematical singularity. Your hypothesis provides no value, no predictions, no anything. It's strictly "God of the Gaps".
I'll fully admit that a universe without cause is incomprehensible to me, but then so is a universe of infinite causes, and even more so a supernatural God without a cause. However, at
Rational basis for believing in God? Easy. (Score:2)
People are a superstitious and cowardly lot - so they imagine themselves an imaginary friend to protect them from all those other imaginary boogeymen.
Or did you by "rational basis for believing in God" actually mean "rational basis which would promote belief in God"?
Cause with current, 21st century's, understanding of psychology, medicine, mental disorders, applied pharmacology, logic, philosophy etc., belief in gods is nothing more than an attempt to ignore the problems until they disappear on their own.
An
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1: The unmoved mover kind of went out the window with quantum mechanics. Also, it assumes a finite amount of time has gone by.
2: First Cause: If god caused the universe, what caused god? If god needs no cause, then why does the universe need a cause? And, again, it assumes a universe that has
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The problem with this sort of argument is atheists in general consider these arguments as falsified. Regarding for example the qualitative assessments of "good" and "evil", they come up with two answers, namely there is no "good" or "evil" and these terms can be defined in the context of evolution - what is good for the survival of the group and what is "evil" or detrimental to its survival.
They have similar issues with the other arguments. While I agree with you that belief in a deity(or deities) is logica
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Or, more accurately, from the point of view of a certain group of people they are considered falsified. Not everyone shares that point of view.
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Science is "looking" for the Higgs Boson particle. They THINK (believe) it exists, but have no "Proof" it exists. They are falsifying NOTHING by looking for it.
Nonsense. The Higgs Boson is a predicted particle of the Standard Model, and the same theory which predicts it also constrains the energies over which it could exist. Many parts of this range have already been excluded. If all of this range is excluded, then they have falsified the prediction made by the Standard Model.
If something like the Higgs nevertheless exists, it isn't the one predicted by the Standard Model. That prediction will have been falsified.
But the point I was making was that people BELIEVE it exists, and are looking for it, without any proof that it DOES exist. In fact, we're spending BILLIONS of looking for it, so I actually hope they DO find it. But as of this moment, it makes a perfect example of where FAITH gets applied by those that deny it has any real value.
You're playing a semantic trick by going from "
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The only faith a scientist needs, if it can yet be called that, is the faith that the universe operates under rules that can be tested, and that human minds could eventually unravel the mysteries.
I'd argue that that is a testable prediction too.
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It is definitely true that people are looking for the Higgs Boson based upon faith, but the trouble is that faith is an overloaded word.
The faith in science asks you to take nothing for granted. You can ask, "Why do we think the Higgs Boson exists?" and, eventually, this line of questioning will drill down to a point that references repeatable, reliable observations in the physical world. Now, it is true that most people (myself included) aren't going to go through that line of questioning and drill
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Was Aristarchus of Samos relying on faith when he proposed a heliocentric solar system in the 3rd century BC, deliberately ignoring the repeatable facts that the epicyclists brought up against his theory, such as that they couldn't measure parallax motion of the stars? But was he right?
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The faith in science asks you to take nothing for granted.
This actually isn't quite true. There is one fundamental assumption that science makes. It assumes that all phenomena are the result of natural laws acting on stuff. There is also a lesser assumption that this is actually explainable.
The result is that if a god (pick any god you care to name) or some other supernatural entity came down and worked some miracles, the miracles would be studied and once enough data was gathered, appropriate modifications to the currently understood physical laws would be mad
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They are falsifying NOTHING by looking for it. Eventually, they will either find it, or not find it. IF they don't find it, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means that they can't find it.
It does falsify SOMETHING, because the theory predicts that we will find it. If we cannot find it then the theory must be wrong.
But the point I was making was that people BELIEVE it exists, and are looking for it, without any proof that it DOES exist.
Scientists don't believe. They EXPECT based on past observati
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If we already had proof that it does or doesn't exist, we wouldn't need to go looking. That's what science is, to go looking for the unknown and the unexplained and you can't do that without observation. And of course if we're spending BILLIONS we spend them where we think there's something interesting, not just trying things at random. And that's the whole difference, faith is happy just to be faith. A scientist may believe in a model but he always wants to test it against reality. You are quite clearly sh
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The difference between the presentation of the Higgs Boson and God is slight, but important.
Whenever I read about the Higgs, the reader is reminded that it has not yet been located, it is being rigorously searched for, and/or it is a best-guess theory that fits nicely into the Standard Model. It is assumed to exist, though I have a feeling nobody would be terribly upset if a better theory came around to account for its lack of existence.
Whenever I read about God, it's implicitly assumed that he exists, he's
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Looking for the aether (and failing to do so with the Michelson-Morley experiment) is a hallmark of science and ended up with the acceptance of the theory of relativity.
Just not finding the Higgs boson where we expect it to be could already lead to many discoveries or changes. This is not useless science, it WILL have impacts one way or another. There is also a relatively high probability that a definitive result will arise, either by finding it or concluding it does not exist (always within reasonable doub
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shitstrirring
word is hilarious!
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One that has no problem changing its beliefs? If you take someone else's word for something its faith so unless you understand why they are saying this is not the Boson they're looking for and how they got the evidence to come to that conclusion its faith for you.
Even if I was fully versed in all the physics, the engineering of the LHC and the detectors involved, and all statistical analysis, I'd still be taking their word that what they were saying actually happened. Without actually reproducing their experiment from the digging of the subterranean chamber on up, I would have to take their word for it.
So sure, it's trivially true to say that anything which you have not personally experienced* you are taking on "faith", but in saying so you have trivialized the mea
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I'll probably get down-modded for pointing out your ignorance, and I know that faith is the atheist's F word around here, but you are sadly confused that there is only one type of faith. There is a world of difference between blind faith and real faith.
First, I am not an atheist. Second I know there are many definitions of "faith", including very trivial ones where other words serve better to express the intended meaning. I was presuming we were talking about "faith" of types where the OP's original and subsequent statements were meaningful, not banal and pointless.
Assuming you mean something not banal and pointless, then I'm at a loss for what you're characterizing as "blind" vs "real" faith. What is faith in God? What is faith in the potential of hu
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> our definition of 'real faith' sounds more like 'expectation' to me.
No, faith requires action. Passively expecting something to happen without doing anything is not faith, just a belief, or maybe even hope.
> With regards to your comment that scientists have *faith* that the Scientific process leads us to a better understanding of the universe - the very fact that you are using a computer to send this message is clearly evidence that it does.
Well, you and I can clearly see that but there are those t
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Tell that to the investors of the LHC.
Uh okay but I'm pretty sure they already know.
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You don't know much about the higgs if you think that their is no evidence that it exists.
No experimental viewing of the higgs does not equal no evidence.
Their is lots and lots of experimental and theoretical evidence that it exists, still since we have yet to find it after searching for so long the evidence against it is also adding up.
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Actually it is exactly the other way around. The fact that they spend billions to confirm its hypothesised existence, rather than just take it for granted, is a consequence of their lack of faith.
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I can't do much more to educate you than repeat what I just said. They don't "believe" it exists. It is an hypothesis based on models that have been shown to have predictive value. Now they are trying to confirm that hypothesis. If the hypothesis is confirmed great. If not new hypothesis will come. There is no faith here. If there were faith they wouldn't bother looking for it and try to look for data to confirm or disprove their models. They'd just assume it to be true.
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Scientists who see a theory that in many other respects explaining observations also predicting a particle that is more difficult to find. Yes, the Standard Model may end up having to be heavily modified if Higgs cannot be found, but throwing out an entire theory prematurely seems pretty bizarre to me.
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Yeah, we can build holodecks where God exists or where we are gods or where the laws of physics are whatever we feel like...
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Translation: I'm a complete fucktard who reads the first paragraphs of SciAm articles, and somehow, due to the extraordinary combination of intellectual arrogance and a near lack of intellectual function, I shall post these grand declarative statements on /.!
Re:There is no Higgs Boson (Score:4, Informative)
The Kruger-Dunning effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]. The less you know about something, the more certain you are that your intuitions about it are correct.
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I'm afraid that for your viewpoint to qualify as real science you have to get your hands dirty and come up with a competing theory that not only explains all of the measurements that have been performed in the past (not just by hand-waving arguments but actual numbers) and also makes predictions that can be tested. Do you have one of these or is this just some gut feeling?
Jedi Voice (Score:2)
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respectable physicists never get invited to those kind of parties.
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Also, it's only called the "God" particle because the original phrase "God damned particle" wasn't very PC to publish. Joking I am not:
"The Higgs boson is the particle that is thought to give everything else in the universe mass, but that bit of theoretical physics is unlikely to be the reason most people have heard of it. Its theistic nickname was coined by Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman, but Higgs himself is no fan of the label. "I find it embarrassing because, though I'm not a believer myse