RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/08/23/a-higgs-setback-did-stephen-hawking-just-win-the-most-outrageous-bet-in-physics-history

by akkartik • 15 years ago

161 147 15 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

indrax• 15 years 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.

jamesaguilar14• 15 years 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?

lucasjung2• 15 years ago

Indeed. 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?"

fragsworth2• 15 years ago

Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter.

You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.

mgualt• 15 years ago

What they got out of it was a) gaining a greater knowledge about the way our world functions, b) training a new generation of scientists at a level of advanced research which goes beyond what was previously achieved. c) developed an advanced engineering industry which has broken new ground in materials science, not only in superconductivity and cooling, but in practically all engineering disciplines. d) developed a new level of sophistication in computer analysis and processing ability.

Many universities and advanced research facilities around the world contribute to a project as large as LHC, so the benefits are spread worldwide. However the location of LHC makes a huge impact on the scientific abilities and human resources of Europe.

As for how much benefit the average European derives from LHC, the question is really how much they benefit from the advancement of general scientific ability and human resources. Besides the innumerable everyday fruits of the advancement of science which average people enjoy today as compared with, say, 1803, there is the even more important fact that their future ability to establish a high quality of life, and to solve major problems, depends on their having an incredible skill and wisdom in dealing with the actual, factual world.

robryan• 15 years ago

I think it's far to early to start talking about the LHC's value in a past tense.

icarus_drowning2• 15 years ago

This is, I think, a dishonest question, because we can't know "what they [got] out of it". There is a 5% probability that they might "get something out of it" in the future, and an unknown (likely greater than zero) probability that they will "get" a great deal out of it through readjustments of previously invincible models of how the universe is constructed.

Remember, we're trying to figure out why things have mass here, (which, I think, is rather prima facia a very important question to answer) and if we're wrong about how that phenomenon arises, we now have a very big clue to look somewhere else.

In short, they got petabytes of data out of it, and frankly, that will most likely prove to be invaluable in and of itself.

rorrr• 15 years ago

What they got out of it is that the standard model and supersymmetry are (likely) wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Higgs_boson

EDIT: actually it looks like they only searched a partial range of energies, there's still a chance to find it.

patrickyeon• 15 years ago

There are a number of replies telling you that a better understanding of physics is what we get out of this. I completely agree, but that argument won't convince everybody.

I don't have numbers at hand, but a large amount of the data the detectors spew out is un-necessary, and needs to be sorted quickly (think real-time or very nearly), so that the back end computing resources can actually keep up with storing it. There is a huge grid infrastructure (data transfer and compute resources) dedicated to the LHC. The problems the scientists and engineers had to solve to get the LHC running will come up in some shape down the road, and we'll benefit from this.

We can list off a whole lot of advances that were made for pure science that are ridiculously useful for us today (spectroscopy, lasers, atomic clocks, nuclear reactors, even particle accelerators, off the top of my head). We may also wish to keep in mind that solving the infrastructure problems scientists face also gives society great payoffs.

msie• 15 years ago

Don't forget the thousands of jobs created and billions injected into the economy. It's not like the money was dumped into a volcano.

nitrogen• 15 years ago

In response to this and your subsequent posts:

First, let's draw an analogy to the territorial expansion of the human race. Engineering is like building cities, while basic research is like exploration and mapping. Before Columbus set sail there was an inkling that he might be able to find something of value, but nobody knew whether it would be gold, spices, etc., and certainly nobody foresaw the creation of an eventual world superpower. Plus, city builders need explorers to identify suitable sites for new cities, and to make sure that an expanding city isn't about to run itself off a cliff (or into some other unforeseen territorial hazard).

Second, imagine that engineering is like exploring a pitch black cave. Basic research is a flashlight we can shine in various directions. Engineers can make incremental steps forward, but without science lighting the way, we won't know whether we're about to run into a wall.

Third, grandiose projects like the LHC or ISS serve as an inspiration to scientists and engineers in all fields. Even if the primary activity of a giant project yields no useful results ("Not finding the Higgs" in the case of the LHC, and "Being in space" in the case of ISS), the supporting research and engineering teams will develop useful technologies to solve related problems (like the grid computing systems others have mentioned).

To sum up, basic research like that done at the LHC is necessary to expand the possible solution space for further scientific research and engineering. The further we push the limits of human understanding, the more branching-off points we create for the minds of applied scientists and engineers. The more different things we have to think about, the more likely we are to think useful thoughts that haven't been thought before. We need the LHC et. al. to be at the forefront of knowledge to provide plenty of well-traversed, fertile ground for applied science and engineering.

arethuza• 15 years ago

"What did they get out of it?"

As you read this you are using one of the direct benefits of Europe's funding for CERN two decades ago.

craigmccaskill• 15 years ago

Indeed. Bean-counters are looking at things totally upside down.

A few billion to further the human understanding of the world around us vs the 1.4 trillion spent on the war effort. I know which I'd rather have backed.

tzs3• 15 years ago

> Europe explored the universe where America did not

I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station?

The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block.

America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area.

We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.

ugh2• 15 years ago

You could call it division of labor. The US will obviously benefit from any discoveries the LHC makes, Europe will also benefit from the ISS.

Permit• 15 years ago

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting indrax's comment, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't meant to be a jab at the United States. He was stating that while America chose to focus its exploration on the cosmos, Europe's exploration endeavors focus on the sub atomic level.

Europe's exploration of the universe has a different focus, not a better one.

linuxhansl• 15 years ago

Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?

Tichy• 15 years ago

I am not a specialist on that matter, but I suspect it is called "International Space Station" rather than "American Space Station" for a reason.

borism• 15 years ago

Funny, cause if the Spanish crown didn't fund Columbuses search for alternative route to East-Indies, we wouldn't be talking about American science right now.

wlievens9• 15 years ago

Really? So that huge continent on the other side of the Atlantic would have remained undiscovered for five hundred more years?

quandrum• 15 years ago

Incorrect, 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• 15 years ago

I 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."

idlewords7• 15 years ago

Neither collider has enough data in those mass ranges to give any useful result. That's WHY the LHC got built.

modeless• 15 years ago

What about the >466 GeV range? Is that considered a possibility? Can the LHC explore that high?

idlewords7• 15 years ago

See http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-... for discussion. Basically, it's possible, but requires physics beyond the Standard Model.

melling• 15 years 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

idlewords7• 15 years ago

It was, especially considering what that program was cut for - the International Space Station!

nazgulnarsil2• 15 years ago

I should place a long bet regarding dark matter...

teraflop2• 15 years ago

The 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• 15 years ago

Dark 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.

nazgulnarsil2• 15 years ago

I know that. This was in reference to making bets in physics against things that are widely regarded as "probably existing."

mathattack• 15 years ago

The 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.

idlewords7• 15 years ago

That'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-...

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

Maybe 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.

idlewords7• 15 years ago

Particle 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• 15 years ago

This 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.

wlievens9• 15 years ago

Plus it feeds the religious nuts, and Dan Brown.

guygurari6• 15 years ago

I'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• 15 years ago

I 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.

bartwe• 15 years ago

It might be because how it is communicated, where an uncertainty is communicated as a chance.

NY_Entrepreneur3• 15 years ago

"It's truly sad, and perhaps even criminal that journalists, and especially science journalists fall victim to those same misconceptions."

"Journalists"? You are being moderated in your high praise of 'journalists', that is, professional members of the highly professional journalistic profession?

Cruel. SO cruel. How can you be so CRUEL?

I mean, while we're discussing particle physics, don't you believe that the English, drama, theater, and communications majors also need to eat?

And it's even worse, you are being even more cruel: You are suggesting that the journalistic profession should pay attention to technical information and, thus, push out the main technique of journalism back over 100 years: Use communications of human experience and emotion to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt.

So CRUEL!

sskates2• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this argument flawed? Bayesian probability says that eliminating possible universes increases the probability of other ones (given everything else as constant). So reducing the probability that the Higgs Boson lies in some energy range (which is what this experiment did) increases the probability that a) the Higgs Boson doesn't exist and b) the Higgs Boson exists at some other energy level, which is what this article is saying.

guygurari6• 15 years ago

I think we should be careful with Bayesian inference for the usual reason -- there is only one universe with one (or zero) Higgs particle. You can't really collect statistics over universes, so what is the meaning of probability in this case?

More concretely, what prior probability would you assign to the distribution of the Higgs mass? This depends on your theory. For instance, supersymmetric theories tend to favor a lower Higgs mass, so if you are a proponent of such theories you wouldn't expect a heavy Higgs anyway.

Note that physicists themselves do not phrase their results in these terms. The statement "Higgs excluded above 130 GeV at 95% confidence" does not mean there is 95% chance the Higgs isn't there. Rather, this statement has a precise meaning based on frequentist reasoning.

But perhaps more importantly, the tone of the article is sensationalist and seems to imply that we are about to give up hope. This isn't true at all. I mean, look:

     "while CERN will continue it's search at least until the end of this year, if no positive results about the Higgs should come out, Stephen Hawking ... would be able to cash in on his wager."

eric-hu• 15 years ago

Didn't the author of the article shoot himself in the foot with this statement:

> These assessments carry a probability measure, such as 95%, 99%, or—as traditionally required in particle physics for a “definitive” conclusion about the existence of a new particle: 99.99997% (this is the infamous “five-sigma” requirement).

So...the five-sigma requirement means that your run-of-the-mill physicists won't accept a claim until there's statistical evidence accurate to 99.99997%. From 95% to ...that number is still a significant number of tests, no? Doesn't this paint the title as sensationalist with the author's own words?

guygurari6• 15 years ago

For discovering an effect the standard is indeed 5-sigma. But here we are discussing excluding an effect, namely deciding that a suggested effect isn't there. For this the standard is lower.

fauigerzigerk• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I follow your first argument. The probability of finding the item in the remaining 5% of the search space is independent of the time required to search different sections of the search space (unless of course you have additional prior information about where the item is more likely to be located).

The fact that it may take you, say, 90% of the time to search a particular 10% section of a search space doesn't increase the probability of finding the item in that section.

AUmrysh• 15 years ago

The difference is that physicists have a good idea of where the Higgs should be, and the search isn't quite intuitive. They don't just have to find a single particle, they have to look at a large collection of events and perform statistical analysis. Also, the time it takes to search for lower energy particles may not be the same as for high energy particles.

gus_massa2• 15 years ago

It's a little more complicated, but "all" the energies ranges are searched in parallel.

It is easier to discard the ranges that are very far from the mass of the Higgs' boson. So initially the expected range is very broad, something like:

* More than 114GeV, because if it's smaller we would have seen the Higgs boson in another smaller accelerator (LEP)

* Less than 185GeV, because we saw small corrections that are probably due Higgs boson in the (LEP)

So you get a lot of money to build another accelerator, and you are confident that the maximal energy of the collider is enough to see something.

In some ranges, the experiments doesn’t show anything interesting, so it is possible to discard that the mass of the Higgs boson is in that range. It is easier to do this when the range is more far away from the "real" value. So you can discard with a 95% of confidence that range, get some papers published, perhaps a few Ph.D. thesis, compare the data to another more indirect calculations, show some progress, and ask for more money because the accelerator is really big.

The problem is that some energy ranges are more difficult to test, because other well known particles appear but the final results is very similar to what is expected from a Higgs boson. So it is important to choose some strange phenomenon where there is easier to see the difference between a Higgs boson and another particles. So with more experiments you can discard with a 95% of confidence a new range, ..., because the accelerator is really big.

But some ranges are more difficult to discard. There are a lot of interesting phenomenons. Some of them are due to other particles. The other particles are well known, so it is possible to calculate how many of these are expected to appear sadistically. But the experiments show that there are more than expected. It can be a statistical fluke, or it can be corrections that appear because the mass of the Higgs boson is near that range. The real problem is that if the Higgs boson really exists, a lot of corrections appear in the nearby mass ranges, so these ranges are more difficult to discard with a 95% confidence ...

The most difficult range is the one that includes the actual mass of the Higgs boson. It should be impossible to discard :). But it is not enough to not be able to discard it with a 95% confidence, because it can be a statistical fluke. To "prove" that the Higgs boson exists wits a 99.99997% confidence, more and more experiments are necessary to see the difference between a statistical fluke produced by the background process of the other particles and a real signal produced by the Higgs bosons. So you need more time to find it where it really is, than to discard it where it isn’t. (So you need more money to run the accelerator, so you need to dhow some preliminary results.)

So, next year we will probably see something like "RIP^2 Higgs Boson, 99% of the initial search range discarder forever with 95% confidence, only a minuscule 1% remaining." and it will be really a good new. And in a few (5?) years something like "Zombie Higgs Boson found, returned from 99.9% dead." and it will be a really good new.

lloeki• 15 years ago

> 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.

Maybe the Higgs boson is the new aether[1] which, after many experiments failing at observing its existence, was replaced by relativity and quantum physics. By which I concur that an experiment built for, yet failing to demonstrate a point is not necessarily a failed experiment.

So whatever the results of the LHC, I'm confident that it's a worthwhile task to undertake.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

gus_massa2• 15 years ago

There is a big difference. The experiments showed that the ether didn’t exist. But there is no experiment that shows that there is no Higgs boson. IIRC the expected roadmap is to find the Higgs boson in 3-5 years (from now) in the LHC, so don’t expect to see it sooner. (It is expected to see it in sooner in 2-3 years in the Tevatron, if it were kept open.)

The experiments show that if the Higgs boson exists, it is not very heavy (not heavier than 145GeV). And there is some indirect and inconclusive evidence that it exist and the real mass is near ~120GeV (probably +-10GeV), but it can be a statistical fluke, so we have to wait a few years.

ristretto• 15 years ago

The article did not hide any of these facts though, so it's not "utter nonsense". The title of the original article is "A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?", nothing like "RIP Higgs". The article, at best, is trying to be provocative. But, more importantly, you believe in god?

sonnekki• 15 years ago

"The goal of X is to teach us about the world, not stroke Ys' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are."

This a million times. I want this on a shirt, with the millions of X's and Y's it satisfies. Thank you for posting.

libraryatnight• 15 years ago

This comment thread is more interesting than the article.

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

It'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

archgoon2• 15 years ago

You 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.

gjm112• 15 years ago

The 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.)

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

At this point I'd probably bet 10:1 against the Higgs, even taking into account risk aversion.

mikk0j• 15 years ago

Well, Higgs Boson is aptly named the "God particle" - it seems likelier and likelier that it doesn't exist.

bcl• 15 years ago

The 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.ph...

RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

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