New Higgs Rumors Have Arrived

http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/06/18/new-higgs-rumors-have-arrived/

by Happer • 14 years ago

21 6 14 years ago

Estragon• 14 years ago

I've been to a few talks about the analysis of the LHC data, and the methods they are using are worryingly reminiscent of high-throughput biology: a search for statistically significant outliers in oodles of data. From a statistical point of view, the problem seems even worse than for biology, because the number of events being searched is much larger.

The problem with this approach is that small deviations from the statistical model can lead to statistically significant variations. Those deviations don't have to be in the scientific model under test, they can lie in the methods of measurement. So the fact that two groups are seeing similar anomalies does not imply that they've found a solid deviation from the standard model.

I'm not saying what they've done is useless. The LHC data might lead to follow up experimental designs which test much more specific hypotheses, and are therefore much more convincing. But I do think everybody is jumping the gun a bit.

jpeterson• 14 years ago

Can someone translate this to human for the rest of us?

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

That would be cheating :-)

Imagine you owned an intersection in a very busy city that was always covered in fog. You wonder what kind of cars they drive in your city but you can't tell because the fog obscures all the traffic below. But you do own an intersection, so what you do is you start turning the traffic signals green for both directions to cause a collision. When that happens sometime a part of the cars involved flys so far up in the air that you can see it above the fog. Of course the car has just been in a collison so it can be challenging to figure out what piece of the car you are looking at. So when you see a crumpled up fender come flying up you take a picture of it, its rotating and what not but you use some image processing on the picture and try to figure out what kind of a car that fender was on, that tells you what kind of cars are crashing in your intersection.

Of course you really want to know the brand of the car, and unfortunately the designers these days have very little imagination so most of the cars look the same and well a fender looks like a lot of other fenders. So you figure if you could just get a hood ornament to come up out of the clouds you would really know what brand of car it was. So you set the speed limit on your roads a lot higher and hope for even more energetic collisons. Of those of few of them will be where you can see the hood ornament come flying up over the clouds but its really small and if its edge on you can't really tell what brand it is. The longer you do it thought the more confident you are that the hood ornaments you are seeing belong to the car manufacturer you think they do.

The Higgs Boson is a piece of particle, when you crash two particles together and smash them there is a small chance that the resulting decay products will go by your detectors. If you don't crash them hard enough you won't see any (its like you see a lot of car hoods in our mythical scenario, but at higher speeds the hood and the hood ornament separate and you can see just the ornament).

Basically the LHC has boosted the energy from last year which means there should be more chances to see this particular piece, and the detectors have been tuned better to look for it in a particular place, if they see what they saw last year, only more of them, then you can make the argument that the effect is really the Higgs Bosun decaying, if you don't see more then its likely some other effect.

Hope that helps

taligent• 14 years ago

Basically the results from this year agree with the results from last year i.e. Higgs Boson exists at roughly 125 GeV.

Except rewrite that statement with a trillion: may, allegedly, perhaps, could, maybe, might etc. Until the certainty level is very high nobody is going to make any definitive statements.

jessriedel2• 14 years ago

> [This is especially true since we learned last year that some well-known non-particle-physicist bloggers have information pipelines directly into the experiments. It is perhaps inevitable that there are scientists who see it in their best interest to subvert the scientific process.]

The ethics of divulging LHC data before it's been fully vetted by the experimental collaborations is certainly debatable, but let's not go conflating the weird, experiment-specific rules for making public statements (which exist mainly to protect their reputation) with the scientific process itself.

jessriedel2• 14 years ago

Luckily, Peter Woit is a man after my own heart and is not above a bit of pettiness:

> Update: Matt Strassler has more about this here. He provides about 20 links to his own blog, no link to the source of his information (this posting). It appears that this is because I’m a “non-particle-physicist blogger” engaged in a conspiratorial plot with some of the 6000+ people who know this latest news to “subvert the scientific process” by sharing it with others.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4772

Preach it, brother.

New Higgs Rumors Have Arrived

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