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Higgs or no Higgs, should nul results get more respect?
With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) coming on line tomorrow, 10 September 2008, many physicists are expecting the long-anticipated detection of the Higgs boson to follow soon after.
But what if they don't find it?
This topic was part of an interesting dinner conversation with a high-school physics teacher who had come for my presentation at Cafe Scientifique Pittsburgh last night. We all agreed that nul results don't get the respect they deserve.
For example, one view of the Michelson-Morley experiment is that it attempted to measure the motion of Earth through the supposedly all-pervasive luminiferous aether (or simply, the ether in common usage). The result was that the difference in speed of light beams in different directions was zero. But not exactly zero, since no measurement is free of error bars. The difference was some number plus or minus a margin of error that included zero.
We now know that the nul result supports the idea that the ether doesn't exist.
Larry Sulak, an undergraduate classmate of mine at Carnegie Tech and who has had a distinguished career as an experimental physicist and professor, spent several years early in his career looking for decaying protons in a salt mine under Lake Erie. Had he found a finite lifetime of the proton, his work might well have made him a candidate for the Nobel Prize, since that measurement would have produced a decisive change in the understanding of the Standard Model of subatomic particle physics.
Instead, he did not detect any definitive evidence of proton decay. His work set a new lower limit for the lifetime of a proton, but did not rule out the possibility that the proton will never decay. Was this nul result any less worthy of recognition than a positive result? It was still an experimental tour de force and it still advanced our knowledge of the subatomic realm. But it didn't produce a dramatic change in our understanding. Sorry, Larry, no Nobel!
That brings us to Peter Higgs, who may be a Nobel Laureate in waiting. He has produced the most widely accepted interpretation of why most particles have mass but photons do not.
In Higgs' theory, there is an all-pervasive field in space. Unlike the ether, which was viewed as an actual physical substance that supported electromagnetic waves but did not interact mechanically with matter, the Higgs field does not have substance. Like other fields, it produces an observable phenomenon--in this case mass--by an exchange of particles called Higgs bosons.
If the LHC does indeed reveal Higgs bosons, and Peter Higgs is fortunate enough to live to see it, does anyone doubt that he would be a leading candidate for at least a share of the next Nobel Prize for Physics?
Another possibility is that the LHC will produce results that will give more definitive evidence supporting or debunking String Theory. Should John H. Schwarz, originator of String Theory, be any more worthy of the Nobel Prize if the theory is shown to have predictive power than if it is not? Up to now, he is probably not on the A-list for the award.
In other words, should the Nobel committee honor those whose work explores important questions and leads to other important work only if that result leads to a new avenue? Or should they be honored even if they have explored a blind alley and shown it to be so. As Edison put it when hundreds of candidate materials for electric light filaments proved unsatisfactory, each of those was a positive result because they eliminated a possibility that seemed viable until it was explored.
Fred Bortz
Author of Physics: Decade by Decade (Twentieth-Century Science set, Facts on File ages 15-adult, 2007)
and
the six-book Library of Subatomic Particles (Rosen Publishing, ages 12-15, 5th grade reading level, 2004)
Submitted by Fred Bortz on Tue, 2008-09-09 08:26.
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Higgs is a Carl Sagen - not a Richard Feynman
Higgs is but one person who gets credit. Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout Englert all have claim to this mass boson. Physical Review Letters just recognized all for the 50th anniversary celebration of milestone papers.
http://prl.aps.org/50years/milestones
PS. Go Tartans
Re: Will the Higgs elude us by escaping into the fifth dim.?
Fred and J.J. van der Bij:
I've just finished printing some of J.J. van der Bij's preprints pertaining to his hypothesis that Higgs will not be found via the LHC due to interactions with higher dimensional scalar particles. I printed the Phys. Lett. B638 (2006) article he referred to and two or three more recent articles that appear to be related.
I'll get back on this once I've had an opportunity to digest these articles.
Of course, as I've stated elsewhere, I don't expect the LHC to find the charge-less scalar Higgs, as found in the simplest versions of the model, even without some higher dimensional interaction. But that's just my own speculation.
David
Will the Higgs elude us by escaping into the fifth dimension?
From a e-mail correspondent who has asked me to post this here. (I derive my headline question on the basis of a phone conversation we just had.) For details, follow the reference he cites.
Dear Dr. Bortz,
I happened to see you your article about the null result for the Higgs search.
Actually it is very likely that the LHC will not see the Higgs field, even though it has to be present, because of the LEP precision data. The reason is that the field has a non-trivial spectral representation, so that there is no particle peak.
For the details I refer you to the paper Phys. Lett. B638 (2006) 234.
Or any of the numerous presentations I gave on this subject, which can easily be found via Google. The class of models I presented fit the data better than the standard model.
Sincerely yours,
J.J. van der Bij
Professor of elementary particle phenomenology
Universitaet Freiburg, Germany
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
RE:Re: Awards should be for progress...
Dear Fred:
I have to admit that I don't really focus much on issues of winning awards, and I never have. So I don't have much experience in considering who deserves one for what. Oddly enough, I wrote that comment fresh from the awards event with those physics students, but there the issue was clear. In the case of simply disproving a theory, I don't think a Nobel should be in the offing, unless the discovery of the error saves lives or something. Recognition should be given, yes, but Nobels should actually be for significant discoveries.
I guess I believe that you get the prize, whatever it may be, for going to 100%, not 75% or even the final 25%. You do the whole enchilada. I guess that's just another reflection of my bias towards results that are conclusive. I recognize, however, that discoveries are often made on the backs of those that came before, so it's all relative. It depends on a variety of factors such as how significant the discovery was, how predictable it was, etc.
Just my opinion. Either way, it's not that big a deal for me. I'm too busy trying to focus on getting work done. I'll let awards take care of themselves.
Re: Awards should be for progress...
Thanks for the comment, Marshall. As you probably could tell, I intended to be a bit of a provocateur in the way I wrote this post.
I agree that awards should be for progress, and the most prestigious awards should be reserved for the most significant progress.
Whatever the outcome of the search for the Higgs, there is almost surely significant progress ahead. It may turn out that Higgs has been pointing us in a productive direction even if his predictions turn out to be not quite right.
It would seem unfair if he doesn't get the Nobel Prize if his ideas carry us 75% of the way toward a breakthrough and the winner only took the last 25% of the great leap.
In other words, as Wolfgang Pauli put it, there is a big difference between being wrong in a useful way and producing work that is so poorly conceived and executed that it is "not even wrong."
Readers of this blog can find a link to download the .pdf profile of Pauli, which includes that quotation and other amusing details, from the web pages of my history of 20th-century physics, Physics: Decade by Decade.
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
Awards should be for progress...
Dear Fred:
I think that awards should be for progress, i.e. discoveries that are substantial. The only time a negative result should be awarded is when someone proves that a theory is wrong due to research that was aimed at determining a result one way or the other. Awards should not be given to a party whose theory was proved wrong.
Absence of evidence is different from a nul result
Lethalfang,
Thanks for the comment.
I agree that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but this is different case.
A nul result is different from absence of evidence. It is a measurement that turns out to be zero when a nonzero measurement was predicted by theory.
It is therefore evidence of absence under certain experimental conditions.
That means the theory needs to be adjusted, as ultimately (certainly not immediately) happened after the Michelson-Morley experiment failed to confirm the existence of the ether.
In this case, if the Higgs is not found at the energy levels available to the LHC, then Higgs' conjectures, no matter how brilliant and well-founded they seem, need to be revisited.
A nul result would be as significant as finding the Higgs but with very different consequences for Physics. Does that diminish Higgs' work? Not at all, but if his prediction turns out to be wrong, he almost surely will not win the Nobel Prize.
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
"As Edison put it when hundreds of candidate materials for electric light filaments proved unsatisfactory, each of those was a positive result because they eliminated a possibility that seemed viable until it was explored."
Of course, they do not give hundreds of Nobel Prizes because each of them carries little weight.
The point is, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While the latter holds considerable importance in the advancement of knowledge, the former is best categorized as inconclusive.
Not detecting Higgs boson does not prove its existence one way or another, and thus, does not advance our understanding as much as a would-be positive result.
The lack of importance associated with a null result is the fact that no conclusion can be drawn from it.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
"As Edison put it when hundreds of candidate materials for electric light filaments proved unsatisfactory, each of those was a positive result because they eliminated a possibility that seemed viable until it was explored."
Of course, they do not give hundreds of Nobel Prizes because each of them carries little weight.
The point is, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While the latter holds considerable importance in the advancement of knowledge, the former is best categorized as inconclusive.
Not detecting Higgs boson does not prove its existence one way or another. The null result gives a inconclusive conclusion, and thus, less important.
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