

New Higgs Rumors Have Arrived - Happer
http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/06/18/new-higgs-rumors-have-arrived/

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jessriedel
> [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_.

~~~
jessriedel
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.

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

~~~
ChuckMcM
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

