

Data hint at 'five God particles' - mebassett
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10313875.stm

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rauljara
The hunt for the higg's boson reminds me of the attempts to measure the speed
of the earth using light beams. Everything we thought we knew about physics
told us that we should be able to measure the speed the earth was orbiting by
measuring the difference in speed between two beams of light. When the
experiments failed, the response was develop more precise measuring
techniques, and more perfect mirrors. It wasn't until Einstein that people
realized these failed experiments were not failures at all, but evidence that
the universe doesn't work quite how we thought. The hunt for the Higg's Boson,
and the "failure" to find it after all these years just seems like a reminder
that empirical evidence > theoretical models. Just because the math seems
elegant doesn't mean it necessarily applies to the universe we are living in.

Of course, they may find the Higg's boson tomorrow, and then my little theory
about them being wrong would be proved wrong, but that's science for you.

~~~
avar
The two aren't really comparable. With Newtonian physics there were clear
signs decades before Einstein that something wasn't right, the clearest
example being the perihelion precession of Mercury:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_problem_in_general_relat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_problem_in_general_relativity#Historical_context_and_intuitive_understanding)

In modern particle physics the main limitation is lack of experimental data.
To get that data we have to build giant and expensive experiments like the
LHC. Even if the LHC is completely successful we're still going to need bigger
colliders to test other things at even higher energies.

Another problem is that the current theories make predictions about things
that we probably won't ever be able to measure directly due to the microscopic
scales involved.

To name an example. We think that gluons exist inside atomic nuclei, but we
can't observe them unless we break the nuclei apart, thus destroying the
gluon's habitat. We think it's there because we see what looks like the energy
of a gluon falling apart, and because mathematical models back it up.

~~~
jessriedel
At the time, no one (not even Einstein) thought the precession of Mercury had
anything to do with the lack of experimental detection of the Ether. Einstein
figured out special relativity, solving the Ether problem, almost a decade
before doing general relativity and thereby solving the precession or Mercury.

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gahahaha
"""The Higgs boson's nickname comes from its importance to the Standard Model;
it is the sub-atomic particle which explains why all other particles have
mass."""

That's not the story I heard: Leon Lederman named the hypothesized Higgs boson
the "God particle" as a joke, because its effects were everywhere yet nobody
had ever seen it in the flesh--not because it was in any way powerful or
dangerous or numinous or terrifying.

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jarin
The growing number of elementary particles reminds me of the epicycles-upon-
epicycles in the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. The question is when are we
going to have our "Newton moment" and figure out that they're all just
manifestations of one elementary particle or string or something else?

~~~
Luc
That would be nice, but isn't that metaphysics? The thought that there is
something simple underneath it all appeals to our aesthetics, but it needn't
be that way...

~~~
jessriedel
If that's metaphysics, then every famous physicist--Newton to Einstein to
Feynmann--has been a strong believer in the power of metaphysics.

~~~
aswanson
Fine, but that doesn't make the "power " any more or less valid, only that it
seems to be useful thus far.

~~~
jessriedel
Well, then this just basically becomes a philosophical argument about the
justification for empiricism/inductive-reasoning. Can we axiomatically prove
that just because the sun has risen in the morning for the last 10,000
mornings that it will do so tomorrow? No. Neither can be sure that just
because _every_ single major advance in physics has come because of
simplification/beauty that the next one will come the same way.

But you'd be a fool to bet otherwise.

~~~
Luc
Well, I certainly wouldn't want to be a fool. I might be of course, especially
compared to the many people I know who are smarter than myself.

I think though that your argument is basically an 'appeal to ridicule'
fallacy. You are making it sound like my statement is the philosophical
equivalent of 'we can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow'. It isn't, it is
simple the statement that the current zoo of particles may well all be
fundamental, with no 'simpler' theory underlying them.

Secondly, I think your statement that 'every single major advance in physics'
has been a simplification is debatable.

Thirdly, extrapolating from that that every new advance will be found using
the same heuristic is also debatable. If there really is to be a scientific
breakthrough of the magnitude of a Newton, it seems likely (almost by
definition) that it will be from an unexpected avenue of thought - seeing that
the expected ones have been well researched and haven't been all that
productive.

I guess it makes sense to bet on a unifying theory if you are a career
particle physicist. There's a Nobel prize in it. It doesn't make sense to bet
on the opposite notion, since there are probably no breakthroughs that way.

~~~
jessriedel
I _do_ think your statement is the philosophical equivalent of 'we can't be
sure the sun will rise tomorrow', except that it differs by _degree_. (The sun
has risen thousands of times in my personal experience, and bazillions of
times in the experience of humans, while only a handful of fundamental physics
discoveries have been made.) In either case, it's a question of justifying the
claim that "In situations of type A, X has always been true in the past.
Therefore, in situations of type A in the future, X will be true".

Likewise your simple statement that "the current zoo of particles may well all
be fundamental, with no 'simpler' theory underlying them." is analogous to
"the sun will collapse into a black hole tomorrow". Again, just a difference
of degree.

[I should stress here that the justification for empiricism is an age-old
philosophical problem which isn't easy to understand, much less solve.
However, I think that a proper understanding of the history of physics gives
very convincing (though maybe not the-sun-will-rise convincing) evidence that
simplicity and beauty will be found at the bottom of the particle zoo.]

I don't understand what the true statement

>If there really is to be a scientific breakthrough of the magnitude of a
Newton, it seems likely (almost by definition) that it will be from an
unexpected avenue of thought - seeing that the expected ones have been well
researched and haven't been all that productive.

has to do with our current discussion.

Lastly, (basically) no career particle physicist think that any Nobel prizes
will be awarded for a unifying theory in their lifetime. (See, for instance,
<http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2998>). Perhaps, if we're
lucky, there will be a somewhat _simplifying_ theory (which gets a Nobel
prize) but that certainly couldn't come from the dominant research avenue,
string theory.

------
td
Can anybody explain how they get the number of _five_ Higgs particles?

If they count one doublet as 4 particles, two doublets would be 8 particles,
right?

~~~
mootothemax
From the news story:

 _Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large
asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs
bosons.

They say the data points to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but
different electric charges.

Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and
positive electric charge. This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model._

And:

 _The Standard Model only has one Higgs "doublet". Although we tend to think
of the Higgs boson as one particle, it actually comes in a package of four,
explained Dr Martin.

"In the Standard Model, you only see one of them because the other three are
absorbed into [other parts of the scheme] such as the W and the Z bosons.
There's only one left," he told BBC News.

"So if you want to add another Higgs doublet - you actually have to add four
more particles."_

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AaronM
This theory would tend to suggest that there are indeed several undiscovered
particles

[http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/how-a-surfer--
1...](http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/11/how-a-surfer--1.html)

