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I don't want to discuss whether sabine is making argument in bad faith or not. Or if she us just cherry picking claims from couple of researchers among thousands working/ed on LHC. But it is inaccurate to say the LHC is built to search for supersymmetry. The original motivation for LHC was Higgs search, we didn't have enough energy in Tevatron so people proposed LHC. There are other motivations like studying dark matter, interactions of quarks and glouns at high energies, b physics and matter- anti matter asymmetry, and Beyond standard models searches where many of the proposed models where SUSY (but not limited to).

I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to judge if ignoring all these and focus on SUSY ia bad faith argument or not. But one of my problems with sabine is that how usually she goes from premises to conclusions which in many cases does not work out well.




Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I think you might be inadvertently side-stepping my point. My argument was not about whether the LHC should have been built. It was about whether or not it was a valid justification put forward. I think the LHC should have been built. And while I can't say for sure, I'm pretty sure Sabine would as well. I think in that same video she calls out that it was built for the Higgs, so no discrepancy there.

But it still side steps the point - which is a false justification being provided by people who either should have or did know better - and that never being acknowledged or addressed.


Sorry but how does it constitute a false justification? The short version of the proposal to build LHC was that

" We would like to construct a machine to reach the energy scale we can't currently reach with Tevatron. This will allow us to discover Higgs boson the last building block of standard model and in the process allow us to do other things like study b physics, Quark-Glouns interactions and maybe could find some low mass particles from SUSY and or other beyond standard model theories."

Most of the goals are either achieved (with the main on being higgs Higgs) or being studied now (remember particle physics is not about unification only) but we failed to see some of things we said we could have seen.

Sorry I have hard time believing that sabine is not cherry picking and twisting facts to support her claims. I don't want to go into attacking personalities and I don't have something with sabine other than her constant stream of unfounded claims about particle physics.


Again you are focusing on something separate from the point I'm discussing. It's is not a question of whether the LHC should have been built. It is also not about whether there were other reasons to build the LHC. I stated that in my initial post - and both of your follow ups have been about that. That is not the topic I (or she) is calling out.

The topic is that of science in general. Falsifiability of theories and arguments in good faith. Most specifically *one* of the numerous reasons provided for the LHC was X. Many people made that argument. That argument was false. People who made the argument either knew it was false or should have known. That is the issue being discussed. Not whether there were other valid reasons to build the LHC - or if those reasons were successful.

It's a bit of hyperbole but it's the equivalent of "lying under oath" to get a conviction. It doesn't matter if the defendant was guilty - and that they were ultimately convicted. It's not ok to "lie under oath" to try to put them behind bars. That is her argument. An expert witness either lied under oath (or was so wrong they shouldn't be considered an expert going forward). And the "courts" should acknowledge and address that. The fact that all of the other experts that all knew he was wrong said nothing is very notable. And we should really address it before that expert witness goes and testifies in another case. All if this is entirely independent of whether the defendant was guilty (which is the point you are raising).

Your argument is "the defendant was guilty, and here is all of this evidence they were guilty. Why are you picking this one expert and their evidence?". And I'm saying it's not about whether the defendant was guilty. That expert is being called out because either they were extremely wrong to the point they shouldn't be an expert, or they knowingly gave false testimony. And in both cases, the other experts in the room who as well knew it he was wrong all remained silent - and did so likely because it benefitted them.




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