I was listening to Radio 4 this morning and it raised some very interesting issues amongst which were:
There is a 1 in 1000 chance that we are wrong about the Higgs mass. Probability of 1 in a million of being a statistical fluke is the level they look for in statistical maths generally. At this point the theory is considered correct or verified, if not factual.
why is the discovery or indeed lack of discovery of the Higgs important
why should the world invest several billion pounds into CERN when there are so many other nobler causes, like curing cancer etc
what does it mean if we don’t find it…
I of course think atm that it’s looking like the Higgs will be found in an area of about 126 times the mass of the proton. Which is a rather sweet spot for it to turn up. But what do you think?
Do you think CERN is a colossal waste of time?
Do you have your own theory of why things have mass?
Shouldn’t we be investing in the key problems facing physics, such as producing renewable energy in vast quantities, rather than esoteric problems that have little relevance (at least superficially) to the common man.
Anyway the program is interesting and should help clear up any questions people have as to why at least most scientists think this is pivotal.
Well James that is not something you can demand of science that is something you have to show to science. You don’t win Nobel prizes by bitching about how everyone is wrong, but usually by years of effort against the flow. Or at least in a flow of your own.
Damn you are stuck in a rut? Do you really believe that, or is it comfortable to believe that destroying paradigms is impossible? Seems to me wherever you are these days we are so confused by evidence that anyone can be the next big thing, if they are willing to take a leap of faith and run with an idea until it is proved. problem is there are so many ideas and so many that exceed the grasp of science, that, we are reaching wherever we are going, will it always be so, well I don’t know: who’s going to be the next Einstein and shatter the assertions of the establishment beyond repair? Our reach exceeds our grasp, but does that not happen every century? And every century is there not a revelation since the 19th with Maxwell et al.
I think a paradigm shift in understanding of physics happens about once a century. Once there was waves or particles, then duality, who knows what’s next, will it make qm obsolete? Who knows… Even the most jaded person has to admit though it’s a good time to be alive in physics.
Well, they recently managed to repeat experiments in which a particle was able to travel faster than light.
If the results are repeated elsewhere, then the next big shift in physics would probably be a theory that explains these results. I reckon it could take at least twenty years or so though. Everyone has been working on the assumption that the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit for everything. It would show that Einstein, just like Newton, at some point assumed something that means that the theory of relativity, whilst being a description of how some things work, is essentially incomplete. Newton assumed that time was constant, but what could Einstein’s faulty assumption be? And what new rules could be derived from dismissing this assumption?
There’s a good reason everyone is dubious about this experiment, even those who performed it though. If it is repeated, IF being an awfully big IF.
There’s already speculation on neutrino spin that claims the reason they are only left handed is you would have to be travelling faster than them to see the opposite spin, and that is faster than c.
I love this ad hoc speak here, but science would never get anywhere unless it was ad hoc. I mean really, that is why science would not dare to hold to falsification in the strict sense, i.e. if your experiement is shows a prediction to be wrong, the theory is wrong. Well what do you know, we noticed that if we made some alterations that the theory would not be found false and be consistent with the experiment.
