Back in Los Angeles, after my brief action-packed jaunt to Geneva. Higgsteria continues, and I’ll be on NPR’s Science Friday later today to talk about it. That’s 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific time. Hope to do justice to the palpable air of excitement at CERN and around the world.
After that, I think certain parts of my book are going to need some re-writes…
One thing I don’t want to get lost in all the hubbub. Amidst all the many impressive aspects of the work the physicists and machine-builders did to make the LHC happen and achieve this fantastic discovery, I was very struck by how eager people were to give credit to other people. In their main talks, both Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela went out of their way to give credit to the machine builders, the technicians who worked on their experiments, and the thousands of colleagues within each collaboration who contributed to the result. But that eagerness to share credit went well beyond the official announcements — everyone we talked to was quick to point out how far-reaching and international the project really was. The very quintessence of a group effort.
Unfortunately, at least in the sciences, large groups can’t win the Nobel Prize. There will be much discussion in days to come about who deserves a prize for inventing the theory behind the Higgs; I think it’s complicated, and I’m not going to push for any particular set of people. When it comes to the experiments, the matter is easier: there’s no fair way to give it to anyone, really. There was a lot of Nobel-quality effort, without question, but I can’t see how it’s possible to narrow it down to just three people, which is the strict Nobel rule. What we really need to do is change that rule, but the folks in charge are (probably correctly) very conservative about such things, so I don’t see it happening soon.
So let me throw out one name that should at least be in the conversation: Lyn Evans, “the man who built the LHC.” Evans was in charge of the project for many years, and it was his dedication and ability that brought it to successful completion. He is now officially retired as a CERN staff member, although he’s still working as a member of the CMS collaboration and the leader of the effort to build a linear collider. He didn’t play a central role in the actual experimental effort to find the Higgs, but there’s no person who deserves more credit for enabling the conditions under which it could be found. People who are much more informed about the detailed history of the LHC and the ATLAS/CMS experiments will be in a better position that I to render such judgments, but I think the Nobel committee could do a lot worse.
@Josh Says,
Be very careful what you buying into Josh. Physics is ‘supposed’ to be about the physical interaction of actual things, like those “particles and balls” Marko is dismissing. Marko would seem to believe (sadly, as most mathematical folks do) that math is physics, or reality. This is not logically or physically true. Math in physics is supposed to try and describe reality (those pesky particles and pool balls) by creating models that can make accurate predictions about what actual particles and pool balls do. When you jettisson the reality of actual particles that have physical extension and mass in favor of abstract virtual point particles that only exist in fields of abstract force carrying math, you are moving further and further away from what physics is supposed to be about. Look around before you discard your rational intuition, there are other possibilities that don’t insult logical causality.
@Tony Cusano,
I can’t believe you actually said what you did. Individuals think, reason, learn, discover, and accomplish… or at least they should be able to. Science history is full of individuals who figured this out and went out and changed things when the collective wisdom of the groupthink you prevail were wrong. Please reconsider.
Christian,
I would tend agree with you, but I don’t have the evidence or expertise to support that hah! That’s why I mentioned positivist thought, which I think we are kind of pidgeon-holed into at the moment simply because we don’t know enough. There is, however, also the possibility that the way the universe works is complete nonsense (by our reasoning), and I think we should be willing to cede that possibility. But first I do think an extremely stringent and stubborn look for the “rational” explanations should precede the admittance of course. 🙂
@Josh Says,
What you say is very interesting, because it brings up a very interesting fact that is the crux of all understanding. If you are going to pursue science/physics, honestly, you have to assume the universe is intelligible. All our present understanding of science as we know it comes from this premise or assumption, and it has for the most part worked out quite well…with a few caveats. If you assume the opposite, that the universe is unintelligible, you have painted yourself into a corner logically with regards to any comprehension of reality and have eliminated any chance of escaping the position of nihilism to seek alternatives. Since the second assumption does not and can not bear any fruit whatsoever in its self fulfiling axiom “We can know nothing, reality is beyond our capacity”, I should hope that the first assumption would be preferred…and even hoped for. It is ironic (not a paradox or contradiction) that the basis of science is started with an assumption or act of faith. Don’t ever cede to the position of reality being incomprehensible unless you are trying to not understand.
Christian Takacs:
Physics is ‘supposed’ to be about the physical interaction of actual things, like those “particles and balls” Marko is dismissing. Marko would seem to believe (sadly, as most mathematical folks do) that math is physics, or reality. This is not logically or physically true. Math in physics is supposed to try and describe reality (those pesky particles and pool balls) by creating models that can make accurate predictions about what actual particles and pool balls do. When you jettisson the reality of actual particles that have physical extension and mass in favor of abstract virtual point particles that only exist in fields of abstract force carrying math, you are moving further and further away from what physics is supposed to be about. Look around before you discard your rational intuition, there are other possibilities that don’t insult logical causality.
What I was explaining to Josh was a theoretical description of elemetary particles and their interactions (that is what he asked for, IIUC). The Standard Model is just that — a mathematical model. Generally, in describing natural phenomena, one is allowed to use whatever math is suitable and available, as long as the description and predictions of the model are consistent with experiments. Physicists never claim that the SM is the true reality, but rather only just a good-enough description of it.
As for intuition, balls, pool and stuff… Once you see an experiment with the single electron flying through two slits simultaneously, the “particle-is-a-ball” intuition falls on its nose in a very embarassing way, never to reassert itself again. Human intuition about processes happening in nature is tailored to work for low-energy medium-distance observations, and one is forced to abandon it when dealing with high-energy and small- or large-distance phenomena. Physicists do not abandon their intuition light-heartedly. On the contrary, we are quite pushed into it by experiments and observations of nature itself.
To see an example, consider the “pool balls” scenario for the electrostatic Coulomb force between two electrons. One electron “throws away” a photon, which then “hits into” the other electron. The net effect is that two electrons repel each other, due to the momentum transfer by the photon, just like pool balls. This is ok. But now, consider electron and a proton — the electron throws away the same photon as above, which then goes on to hit the proton. How can the proton now be attracted to the electron, as opposed of being repelled? Momentum transfer cannot explain that — when you play pool, the balls can never get attracted to each other by exchanging the cue-ball between them. The ball-throwing description falls short of describing attractive forces, which are known to exist in nature.
Of course, you may reconsider that model and substitute ball-throwing with some more complicated mechanism, that can account for attractive forces. But then I would probably find some other argument against your new model, so that you would have to refine it again, and again, and again… After some time of playing this game, you will most probably end up inventing a model which is mostly equivalent to the field theory I described in the previous two posts. 🙂 That’s how physicists actually ended up with all this abstract-theoretical logically-insulting interacting-fields-description-nonsense stuff. We didn’t introduce all that because we like abstract math, but because we need abstract math, if we are to describe nature precisely enough.
Best, 🙂
Marko
@vmarko,
I am aware of the ‘double slit experiment’, and the data which was interpreted a certain way ( but by no means the only way). I would argue that when you abandon a particle as a something and substitute a non physical math of abstraction in its place, that contradicts its self (particle/wave duality) that you have already removed yourself from reality, physics, and reason, by several layers. I could also state that the sun rises because it is filled with Helium, but as the day progresses, it leaks out so the sun sinks until it drops below the horizon where a cosmic turtle beneath the disk of the world pumps it back up with helium so it can rise again the following day…aha! see, my prediction agrees with my experiment! This kind of circular silliness is why epicycles took so long to overturn.
Once you convince yourself that a paradox or contradiction in your theory is fine, as long as it allows agreement with the ‘interpretation’ of data from your experiment, you have jettisoned the very concepts of science, logic, and reason from your process that makes understanding possible. No matter how much complex math you cover your logical error with, the error remains waiting for ‘the Space Child oh so Serene to push the button that starts the machine’.
As for your examples of particle interaction…with all due respect, are you serious? You pose some excellent and very relevant questions, state you don’t know how it’s possible to explain certain interactions logically (attraction/repulsion), and then… you basically throw your hands up and say ‘screw it, I want my answer now, I don’t care how I get it’ then abandon the very things that made you pose the question to begin with, your curiosity and reason. Think carefully about what this means. You don’t want to accept magic or miracles (the incomprehensible) to be the method of understanding… you take up the discipline of science, reason, and logic, encounter something you don’t understand, and then employ such wonderful scientific methods such as paradox, contradiction, imaginary numbers, point particles, renormalization, all the various math fields parading around as physical fields and forces, backwards causality, non-localized whatever, spontaneous ‘anything’,breaking symmetries, and I will stop there… because it keeps going and going … so you employ such methods to your scientific process and believe you are going to “describe nature precisely enough”. Do you see the disconnect? You reject mechanical transfers of momentum and energy as being unworkable with atoms, but favor purely mathematical virtual particles that ‘tell’ other particles to repulse or attract to get the quantum field theories to function? Particles that tell other particales what to do? Come here! Go away, Go left, right, Get down! My goodness, how can you have attraction from such pushy little particles! Why bother with so much inexplicable fudge, just go back to miracles and magic… “God did it.” There, all done, no mystery here, nothing to see…Hey, do NOT look behind that imaginary number! But, as you said , you need abstract maths…lots and lots of endless abstract maths…and now you will also need basically infinite universes to make the endless maths go round and round…like some kind of fractalized descent into Mandelbrot computational hell.
I’m sorry vmarko, I don’t mean to offend and you have been patient with me, and I respect that, and I respect your obvious intelligence. But I do think you need to consider that something is SERIOUSLY wrong with a scientific process and physics community that has decided that it would rather defy causality or invent new particles or dimensions before it checks its many many premises everytime it can’t explain what is going on (Quantum tunneling anyone?). If you can’t explain some interaction, re-examine your assumptions, especially your maths, especially various previous ‘interpretations’ by crusty old wizards who told you not to look behind their uncertainty curtains and Feynman diagrams, before giving up and spackling over with more abstraction and heuristical fudge. If you want to be the next Einstein or Copernicus, you aren’t going to be able to agree with a lot that you’ve been taught. Whatever else you do, don’t abandon your muses of reason and logic for quick results.
Christian:
Although I think the mindset you’re arguing against is held by more modern scientists than it should, I don’t think that was what marko was proposing, nor do I think it necessarily is the “consensus” paradigm. It certainly may seem that way because of how we bolster forward with these ideas written behind us, but I think there’s more complexity than that.
For instance, the abstract math used are quite different than a explanation-gap filler such as the turtle with the air pump. Both indeed are cases where the prediction agrees with the experiment, but we aren’t using the current models (emphasis on that word) in physics simply because we are satisfied with that fact. We use them because they also have predictive power for other phenomena, and they work! We should continuously put them under scrutiny and try and figure out the whole picture (which physicist indeed do!), but we shouldn’t just say “well, this isn’t the actual [or whole] truth” and just get rid of it. It’s far too useful for that. After all, even if we thought describing a system as a wave was ridiculous, well, wave functions open up new technological insights and advancements.
I don’t think this is “abandoning the muses of reason and logic for quick results.” I think it’s just pragmatism. If we can develop a mathematical model that works (emphasis), even though we might not understand the full nature of all that is going on, why not? Maybe someday we could look at individual quarks and leptons interacting more directly and describe them so, but the fact is that we are just grasping the truths of our universe lightly, and to do so better, we need technology that we don’t yet have. The mathematical models we have now aren’t giving up, they are making the best with what we are given.
And at some point though, I believe we are going to have to cede that on some eventual level, things in our universe just won’t sound right to us. After all, either our universe came from nothing, or something before it (or itself) has always existed. Neither of those “make sense,” but one of them must be true. Maybe quantum mechanics is the level where that peculiarity begins. We shall hopefully see.
Now maybe the ease by which modern physicists talk in such an abstract framework should be unsettling. I think that ease comes from writing the oddity of it all as a caveat would eventually get tiresome and so they get used to the functionality of this means of thinking. That of course is mind-boggling to us, but it doesn’t make it bad. It may be though still, but I can’t peer into all of their minds so easily. I DO think though that we should shy away from even wilder sounding descriptions of our universe when trying to come up with a model with predictive power though until we get more empirical evidence to support them. For instance, quantum mechanics models sounds weird, but it has the empirical backup and an amazing amount of predictive power. Things like string theory though seem too far reaching, without the empiricism or the strong predictive power to back them up.
I understand your frustration though. It drives me crazy sometimes too, as I definitely think there are some celebrity scientists who think it is ok to not look deeper, or at least to not do so without fighting tooth and nail for a “sensical” diagnosis first. I remind myself though that this is not how it all goes, and pragmatism is often employed.