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RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#31

Post by jamesaguilar »

wtallis wrote: post #29
jamesaguilar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a gamble. Even gambles have odds. And, to me at least, it does matter if we get something valuable out of our tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some slobbering hard-line libertarian who believes that any experiment with a negative result is wasted money. On the other hand, if the odds are that a positive or negative result is nowhere likely to benefit the public in a concrete manner (either directly or…

If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. It would be engineering. You can't make valid predictions about the expected benefit of any single experiment before running it for the first time. All we have to go on is the history of major scientific undertakings, and the technologies they have eventually lead to. That history primarily shows two things: su…

> If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore.

Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its long term practical applications.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#32

Post by fragsworth »

jerf wrote: post #20
fragsworth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter. You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.

At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib gen…

Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?

What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can construct out of quantum materials? And then 10-15 years later we have a functional portal device? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs cars? planes? trains?)

What if we discover a new computing method based on the research started by these particle accelerators, better than quantum computing, that eventually gives us so much computing power that we are capable of developing human-like AI? Or an AI that is many times more powerful than humans? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs to work anymore?)

Who knows what we will be capable of? It's a fucking gamble. As it stands, we don't know. But the potential rewards outweigh the costs so much as to render them ridiculous.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#33

Post by tzs »

indrax wrote: post #2

>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong. Europe explored the universe where America did not.

> Europe explored the universe where America did not

I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station?

The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would have been the first on the chopping block.

America continued exploring the universe just fine--but with a broad approach instead of putting everything toward exploring one narrow area.

We're seeing a repeat of this with the new space telescope, although the outcome may be different this time. The projected costs have grown massively, and the projected launch date has been pushed WAY out. It's been defunded this year, with Congress specifically calling it out by name as to receive no funding. The Congressman who put that language in has said that this is meant to be a warning to the project's managers that they need to get their act together, and then funding can come back.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#34

Post by bane »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #26
henrikschroder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is ridiculous, ROI is relevant if you're talking about applied research where you have a short-term goal and can make the calculation. But the LHC is basic research, you can't do ROI calculations on that. Instead, you dump as much money as you can into it, and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it.

> and then you know that decades down the line, you'll be very happy that you did it. How do you know that? Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?

Has all blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?

That's the wrong question.

"Has blue sky research in history resulted in massive benefits decades down the line?"

is a better one and the answer is a most definitive yes, many many many times the amount of money put into it, on the order of trillions of dollars.

Do each and every blue sky pure R&D experiment yield such results? Heck no! Neither does any known investment vehicle.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#35

Post by teraflop »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #22
teraflop wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Higgs boson has essentially nothing to with dark matter, as far as we know. In fact, they're not even in the same category: the Higgs boson is a theoretical prediction that has yet to be observed (or conclusively ruled out), whereas dark matter is a real, observable thing in the cosmos that we don't yet have a theory to explain.

Dark matter has not been observed, hence the name. We know something is there, but we don't know what is is and we have not seen it.

No, it's called "dark matter" because it appears not to interact with electromagnetic radiation but has mass. We can observe it indirectly through its gravitational influence, such as altered galactic rotation curves and weak lensing. (If we hadn't somehow observed it, and we didn't have a theory that predicted it, why would we think it exists at all?)

Regardless, the point I was getting at is that confirming or denying the existence of the Higgs boson would have little or no direct impact on our understanding of dark matter. (I'm not a physicist, but this is my layman's understanding of the situation, and I haven't heard any physicists claiming otherwise.)

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#36

Post by jamesaguilar »

patrickyeon wrote: post #25
jamesaguilar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe explored the universe where America did not. What did they get out of it? (Honest question.) Also, supposing the Higg's Boson did exist and this experiment found it, how much benefit would the average European derived? How much less benefit would people from other countries enjoy?

There are a number of replies telling you that a better understanding of physics is what we get out of this. I completely agree, but that argument won't convince everybody. I don't have numbers at hand, but a large amount of the data the detectors spew out is un-necessary, and needs to be sorted quickly (think real-time or very nearly), so that the back end computing resources can actually keep up with storing it. Th…

I thank you for your point about advances made from pure scientific research before. However, I think in many of these cases some applications of the pure research were hypothesized as well, long before the pure research was actually completed. I worry that we are simply picking examples of blue sky research that ended up being practical, and ignoring examples that were not because they are less available. (Which makes sense, since research that had no practical use would probably not come to mind when you try to think of examples where research ended up having a practical use.)

Of course, even such a conclusion would not suggest that we should cease all blue sky research. Obviously that would be very silly. But it might make sense to think about whether it is possible to guess ahead of time what research is likely to have practical benefits and what research is not. This way we can spend more money on research likely to have benefits and less on research that is probably useless except for the knowledge's own sake.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#37

Post by evgen »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #30
zzzmarcus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark matter has not been observed, hence the name. We know something is there, but we don't know what is is and we have not seen it.

Its gravitational effects have been observed, that is how we know it is there. Nobody has seen it, but little in the sky is actually accessible via visible wavelengths.

A gravitational anomaly has been observed, but the source of this anomaly is not just invisible to the visible wavelengths but from all wavelengths we can measure. "Dark matter" sounded a bit better than "unicorn turds" I guess, but at the moment each is equally likely.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#38

Post by ugh »

tzs wrote: post #33
indrax wrote: post #2

>to spend billions of taxpayer dollars in search of a particle that likely does not exist would have been wasteful This is infuriating. A negative result is a successful experiment. Don't hamper efforts to fund science with the argument that science might figure out it was wrong. Europe explored the universe where America did not.

> Europe explored the universe where America did not I guess you never heard of a little project called the International Space Station? The SSC was supposed to be a $4 billion project. That's what Congress was told in 1987. By 1993, it was projected as a $12 billion project. Guess where that $8 billion would have come from if the SSC project had continued? From other science projects--and most likely the ISS would h…

You could call it division of labor. The US will obviously benefit from any discoveries the LHC makes, Europe will also benefit from the ISS.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#39

Post by bane »

fragsworth wrote: post #32
jerf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib gen…

Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can const…

"Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?"

Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment by the Soviets.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#40

Post by idlewords »

That's an utterly misleading headline. The Higgs boson is not excluded in the mass range 115-145 GeV, and there won't be enough evidence for a null result (or discovery) until at least November.

More context here:

http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2011/08/higgs-wont-come-out-...

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