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RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#141

Post by gus_massa »

lloeki wrote: post #121
guygurari wrote: post #84

I'm a particle physics grad student. My god, what utter nonsense. The only reasonably accurate paragraph is this: "And, more importantly, the lower energy range from 114 to just under 145 billion electron volts, a region of energy that Fermilab has determined, through earlier experiments, may harbor the Higgs, has not been ruled out. But the Higgs is quickly running out of places to hide." The region of higher Higgs…

> On the other hand, not finding the Higgs would be an extremely exciting result, since it would open the way to less well-explored ideas about the origin of mass. The goal of the LHC is to teach us about the world, not stroke physicists' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are. Maybe the Higgs boson is the new aether[1] which, after many experiments failing at observing its existence, was replaced by r…

There is a big difference. The experiments showed that the ether didn’t exist. But there is no experiment that shows that there is no Higgs boson. IIRC the expected roadmap is to find the Higgs boson in 3-5 years (from now) in the LHC, so don’t expect to see it sooner. (It is expected to see it in sooner in 2-3 years in the Tevatron, if it were kept open.)

The experiments show that if the Higgs boson exists, it is not very heavy (not heavier than 145GeV). And there is some indirect and inconclusive evidence that it exist and the real mass is near ~120GeV (probably +-10GeV), but it can be a statistical fluke, so we have to wait a few years.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#142

Post by archgoon »

gjm11 wrote: post #113
archgoon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bet even odds. Does this mean you are equally likely to expect a Higgs as not, or simply that your belief of there being no Higgs is equal to that of RolfAndreassen's belief that there is one? Genuinely curious here.

The odds (and size of bet) were proposed by the other party. So all you can deduce is that Eliezer thinks Pr(Higgs)<1/2. (If you have a good estimate of Eliezer's risk aversion level for bets of that size, you might be able to get a slightly better estimate, but my guess is that it's extremely close to zero.)

Yes, that's why I asked him.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#143

Post by NY_Entrepreneur »

NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #139
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's truly sad, and perhaps even criminal that journalists, and especially science journalists fall victim to those same misconceptions." "Journalists"? You are being moderated in your high praise of 'journalists', that is, professional members of the highly professional journalistic profession? Cruel. SO cruel. How can you be so CRUEL? I mean, while we're discussing particle physics, don't you believe that the Engl…

Gee, some people really do NOT like facetious comments, parody, and humor! What is it particle physicists: Don't understand humor?

Gee, looks like a LOT of dedicated, devoted English majors here. Who would'a thought?!

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#144

Post by guygurari »

Symmetry wrote: post #140
guygurari wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we should discount our belief that the Higgs has a mass at 140GeV by a factor roughly proportionate to the 95% confidence of the result" I'm sorry but I don't understand what this means in practice. The first part is a Bayesian belief, while the 95% confidence result comes from frequentist analysis. I'm not sure how you can mix the two.

The difference is that frequentist practice would be to stop at the 95% confidence interval and leave it there, whereas a Bayesian would use that observation to update their probability estimate of the theory being true. "If the Higgs were at 140 GeV, it would have 5% probability of producing the results we measured experimentally" is the same as P(Observation | Higgs at 140Gev) = .05 So we can say that P(Higgs|Obser…

Thank you, now I understand what you meant. I concede (again) that using Bayesian analysis the new results do lower the probability that the Higgs exists. Personally I don't subscribe to this point of view since, if the Higgs exists and has a low mass, the most likely chain of events is: Bayesian probability for Higgs existence starts at some subjective value, goes down (with a subjective slope that depends on your priors), then goes up and reaches 1. Not only is it subjective, this just doesn't feel to me like it is describing anything "real"; it seems like we're just playing with numbers. But I guess this is already way off topic for this discussion.

For me the important point to communicate was that the article is, let's say, mostly nonsense. Just consider the title:

> A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?

Never mind the superlatives. There was no "Higgs setback", and the answer to the question is "No". The article does not leave out the correct details, but I'm quite certain it leaves the layman with the feeling that the Higgs search is all but doomed.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#145

Post by ebrenes »

wlievens wrote: post #98
caf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic underlying assumption is that more knowledge is inherently more valuable than less knowledge, even if you don't have a specific application in mind for that knowledge. How many people could have forseen GPS recievers as a consequence of General Relativity?

How is the GSP receiver a consequence of GR (honest question)? I know internal clocks of the satellites have to compensate for time dilation, but to be honest I don't see why that couldn't have been 'fixed' with an empirical solution devoid of theoretical basis. After the first launch, of course.

I think the empirical solution would not be as straight-forward as you proclaim. Namely, because lacking any clear understanding of the science any number of theories might crop up that attempt to explain the perceived anomaly thus hindering efforts at finding a workable solution. Some of the emergent theories might actually lead to declaring outright that the concept is flawed and unsolvable.

On the other hand, having a clear conceptual framework allows these people to pin-point what areas might be causing problems. It allows for effort to be focused and justifies certain fixes. Especially in costly scenarios such as this one, where there might not have been a second launch given the failure of the first.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#146

Post by danmaz74 »

guygurari wrote: post #144
Symmetry wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that frequentist practice would be to stop at the 95% confidence interval and leave it there, whereas a Bayesian would use that observation to update their probability estimate of the theory being true. "If the Higgs were at 140 GeV, it would have 5% probability of producing the results we measured experimentally" is the same as P(Observation | Higgs at 140Gev) = .05 So we can say that P(Higgs|Obser…

Thank you, now I understand what you meant. I concede (again) that using Bayesian analysis the new results do lower the probability that the Higgs exists. Personally I don't subscribe to this point of view since, if the Higgs exists and has a low mass, the most likely chain of events is: Bayesian probability for Higgs existence starts at some subjective value, goes down (with a subjective slope that depends on your p…

I agree with you about the article being just sensationalistic non-journalism.

About not using a Bayesian approach, though, I don't understand how could you infer the existence or not of the Higgs without it, considering that we can only measure something that is probabilistically correlated to what we want to find.

In other words, what should happen for you to say that we have verified that there is a Higgs boson? I'm pretty confident that it would be some application of Bayes theorem :)

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#147

Post by jaylevitt »

dodo53 wrote: post #106
wlievens wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask that we consider whether any given piece of blue sky research is likely to appreciate or be a money sink Good idea in theory perhaps, but how do you suggest to make that assessment?

I think ironically the more obvious the return on investment of the research is, the less sense it makes for government to fund it - the private sector is more likely to fund something where the route to commercialisation is clear. Or: basic science is a public good, and is underinvested in by free markets.

DARPA's rule is that if more than 10% of their projects succeed, they're not taking enough risks. Blue sky projects are presumably much, much lower probability than that.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#148

Post by libraryatnight »

guygurari wrote: post #84

I'm a particle physics grad student. My god, what utter nonsense. The only reasonably accurate paragraph is this: "And, more importantly, the lower energy range from 114 to just under 145 billion electron volts, a region of energy that Fermilab has determined, through earlier experiments, may harbor the Higgs, has not been ruled out. But the Higgs is quickly running out of places to hide." The region of higher Higgs…

This comment thread is more interesting than the article.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#149

Post by caf »

wlievens wrote: post #98
caf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic underlying assumption is that more knowledge is inherently more valuable than less knowledge, even if you don't have a specific application in mind for that knowledge. How many people could have forseen GPS recievers as a consequence of General Relativity?

How is the GSP receiver a consequence of GR (honest question)? I know internal clocks of the satellites have to compensate for time dilation, but to be honest I don't see why that couldn't have been 'fixed' with an empirical solution devoid of theoretical basis. After the first launch, of course.

Apologies - it's actually SR that's key to the whole idea (though GR corrections are also very important to the accuracy). Without the observed SoL being independent of the relative motion of the user and the satellites, the entire concept is pretty unworkable.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#150

Post by Eliezer »

archgoon wrote: post #104
Eliezer wrote: post #88

It's too early to call this one for sure, but still, I'm proudly on the record as betting against the Higgs. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bets_registry

You bet even odds. Does this mean you are equally likely to expect a Higgs as not, or simply that your belief of there being no Higgs is equal to that of RolfAndreassen's belief that there is one? Genuinely curious here.

At this point I'd probably bet 10:1 against the Higgs, even taking into account risk aversion.
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