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RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#91

Post by jamesaguilar »

D_Alex wrote: post #78
jamesaguilar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I know very little of the history of LCDs. From what I can read on Wikipedia, the chain of research went something like: - Liquid crystals observed. - Materials science research into the properties of liquid crystals, during which the TN-effect was discovered. - Industry scientists looking for a display technology that did not rely on vacuum tubes use the TN-effect to develop practical liquid crystal di…

I was thinking about the transistor (and hence computers etc), rather than the LCD. As for the study - yes, such returns are very difficult to measure or even estimate accurately, as the range of estimates suggest. But won't you agree that a) the consensus is that R&D is extremely valuable, and b) this can probably be extrapolated to basic scientific research? (I feel that I am about to gain a convert to the cause of…

I have always supported scientific research, as you can see from my other comments, the only question is which research.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#92

Post by ericd »

peteretep wrote: post #79
linuxhansl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?

Somehow you added two zeros on to your $3,500bn on bank bailouts! In 2009, it looked like the actual cost would be about $350bn, which is a lot, for sure, but literally an order of magnitude less. According to the treasury department, by 2010, projected cost of TARP was $30-50bn. That's /two/ orders of magnitude out. You also handily miss out the multiplier effects of military spending, and act like the government is…

What my peer means to say is that the Govt. spent a ton more than the TARP amount on buying what basically amounts to garbage debt - almost a pure gift. It's a less reported but much more important number. The banks, of course, like to claim that the TARP stuff was just a loan, to misdirect your eyes from the elephant in the room.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#93

Post by bartwe »

maaku wrote: post #89
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…

I am reminded of an observation made by my former boss, a planetary scientist at NASA, about that same statistical effect: When a new Earth-crossing asteroid or comet is discovered, it's orbit is rarely known with any great certainty. The cross sectional area of the Earth divided by the area of space the object might possibly pass through yields the chance of a collision. With each successive night of observation, th…

It might be because how it is communicated, where an uncertainty is communicated as a chance.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#94

Post by wlievens »

borism wrote: post #90
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.

Funny, cause if the Spanish crown didn't fund Columbuses search for alternative route to East-Indies, we wouldn't be talking about American science right now.

Really? So that huge continent on the other side of the Atlantic would have remained undiscovered for five hundred more years?

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#95

Post by wlievens »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #59
D_Alex wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes, good question. People who make the decisions to spend money on this scale - US$ 9 billion! - must be well qualified to make such decisions, and do so after careful consideration of various alternatives. I think it was the right decision. Of course opportunity cost must be considered - you could have had, instead: 1 new Nimitz class aircraft carrier (without the air wing), OR 4 new B-2 bombers OR 1 extra wee…

> people . . . must be well qualified . . . [so we should trust them]. Surely not an argument from authority. Before we can accept this reasoning, we have to have proof that the people allocating the research funds have interests that well match those of the public, not just the scientific community, and we must also have proof that they have a good track record of applying those interests to ends that match them.

"must" meant "should" in his sentence, not "are definitely".

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#96

Post by wlievens »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #42
bane wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? H…

> That's the wrong question. I asked the question I meant to ask. The point is not that we should stop doing blue sky research if examples exist where it has produced no benefit. It is quite obvious that blue sky research has been useful to us over the course of time. That fact does not give anything called blue sky research carte blanche to spend taxpayer money. The point is to weigh the likely benefits of all the v…

> 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?

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#97

Post by wlievens »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #27
icarus_drowning wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it would be nice to know where mass comes from, but that fact absent any useful application (or a probability of a useful application) is of limited value to me. I guess if you don't see potential applications of understanding where mass comes from, we're at a bit of an impasse here. It is difficult (if not impossible) to make predictions about what the discovery will bring, but the mere possibility that…

> . . . we're at a bit of an impasse here. Only because I don't know the science behind it. I asked the question to be informed. Everyone is so busy trying to show that I am wrong to ask the question that no one has taken time to answer it. What potential applications are there of knowing where mass comes from in the level of detail we are speaking about here (i.e. the proof of the SM or the suggestion of one of the…

> although people were able to make predictions about technologies arising from much of the abstract research of the past long before it became practical

Just about everybody in this thread is arguing the opposite of that.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#98

Post by wlievens »

caf wrote: post #67
jamesaguilar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to seek to find. Even if they are on the wrong track it's better to seek than not. I guess this sentiment, which is seen throughout this thread, is my main objection to the whole thing. This is spiritualism, pure and simple. Science, no matter about what, is good, because it's science. We know this because of our history, and we embrace it like a totem. What I wish is that we had a scientific mindset about…

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.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#99

Post by xdissent »

wlievens wrote: post #94
borism wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, cause if the Spanish crown didn't fund Columbuses search for alternative route to East-Indies, we wouldn't be talking about American science right now.

Really? So that huge continent on the other side of the Atlantic would have remained undiscovered for five hundred more years?

Yes. It would only be discoverable from space.

Re: RIP Higgs Boson (with 95% confidence)

#100

Post by wlievens »

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…

While I agree with your sentiment, your second paragraph is quite telling of probably everyone in this thread: a bunch of geeks secretly hoping [yet consciously knowing it's probably nonsensical], that LHC research will lead to faster-than-light travel/communication and/or time machines.
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