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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Does the “Goddamn” Higgs Particle Portend the End of Physics?

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Does the “Goddamn” Higgs Particle Portend the End of Physics?

December 17, 2011


What does it say about particle physics that the Higgs boson has generated so much hullaballoo lately? Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have reportedly glimpsed “tantalizing hints” of the Higgs, which might confer mass to quarks, electrons and other building blocks of our world. Not actual “evidence,” mind you, but “hints” of evidence. “Physicists around the world have something to celebrate this Christmas,” the physicist Michio Kaku exults in The Wall Street Journal.


Actually, the Higgs has long been a mixed blessing for particle physics. In the early 1990s, when physicists were pleading—ultimately in vain–with Congress not to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider, which was sucking up tax dollars faster than a black hole, the Nobel laureate Leon Lederman christened the Higgs “the God particle.” This is scientific hype at its most outrageous. If the Higgs is the “God Particle,” what should we call an even more fundamental particle, like a string? The Godhead Particle? The Mother of God Particle?

Lederman himself confessed that “the Goddamn Particle” might have been a better name for the Higgs, given how hard it had been to detect “and the expense it is causing.” A more fundamental problem is that discovering the Higgs would be a modest, even anti-climactic achievement, relative to the grand ambitions of theoretical physics. The Higgs would serve merely as the capstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the workings of electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The Standard Model, because it excludes gravity, is an incomplete account of reality; it is like a theory of human nature that excludes sex. Kaku concedes as much, calling the Standard Model “rather ugly” and “a theory that only a mother could love.”

Our best theory of gravity is still general relativity, which does not mesh mathematically with the quantum field theories that comprise the Standard Model. Over the past few decades, theorists have become increasingly obsessed with finding a unified theory, a “theory of everything” that wraps all of nature’s forces into one tidy package. Hearing all the hoopla about the Higgs, the public might understandably assume that it represents a crucial step toward a unified theory–and perhaps at least tentative confirmation of the existence of strings, branes, hyperspaces, multiverses and all the other fantastical eidolons that Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall and other unification enthusiasts tout in their bestsellers.

But the Higgs doesn’t take us any closer to a unified theory than climbing a tree would take me to the Moon. As I’ve pointed out previously, string theory, loop-space theory and other popular candidates for a unified theory postulate phenomena far too minuscule to be detected by any existing or even conceivable (except in a sci-fi way) experiment. Obtaining the kind of evidence of a string or loop that we have for, say, the top quark would require building an accelerator as big as the Milky Way.

Kaku asserts in The Wall Street Journal that finding the Higgs “is not enough. What is needed is a genuine theory of everything, which can simply and beautifully unify all the forces of the universe into a single coherent whole—a goal sought by Einstein for the last 30 years of his life.” He insists that we are at “the beginning, not the end of physics. The adventure continues.” Maybe. But I’m not hopeful. Whether or not physicists find the Goddamn Particle, the quest for unification, which has given physics its glitter over the past half century, looks increasingly like a dead end.

Almost 10 years ago, I put my money where my mouth is. The Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages long-term thinking, asked a bunch of people to make bets about trends in science, technology and other realms of culture. I bet Kaku $1,000 that by the year 2020, “no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” (Lee “loop space” Smolin was my original counter-bettor but backed out at the last minute, the big chicken.)

Kaku and I each put up $1,000 in advance, which the Long Now Foundation keeps in escrow. If civilization–or more importantly, the Long Now Foundation–still exists in 2020, it will give $2,000 to a charity designated by me (the Nature Conservancy) or Kaku (National Peace Action). In defending my bet, I stated:

“The dream of a unified theory, which some evangelists call a ‘theory of everything,’ will never be entirely abandoned. But I predict that over the next twenty years, fewer smart young physicists will be attracted to an endeavor that has vanishingly little hope of an empirical payoff. Most physicists will come to accept that nature might not share our passion for unity. Physicists have already produced theories–Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, nonlinear dynamics–that work extraordinarily well in certain domains, and there is no reason why there should be a single theory that accounts for all the forces of nature. The quest for a unified theory will come to be seen not as a branch of science, which tells us about the real world, but as a kind of mathematical theology.”

I added, however—and this is both mawkish tripe and the truth–that “I would be delighted to lose this bet.”

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

About the Author: Every week, John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A former staff writer at Scientific American, he is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's Books, January 2012).

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

The 'God Particle' and the Origins of the Universe

The Wall Street Journal

The 'God Particle' and the Origins of the Universe

The search for a unifying theory is nowhere near over.


Physicists around the world have something to celebrate this Christmas. Two groups of them, using the particle accelerator in Switzerland, have announced that they are tantalizingly close to bagging the biggest prize in physics (and a possible Nobel): the elusive Higgs particle, which the media have dubbed the "God particle." Perhaps next year, physicists will pop open the champagne bottles and proclaim they have found this particle.

Finding this missing Higgs particle, or boson, is big business. The European machine searching for it, the Large Hadron Collider, has cost many billions so far and is so huge it straddles the French-Swiss border, near Geneva. At 17 miles in circumference, the colossal structure is the largest machine of science ever built and consists of a gigantic ring in which two beams of protons are sent in opposite directions using powerful magnetic fields.

The collider's purpose is to recreate, on a tiny scale, the instant of genesis. It accelerates protons to 99.999999% the speed of light. When the two beams collide, they release a titanic energy of 14 trillion electron volts and a shower of subatomic particles shooting out in all directions. Huge detectors, the size of large apartment buildings, are needed to record the image of this particle spray.

Then supercomputers analyze these subatomic tracks by, in effect, running the video tape backwards. By reassembling the motion of this spray of particles as it emerges from a single point, computers can determine if various exotic subatomic particles were momentarily produced at the instant of the collision.

The theory behind all these particles is called the Standard Model. Billions of dollars, and a shelf full of Nobel Prizes along the way, have culminated in the Standard Model, which accurately describes the behavior of hundreds of subatomic particles. All the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle have been painstakingly created in the laboratory except the last, missing piece: the Higgs particle.

It is a crucial piece because it is responsible for explaining the various masses of the subatomic particles. It was introduced in 1964 by physicist Peter Higgs to explain the wide variation. Until then, a theory of subatomic particles had to assume that the masses of these particles are zero in order to obtain sensible mathematical results. This was a puzzling, disturbing result, since particles like the electron and proton have definite masses. Mr. Higgs showed that by introducing this new particle, one could preserve all the correct mathematical properties and still have non-zero masses for the particles.

While physicists cannot yet brag that they have found the Higgs particle, they have now narrowed down the range of possible masses, between 114 and 131 billion electron volts (over a hundred times more massive than the proton). With 95% confidence, physicists can rule out various masses for the Higgs particle outside this range.

Will finding the Higgs boson be the end of physics? Not by a long shot. The Standard Model only gives us a crude approximation of the rich diversity found in the universe. One embarrassing omission is that the Standard Model makes no mention of gravity, even though gravity holds the Earth and the sun together. In fact, the Standard Model only describes 4% of the matter and energy of the universe (the rest being mysterious dark matter and dark energy).

From a strictly aesthetic point of view, the Standard Model is also rather ugly. The various subatomic particles look like they have been slapped together haphazardly. It is a theory that only a mother could love, and even its creators have admitted that it is only a piece of the true, final theory.

So finding the Higgs particle is not enough. What is needed is a genuine theory of everything, which can simply and beautifully unify all the forces of the universe into a single coherent whole—a goal sought by Einstein for the last 30 years of his life.

The next step beyond the Higgs might be to produce dark matter with the Large Hadron Collider. That may prove even more elusive than the Higgs. Yet dark matter is many times more plentiful than ordinary matter and in fact prevents our Milky Way galaxy from flying apart.

So far, one of the leading candidates to explain dark matter is string theory, which claims that all the subatomic particles of the Standard Model are just vibrations of a tiny string, or rubber band. Remarkably, the huge collection of subatomic particles in the Standard Model emerge as just the first octave of the string. Dark matter would correspond roughly to the next octave of the string.

So finding the Higgs particle would be the beginning, not the end of physics. The adventure continues.

Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at CUNY, is author of "Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by 2100" (Doubleday, 2011).

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution Rethinking the Politics-patronage-social Science Nexus


SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE

Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution

Rethinking the Politics-patronage-social Science Nexus

  1. Mark Solovey1

+ Author Affiliations

  1. 125 Irving Terrace, #7, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; fax (at Harvard): +1 617 495 3344; solovey@asu.edu

Abstract

Project Camelot, a military-sponsored, social science study of revolution, was cancelled in 1965 amidst international and national discussion about the study's political implications. Subsequently, Camelot became the focus of a wide-ranging controversy about the connections between Cold War politics, military patronage, and American social science. This paper argues that following Camelot's demise, efforts to rethink the politics-patronage-social science nexus became an important part of what historian Peter Novick has called `the epistemological revolution that began in the 1960s'. Novick claims that `strictly academic' considerations provided the categories of analysis that challenged the scholarly mainstream's commitment to objectivity and related ideals, like value-neutrality and professional autonomy. In contrast, my analysis - which discusses post-WWII military patronage for the social sciences, Camelot's origins and cancellation, the ensuing controversy, and some long-term implications of this controversy - underscores the centrality of political developments and political concerns in that epistemological revolution.

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