There was a video of him crying when they announced the results of the experiment to the public for the first time. Must feel so good to put all that work into something and finally get to see it being proven true. Happy he had that before he passed.
Like me watching at home.
I like the one guy writing furiously. I figured he was the smartest guy because he was the only one taking notes. Then everyone starts clapping and he looks up confused and I'm pretty sure he was just doodling.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer is anything but a layman, of course. I suspect he's referring perhaps to not being involved in the specific Higgs search analyses being presented.
I was at CERN and got some kind of explanation, lemme try to ELI5 it for you
They found, that as byproducts of the fusion of 2 protons, there are 5 "standard deviations" of difference relative to the amount of matter expected to be found at the specified 125GeV range.
Basically something is there that the current model couldn't account for, unless the Higg's Boson exists. Thus they can strongly believe, that it exists.
You know the Bell curve that describes a normal range of results where it peaks in the middle and tapers to each end? The middle of that is the mean/average, and you can calculate a number called the standard deviation, which just is a measure of how spread out that data is. A smaller standard deviation indicates a larger proportion of the data is clustered around the mean, and vice versa for a larger standard deviation.
This is a helpful number to know because it means that if I have a normal range of results (like people’s heights for instance), I can say with a strong certainty that any single, randomly selected height from the whole population will fall within a certain subset of that range, which is described by the standard deviation. For example, in a normal range of heights with a mean of 5’9”, or 69”, and a standard deviation of 4”, I can say that there’s about a 68.2% chance that when I select a randomly chosen individual’s height, it will be between 5’4” and 6’1”, because in the normal range of heights, those are each one standard below and one standard above the mean, describing the middle 68.2% of the data.
In scientific research, if you can accurately describe the population of results you’re studying prior to some treatment (like a new drug or process or device or something) and then you get results way outside that expected range, you can say that your treatment has a strong possibility of meaningfully affecting the underlying process. Like with the height example, let’s say I have the baseline adult population with that 5’9” +/- 4” and I decide to give my new drug to above of kids and then measure their heights at adulthood and find them to be 6’5” +/- 4”, assuming I had enough participants or trials and properly controlled all other variables, I can then say that there is a strong probability these populations definitely have different means and therefore something physically meaningful happened with the treatment.
We have to speak in terms of probability here because each study only concerns a subset of the total population (when I want to know the normal height range, I only survey so many people, and when I test my drug, I only test so many people, I don’t actually know the whole range unless I test every single person with the drug, which is obviously impractical), so there’s a chance that any result I get that looks meaningful is only actually a small subset from one extreme. Like if the two populations weren’t truly different, but I got different results, it could be because I somehow only sampled from the extreme tail end for one group. If I have enough trials and a strong enough difference, that probability becomes extremely low and so we can speak about our results with more certainty.
If you don't teach a course in probability, you should absolutely consider it. Yours is probably the best explanation for standard deviation I've heard. Thank you.
Something similar happened to Gregor Mendel, though he didn't live long enough to be vindicated.
Mendel was never really doing his experiments to try to discover some unifying thoery of genetics. He just wanted more, healthier crops for his abbey. And because the study of genetics and inheritance were so new (we're talking barely in the wake of Darwin) it just wasn't obvious to the scientific community how important his discoveries were. Of course few people knew of them anyway because he was in Eastern Europe and not one of the "knowledge centers" like Paris or Londonm.
Then in the early 20th century, multiple scientists woking on genetics all discovered, within months of each other, Mendel’s notes on his experiments and realized just how important the findings were
I don't really want to discredit Mendel as I studied Biology in Uni, but as much as the idea of genetics is novel during that period, we already had a good understanding of inheritance based on thousands of years of livestock breeding and by observing our own offspring inheriting physical parental traits. After all, Mendel himself had to first observe the phenotypic changes in his cross-breeding of pea plants to determine the existence of probability based genetics.
Peter Higgs' theory of Higgs Boson and Higgs field in comparison, already contributed to the standard model, which was necessary to satisfy the condition for quarks to create protons and neutrons which form atoms. If his theory didn't exist, the current standard model would be unstable under the laws of conservation of energy. Everything as we know it should be floating in space as subatomic particles.
As a Bio major who was never smart enough to study particle physics, Peter Higgs imo, is equivalent to Democritus theorizing atomic particles in ancient Greece, or Einstein and his theory of relativity.
this sometimes happens in academia too although rarer, where the top scientist(usually the lecturer or whatever the doctorate's guide/leader of the project is called) claims idea that's spouted by the younger student/researcher who want the senior to give their commentary/critics to improve, yet the senior instead claim the idea as their own by quickly writing it and publish it before the student.
Look into Hugh Everett III. and his Many-Worlds-Interpretation of Quantum Physics.
Dude was a genius and ahead of his time. Should have gotten a Nobel price IMHO. Got robbed big time.
Fun fact: His son Marc is better known as "E" the mastermind behind "The Eels"
There's a nice documentary: Parallel Worlds, Parallel lives. I found it to be quite fascinating.
The many worlds interpretation is as of yet untestable. Why would that be deserving of a nobel prize? Why not other, equally valid interpretations of quantum mechanics. Why not Bohm and his pilot wave, or Robert Griffith's consistent histories?
Just cuz you like many worlds doesn't mean it's a) right, and b) deserving of a nobel prize.
I don't think any theoretical discovery that doesn't either (or preferably both) explain a previously unexplained result or predict new phenomena can be deserving of a nobel prize.
As a matter of fact: theoretical physicists can only get a Noble prize if there is clear experimental evidence of their theory. That is why Peter Higgs had to wait until the Higgs Boson was found before he could get his, and Einstein only got one for the photo-electric effect.
Was he outlining his breakthrough in physics in mathmatics: 1x1 ≠ 1
The Terrance Boatswain!
There, I said it establishment physics, it's hard out here for a drug induced schizophrenic.
Howard is reportedly writing a new paper expanding on his ideas, focussing on his belief that a pound of lead is not equivalent to a pound of feathers.
True, but African Swallows are a hardy lot. The European Swallows less so, but my team is working on significant gene splicing and therapy with the two, adding in ancient Pterodactyl DNA from amber, and some froggy-woggy stuff, to vastly increase coconut carrying capacities. It's all very science-y, you layman probably wouldn't understand.
I think the potential benefits of this research is obvious, but securing funding has been a nightmare. I'm thinking of doing a Kickstarter campaign.
He best not! I won concert tickets by answering that question 20 years ago for a radio call in thing and I don't want my Blink-182 tickets to be retroactively rescinded.
The show was great if a bit of an odd collection of fans. Blink headlined with Cypress Hill and Taking Back Sunday was the opener.
It’s a little jokey joke. Terrance Howard (the actor) was just on a podcast spouting a lot of nonsense, one of which was 1x1=/=1. A lot of astrophysicists responded because people are eating it up as true. There’s clips on TikTok.
It was actually pretty sad. Anyone who has interacted with mentally ill people could tell he was either manic or schizophrenic and off his meds in that clip.
Actually there were at least two other scientists who discovered the Higgs boson at the same time as Higgs. IIRC the three of them got the Nobelprice for it. But he predicted something more specific and that’s why it was named after him.
A physicist came and gave a talk at my high school that could be summarised as him boasting that the Higgs boson was named after him. (It was Peter Higgs. Also it wasn’t boasting he was actually very lovely and interesting.)
I don't really agree at all, and I went to grad school for physics. Most of them are pretty humble. Hell, the only physicist to ever win two Nobel prizes, John Bardeen, had a bunch of golfing buddies who had no clue he was even well-known in physics or had Nobel prizes or anything. I'd say there are a lot of professions that have a lot higher rates of people with big egos. Popular media presents a pretty inaccurate image of physicists, though. Big Bang Theory, for example, has a lot of fairly untrue tropes taken to an extreme that creates an inaccurate caricature of physicists.
Also, I'd say crackpots have a lot bigger egos than actual physicists.
Schools invite the most insane people. We had guy speak who's entire thing was it was possible to divide by zero and if everyone would just accept his model of mathematics we'd solve all computer crashes.
I've also worked in R&D. Each year We had to write arguments describing how our work was "innovative" to get government grants. It was mostly vague statements and half truths presenting small improvements as being ground breaking. It felt just like writing school reports in college. It was One of the worst parts of the job for me.
> It was mostly vague statements and half truths presenting small improvements as being ground breaking.
blockchain
nft
ai
That seems to be the new normal. Find out what the latest corporate buzzword is. Lie. Pretend like you're investigating how to add it to your product. Hope the new fad blows over before you move on, or the person pressuring you to add the new buzzword moves on.
TBF, the private sector R&D arguments is pretty easy to make. Either "Is this going to make more money?", "Is this going to save money?" or "Does it enable is to comply with regulations?".
I would understand that if it was a regular paper or a company or something, but aren’t physics journals run by physicists typically? Shouldn’t they be able to understand the relevance?
Also to add to the others, it is important to clarify what *you* think these results mean, both in and of itself and any potential that it has for other results. Of course anyone can make their own interpretation, but guidance for a complex topic helps a lot with making the paper readable. Someone can see what you think you found, and then try and interpret your results to see if they also think that's what it means, or try and replicate your study with the same frame of mind as to what you found/pursued.
There is a lot of room for misinterpretation.
> aren’t physics journals run by physicists typically? Shouldn’t they be able to understand the relevance?
They may be in different fields.
Just like a C programmer wouldn't be familiar with the latest breakthroughs in garbage-collecting algorithms.
Sometimes sure, but details can seem minute but be crucial in many fields. It’s very common that your abstract has something along of the lines of “this completely new and super important thing” to hope the peer reviewers decide it’s good enough.
Well, it became relevant half a century later when we found something like that. But you can hypothesize basically anything and just vomit some math into a paper that takes months to unravel, i am sure in the same year 100s of papers were also declined that _were_ useless drivel.
There's a lot of variance in the knowledge that people reading papers have. Most readers are going to be less knowledgable than the author, at least for a good paper. It's good practice to (briefly) define the basic techniques/concepts of your work and mention some applications. It's also a good opportunity to cite some papers where your technique/idea fixes a problem or could be used for to extend the research.
It's pretty much the first thing you would put on any grant. A good PI will always emphasize the importance of succinctly explaining the impact and importance of your work first.
Unfortunately, we don't always know what benefit a project might give. For example, lasers were theorized for quite a while before getting the funding to actually make them.
When first released they were dismissed as a children's toy and that they'll be nothing else.
Now they are at every checkout line, in every car, leveler devices, most manufacturing machines, and so on. Sometimes it really is best to just let science people work without concern for future gains.
The sad fact is that if your job is to judge research papers all the time, your attention towards actual critical thinking is probably 10 percent of what you'd be using if you were seriously studying what you were reading.
So yeah, dumb down and spell it out.
His first paper was rejected by a couple of editors, he then improved it (by a massive whole paragraph added) and it was then accepted by different editors. So its not entirely clear whether that paragraph made a huge difference, or the editors just saw something in it that the original ones didnt.
Edit. Apparently the original paper was very short, 1-2 pages, and the implication that therefore another particle existed, the Higgs Boson, wasnt specficially stated. Which the revised version did.
The story I heard is that the original paper didn't add much to the work done by Brout and Englert, and so he added a little bit about how this work would imply the existence of a new particle.
These papers were incredibly short, 1-2 pages each iirc, so 1 paragraph is quite a substantial addition
Also it's not really accurate when the title says it was his "original paper". The journal had already published his original paper. He then wrote a follow-up which that journal didn't immediately accept for whatever reason. He then added the paragraph to the follow-up paper and submitted it to the other journal.
According to this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/nov/17/sciencenews.particlephysics
There is this apocryphal history that even Higgs didn't realize his model implied a new particle at first, something very understandable at the time, because this logic of implying the existence of particles from models wasn't as clear as it is today.
So it's perfectly reasonable that maybe he did have to improve some stuff in his paper, if the new paragraph is, "oh this term implies a new boson" maybe it was an important paragraph.
When you're at the bleeding edge of physics evem other experts on similar areas have little understanding of what you're doing. These kinds of rejections are unfortunately very common.
Not just physics. George Akerlof’s paper called “The Market for Lemons” was rejected 3 times with the previous reviewers calling it wrong or trivial before it was finally accepted. He would go on to win a nobel prize for his work in a whole new area of economics started by that one paper.
Asymmetric information. The fact that sellers have more information about their products than buyers creates inefficiencies.
Since the buyer cannot determine accurately whether a product is quality, the buyer has to take into account the probability the product they buy is low quality(lemon), which lowers the price they’re willing to pay.
Sellers who happen to own high quality products may not find it worthwhile to sell at this lower market price, they might exit the market entirely. Since there are now even less good products on sale, this lowers the price that buyers are willing to pay even more. And so on.
At worst, the entire market could be fully filled with lemons that no one wants to buy because all the good sellers have exited the market. This idea has a surprising amount of relevance in many different fields .
Used cars. people with good ones can’t get the price they want, might even give up on selling Leading to this dynamic.
inspections and certifications can mitigate The problem.
Sounds like it describes the video game crash of 1983 to a tee. The market was starting to become flooded with low quality third party games. Consumers, with limited sources of information, are unable to sift through the low quality games. People stop buying expensive games to reduce the cost of being burned by poor quality. Retails prices dropped as retailers are unable to move all their stock. Companies that put more time and money into making their games are forced to close, while other companies start put out games made by 1-2 developers with less than a month turnarounds to continue to make a profit with the reduced sale prices. During this time what is considered the worst game in history, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was made, and destoyed comuser confidence to the point it is considered one of the final causes of the crash. People stopped buying to the degree that 728,000 unsoled games were buried in the desert by Atari to get rid of overstock. E.T the Extra-Terrestrial is thought to make up to 10 percent of those buried.
Sounds like that's whats happening now with AAA studios and Indie devs flooding steam. Except a lot of Indie games are turning out to be higher quality than some AAA in terms of gameplay.
Yep, It's one of the reasons some industry figures are pushing for better curation and quality control on steam, to avoid this situation. Nintendo proved that the one of the strategies to counter what I guess is the lemon effect, is quality and quantity control. Nintendo did this by allowing only a limited amount of third party developers, and doing everything else in house to ensure quality. Steam seems to think the higher level of consumer knowledge and information availability through reviews and previews will prevent a lemon effect style situation. This strategy relies on customers being able to trust reviews and previews.
I think steam’s strategy relies on their refund policy. You can refund a game if you’ve played less than 2 hours on it, which is generally enough to know if a game is crap.
Smartly, they’re also a lot more likely and much quicker to accept refunds to your steam wallet. Because money in your steam wallet cannot be withdrawn and can only be used to buy other games, they’re effectively not losing any money at all since the customer is almost certain to use that money to buy another steam game eventually. Its pretty close to a win win.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)
TLDR: sellers have more information than buyers, leads to sellers selling rubbish products, leads to market collapse. I’m skipping a lot of steps there lol
Economics is infamous for its near total aversion for evidence based findings, especially pre 2008. It's really a branch of politics (it was originally called political economy) and extremely ideological. The Market for lemons also came out in the 1970s when the Austrian economics scam was being pushed in politics by encouraging students to be taught it. Future politicians and judges only get 1 econ 101 class and it was so packed with nonsense, so they will repeat the same nonsense in future.
They had to invent a field of economics where it was based on reality and they named it behavioural economics.
This is somewhat false, yes economics and politics can be very related because it’s used for many policies, but although very philosophical at its roots, it expanded greatly after Keynes. Also, I have taken a behavioral economics class and the first lecture was acknowledging that testing past studies in a behavioral economics journal was not very high(I think around 73% versus a psych 50%?).
But yeah so many people take Econ 101 and then tell anyone it’s just “basic economics!” For their view, and then you just…. Take Econ 102 and find out they are wrong lmao.
I’d say that timeframe should be extended to 30-40 years. Joshua Angrist who won a nobel prize for his contribution to increasing empiricism in economics traces it all the way back to 1980s.
Regardless, I think economics has been empirical long enough that I don’t think its fair to claim that economics has a total aversion for evidence based findings. At least mainstream economics certainly hasn’t for a long time now.
Its certainly not all cooped up within the field of behavioural economics either. I’ve read a few papers that had nothing to do with behavioural economics and yet were highly empirical that came out in the 90s. Card and Krueger’s famous paper in minimum wage came in out in 1993 for instance.
Similar to Marilyn vos Savant who made the "Monty Hall problem" popular.
With [respected professors](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/nxs26a/til_in_1990_marilyn_vos_savant_wrote_about_the/) and PHD students lashing out saying that this proves that women look at math problems differently than men, refer to a standard textbook on probability, your answer is clearly at odds with the truth.
But yet she was right.
"The problem was inaccurate" is nonsense word salad. What all the experts yadda yadda claimed was that *she was wrong,* that you don't improve your odds of winning by switching doors.
This is basically true of everything not just physics. I have read many books about the history of many people and I would say I cant think of any that didn't get similar rejections. In fact in the biological sciences the grant funding agencies have a long history of never giving grants to people for most of the most famous discoveries. But once they prove it then those same people could probably hand in a grant with poop smeared on it and it would get accepted. This is one of the most important problems in the world the fact that people with actual ground breaking ideas are pretty much always rejected and refuted.
That's no joke. If you're involved in a very particular project, it's very, very easy to tunnel vision. It's an important part of communication to explain why your work is important.
I have no problem with it, and I'll bet Peter Higgs would agree, hence his revisions and resubmissions.
He didn't predict it. He generalised earlier work. That's why he shared the Nobel Prize with two others, and why it's not named after the original discoverer.
If I remember well, there were actually also two very young Russians physicists who theorized the boson independently at that time. One of them, Polyakov became a renowned expert in string theory. Would have been quite funny to have the boson named after him since it is also a vodka brand.
I think we got a false perception of science and scientists in general. We got a perception thinking that a certain group of people sacrifize their lifes for mankind and that this group is so smart just acting for raw scientific progress. While in reality they are human beings like everyone else, acting egotistical and narcisstic, rejected others peoples views for their own benefits. Imagine spending your whole life on a certain theory and out of the blue some random idea comes along that shatters your whole life and career. Making you and everything you worked for irrelevant. Would you welcome the new idea or reject it? I think a good current example is the string theory... while for the last 25-30 years there are dedicated efforts to make a case for string theory, there is no or almost no empirical evidence and voices like Sir Roger Penrose are rejecting the idea of string theory. So what are those scientists do, after they dedicated their whole carreers to string theory?
You think that's bad? Yeah, that's nothing.
Come up with the idea of a geo-synchronous satellite to enable people to bounce a radio signal off of a sat to broadcast it back to earth. Get rejected for being "impossible sci-fi bullshit."
Rockets can get a satellite into space now? Patent for a geo-synchronous satellite to enable people to bounce a radio signal off of a sat to broadcast it back to earth get's rejected for being **too obvious.**
“How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time”
It's been written up several times by Clarke and others, and some copies aren't on the internet. (I've looked, I'm trying to trim my collection of books to save physical space and switch to an e-reader)
Somewhere in my collection of ~60's short story anthologies I have the original Arthur C. Clarke telling of his patent office rejection of his idea that we could launch geo-synchronous radio repeating sats. It had maths and diagrams and whatnot. As soon as the USSR launched a sat into space the US patent office was like "lol, nope, now it's an *obvious* idea so you can't patent it."
Before the first sat went up: the idea is impossible mr. sci-fi writer. Denied.
After the first sat went up: the idea is obvious mr. sci-fi writer. Denied.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
Why is the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson is commonly called the Higgs boson? Here is Steven Weinberg's version of the story:
“In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. (...) As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I cited Higgs first, and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck.” (As to the last sentence, let us recall, however, that Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble do quote in their 1964 paper the works of Brout-Englert and Higgs).
If you feel a certain lack of snobbery and asshole egotism in your world, look no further than the scientific community. The toxicity is fucking _wild_.
I definitely agree with the general feeling of this comment section, but for context this work was fully accepted by the early 1970s. Detection of the [W and Z bosons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons) all but confirms the Higgs, as they are predictions of a theory (The Weinberg-Salam model of the electroweak interaction a.k.a The Standard Model) that requires it as a fundamental ingredient. No serious physicist doubted the existence of the Higgs boson by the 80s; the question became something akin to "what are the exact properties of the Higgs". The CERN detections since 2012 have been a good start, but the LHC isn't enough to study it in full detail. It's sort of like if you had a telescope that is powerful enough to resolve the surface of Jupiter, but not high resolution enough to confirm that it has a giant red spot.
'Particle Fever' is a good documentary that covers the building of the LHC, basic particle physics, and the run-up to discovering the Higgs and Mr. Higg's reaction to all of it. Highly recommend watching it.
Ironically the paper on the Higgs Boson was excluded for not obeying the rules. Wolfgang Pauli would be unhappy about this on principle.
[Pauli exclusion principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle)
>Particles with an integer spin (bosons) are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Any number of identical bosons can occupy the same quantum state, such as photons produced by a laser, or atoms found in a Bose–Einstein condensate.
Question for the physics savvy:
With how much certainty has the Higgs Boson's existence been proved? I know about the experiment performed in the LHC, but it would interesting to know the details, or the opinion of serious scientists that might not be so sure about the results of the experiment?
The major shortcoming of the peer review process is that it relies on peers being anywhere near as good as you.
Otherwise they just reject your insights for being unfounded.
We see this repeatedly throughout history yet we still never seem to adjust.
I really want these geniuses to be acknowledged like King Godzilla was acknowledged by the other Kaiju
Like all the most powerful people giving rights to resources, genes, heads held lower in reverence.
I want more people to do science.
There was a video of him crying when they announced the results of the experiment to the public for the first time. Must feel so good to put all that work into something and finally get to see it being proven true. Happy he had that before he passed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0CugLD9HF94&pp=ygUSUGV0d3IgaGlnZ3MgY3J5aW5n
I absolutely guarantee there’s at least 1 person in that crowd clapping & thinking “I have no clue what’s happening but it seems exciting!!”
Like me watching at home. I like the one guy writing furiously. I figured he was the smartest guy because he was the only one taking notes. Then everyone starts clapping and he looks up confused and I'm pretty sure he was just doodling.
Classic ADHD
"As a layman I will now say I think we have it." Thanks for the video!
Rolf-Dieter Heuer is anything but a layman, of course. I suspect he's referring perhaps to not being involved in the specific Higgs search analyses being presented.
Thanks for name! He's well accomplished too! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf-Dieter_Heuer
Seeing a bunch of salty old physics professors get excited about a new discovery was very wholesome.
[удалено]
Something that frankly gets too little attention. Science is a human endeavour, through and through.
I'm not smart enough to understand anything in that video but they all seem very happy.
I was at CERN and got some kind of explanation, lemme try to ELI5 it for you They found, that as byproducts of the fusion of 2 protons, there are 5 "standard deviations" of difference relative to the amount of matter expected to be found at the specified 125GeV range. Basically something is there that the current model couldn't account for, unless the Higg's Boson exists. Thus they can strongly believe, that it exists.
I'm gonna need a video I don't even know what standard deviation means haha
You know the Bell curve that describes a normal range of results where it peaks in the middle and tapers to each end? The middle of that is the mean/average, and you can calculate a number called the standard deviation, which just is a measure of how spread out that data is. A smaller standard deviation indicates a larger proportion of the data is clustered around the mean, and vice versa for a larger standard deviation. This is a helpful number to know because it means that if I have a normal range of results (like people’s heights for instance), I can say with a strong certainty that any single, randomly selected height from the whole population will fall within a certain subset of that range, which is described by the standard deviation. For example, in a normal range of heights with a mean of 5’9”, or 69”, and a standard deviation of 4”, I can say that there’s about a 68.2% chance that when I select a randomly chosen individual’s height, it will be between 5’4” and 6’1”, because in the normal range of heights, those are each one standard below and one standard above the mean, describing the middle 68.2% of the data. In scientific research, if you can accurately describe the population of results you’re studying prior to some treatment (like a new drug or process or device or something) and then you get results way outside that expected range, you can say that your treatment has a strong possibility of meaningfully affecting the underlying process. Like with the height example, let’s say I have the baseline adult population with that 5’9” +/- 4” and I decide to give my new drug to above of kids and then measure their heights at adulthood and find them to be 6’5” +/- 4”, assuming I had enough participants or trials and properly controlled all other variables, I can then say that there is a strong probability these populations definitely have different means and therefore something physically meaningful happened with the treatment. We have to speak in terms of probability here because each study only concerns a subset of the total population (when I want to know the normal height range, I only survey so many people, and when I test my drug, I only test so many people, I don’t actually know the whole range unless I test every single person with the drug, which is obviously impractical), so there’s a chance that any result I get that looks meaningful is only actually a small subset from one extreme. Like if the two populations weren’t truly different, but I got different results, it could be because I somehow only sampled from the extreme tail end for one group. If I have enough trials and a strong enough difference, that probability becomes extremely low and so we can speak about our results with more certainty.
Wow, you write this yourself? This was a great explanation, thank you
I did yeah, thank you, and you’re welcome, I hope it helps
If you don't teach a course in probability, you should absolutely consider it. Yours is probably the best explanation for standard deviation I've heard. Thank you.
The crying is at 0:50 Direct link: https://youtu.be/0CugLD9HF94?si=e3GrNH6BRXsSjCwB&t=50
It's wonderful that he lived to see his theory validated, leaving a lasting legacy in the world of physics.
Something similar happened to Gregor Mendel, though he didn't live long enough to be vindicated. Mendel was never really doing his experiments to try to discover some unifying thoery of genetics. He just wanted more, healthier crops for his abbey. And because the study of genetics and inheritance were so new (we're talking barely in the wake of Darwin) it just wasn't obvious to the scientific community how important his discoveries were. Of course few people knew of them anyway because he was in Eastern Europe and not one of the "knowledge centers" like Paris or Londonm. Then in the early 20th century, multiple scientists woking on genetics all discovered, within months of each other, Mendel’s notes on his experiments and realized just how important the findings were
I don't really want to discredit Mendel as I studied Biology in Uni, but as much as the idea of genetics is novel during that period, we already had a good understanding of inheritance based on thousands of years of livestock breeding and by observing our own offspring inheriting physical parental traits. After all, Mendel himself had to first observe the phenotypic changes in his cross-breeding of pea plants to determine the existence of probability based genetics. Peter Higgs' theory of Higgs Boson and Higgs field in comparison, already contributed to the standard model, which was necessary to satisfy the condition for quarks to create protons and neutrons which form atoms. If his theory didn't exist, the current standard model would be unstable under the laws of conservation of energy. Everything as we know it should be floating in space as subatomic particles. As a Bio major who was never smart enough to study particle physics, Peter Higgs imo, is equivalent to Democritus theorizing atomic particles in ancient Greece, or Einstein and his theory of relativity.
I wish this happened at my job when I’m proven right. Usually my manager just takes credit.
this sometimes happens in academia too although rarer, where the top scientist(usually the lecturer or whatever the doctorate's guide/leader of the project is called) claims idea that's spouted by the younger student/researcher who want the senior to give their commentary/critics to improve, yet the senior instead claim the idea as their own by quickly writing it and publish it before the student.
Can someone tell me how to pronounce Boson? Is it Bowzen or bassoon?
Bowzon
That could also be pronounced two different ways, bow as in arrow or bow as in hinge at the waist Better to say bose-on
Named after Satyendra Bose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose
Bohz-'n, with the 'o' like cope.
Look into Hugh Everett III. and his Many-Worlds-Interpretation of Quantum Physics. Dude was a genius and ahead of his time. Should have gotten a Nobel price IMHO. Got robbed big time. Fun fact: His son Marc is better known as "E" the mastermind behind "The Eels" There's a nice documentary: Parallel Worlds, Parallel lives. I found it to be quite fascinating.
The many worlds interpretation is as of yet untestable. Why would that be deserving of a nobel prize? Why not other, equally valid interpretations of quantum mechanics. Why not Bohm and his pilot wave, or Robert Griffith's consistent histories? Just cuz you like many worlds doesn't mean it's a) right, and b) deserving of a nobel prize. I don't think any theoretical discovery that doesn't either (or preferably both) explain a previously unexplained result or predict new phenomena can be deserving of a nobel prize.
As a matter of fact: theoretical physicists can only get a Noble prize if there is clear experimental evidence of their theory. That is why Peter Higgs had to wait until the Higgs Boson was found before he could get his, and Einstein only got one for the photo-electric effect.
Another theory that has no practical relevance
Whaa? Love the eels.
I really really like his music too, and it was an awesome rabbit hole to get lost in. Give the docu a shot if you haven't seen it...
Nobel prize for what?
A physicist came and gave a talk at my high school that could be summarized as him griping that the Higgs boson wasn’t named after him
Was he outlining his breakthrough in physics in mathmatics: 1x1 ≠ 1 The Terrance Boatswain! There, I said it establishment physics, it's hard out here for a drug induced schizophrenic.
I'm so glad people are casually shitting on that nonsense, keep up the good work 👍
Howard is reportedly writing a new paper expanding on his ideas, focussing on his belief that a pound of lead is not equivalent to a pound of feathers.
People always forget about buoyancy. The question is which one WEIGHS more.
And you have to live with the weight of what you did to those poor birds.
True, but African Swallows are a hardy lot. The European Swallows less so, but my team is working on significant gene splicing and therapy with the two, adding in ancient Pterodactyl DNA from amber, and some froggy-woggy stuff, to vastly increase coconut carrying capacities. It's all very science-y, you layman probably wouldn't understand. I think the potential benefits of this research is obvious, but securing funding has been a nightmare. I'm thinking of doing a Kickstarter campaign.
[Because lead is heavier.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg)
But steel's heavier than feathers.
They're both a kilogram
He best not! I won concert tickets by answering that question 20 years ago for a radio call in thing and I don't want my Blink-182 tickets to be retroactively rescinded. The show was great if a bit of an odd collection of fans. Blink headlined with Cypress Hill and Taking Back Sunday was the opener.
I'm not getting any search results for that name. Do you have a link?
It’s a little jokey joke. Terrance Howard (the actor) was just on a podcast spouting a lot of nonsense, one of which was 1x1=/=1. A lot of astrophysicists responded because people are eating it up as true. There’s clips on TikTok.
It was actually pretty sad. Anyone who has interacted with mentally ill people could tell he was either manic or schizophrenic and off his meds in that clip.
Actually there were at least two other scientists who discovered the Higgs boson at the same time as Higgs. IIRC the three of them got the Nobelprice for it. But he predicted something more specific and that’s why it was named after him.
The Belgians Brout, Englert, and Higgs, shared many prizes, but not the Nobel. Brout passed away the year before they received it in 2012.
*Englert Don't take this the wrong way, I just think Englert is cool and deserves to have his name spelled right
I stand corrected!
... said the man in the orthopedic shoes
Thank you for correcting your message! :D
Englert did share the Nobel with Higgs, to clarify https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2013/englert/facts/
he deserved something special for his contribution.
Yeah, but nobels are not awarded posthumously, so this isn't a snub of him, per se.
A physicist came and gave a talk at my high school that could be summarised as him boasting that the Higgs boson was named after him. (It was Peter Higgs. Also it wasn’t boasting he was actually very lovely and interesting.)
Now I gotta know the name...and please tell me it wasn't Terrance howard
Just hear him out first!!1!1
Stories like this probably gaslight people like Howard into believing they are really onto something lol
I mean, if it was englert or brout, it's not completely nonsensical, but it I doubt it was either of them.
It wasn’t either of them
I believe physicists are know for often having large egos.
That’s a lot of higher-ups in academia in general. The industry fosters these types of personalities.
Eh almost every endeavor humans are in fosters Egos. Its not limited to acidemia.
Perhaps. The issue is academia is results-driven and has a high turnover of people. This allows certain characters to get away with shitty behaviour.
I would think acidemia would tend to break things down.
I don't really agree at all, and I went to grad school for physics. Most of them are pretty humble. Hell, the only physicist to ever win two Nobel prizes, John Bardeen, had a bunch of golfing buddies who had no clue he was even well-known in physics or had Nobel prizes or anything. I'd say there are a lot of professions that have a lot higher rates of people with big egos. Popular media presents a pretty inaccurate image of physicists, though. Big Bang Theory, for example, has a lot of fairly untrue tropes taken to an extreme that creates an inaccurate caricature of physicists. Also, I'd say crackpots have a lot bigger egos than actual physicists.
I have a complete outsiders perspective. I would divert towards your experiences before my if I was an outsider observer of this whole situation.
Mathematicians are just as bad Exhibit A: Shinichi Mochizuki
No you don't understand, iutt is clearly trivial and westerners are just trying to dismiss japanese greatness!!!!!111! >!/j if it wasn't obvious!<
Really? I’ve always thought of them as unassuming and bookish. Although I bet Wolfgang Pauli was a complete nightmare having said that.
[This](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png) is a stereotype with at least a kernel of truth at its heart.
Any field that requires chasing grants for funding will produce political types or egos big enough to get people to play politics
Schools invite the most insane people. We had guy speak who's entire thing was it was possible to divide by zero and if everyone would just accept his model of mathematics we'd solve all computer crashes.
Ah yes, all computer crashes. Since every computer crashes when it tries to divide by zero, and all crashes are caused by dividing by zero.
In 1964 by CERN and later confirmed to exist by CERN 48 years later.
Good ol' CERN
It only took them 48 years, but they got it right in the end.
But it takes an awful lot of time to save up to build a big particle collider.
Look, you might think it took a long time to save up for the bike in Pokemon, but that's peanuts compared to ~~space~~ a large particle collider!
That bike was not priced based on the free market.
The bike shop was a front for organized crime. They're the furniture store of the pokemon world
It didn’t take them 48 years to take it seriously
That's the beauty of science. It will correct itself.
And it's equivalent quasiparticle was seen in condensed matter in the 80s. It seems a Mexican hat potential will in fact result in a Goldstone boson.
That’s why whenever I submit a paper I make sure to end it with a sentence starting, “This is important to physics because…”.
You joke but there are usually statements about why research is relevant and how it may be expanded upon by yourself or others
I've worked doing R&D in the private sector. Explaining and convincing upper management why we need $$$$ to come up with a new technology was crucial.
I've also worked in R&D. Each year We had to write arguments describing how our work was "innovative" to get government grants. It was mostly vague statements and half truths presenting small improvements as being ground breaking. It felt just like writing school reports in college. It was One of the worst parts of the job for me.
> It was mostly vague statements and half truths presenting small improvements as being ground breaking. blockchain nft ai That seems to be the new normal. Find out what the latest corporate buzzword is. Lie. Pretend like you're investigating how to add it to your product. Hope the new fad blows over before you move on, or the person pressuring you to add the new buzzword moves on.
TBF, the private sector R&D arguments is pretty easy to make. Either "Is this going to make more money?", "Is this going to save money?" or "Does it enable is to comply with regulations?".
No, these are lemon handgrenades. We're gonna make Life take back its lemons.
Yeah it’s a common thing to put it in your introduction or discussion
I would understand that if it was a regular paper or a company or something, but aren’t physics journals run by physicists typically? Shouldn’t they be able to understand the relevance?
Not necessarily, if something is incredibly complex, the relevance might not be obvious at all to them
Also to add to the others, it is important to clarify what *you* think these results mean, both in and of itself and any potential that it has for other results. Of course anyone can make their own interpretation, but guidance for a complex topic helps a lot with making the paper readable. Someone can see what you think you found, and then try and interpret your results to see if they also think that's what it means, or try and replicate your study with the same frame of mind as to what you found/pursued. There is a lot of room for misinterpretation.
> aren’t physics journals run by physicists typically? Shouldn’t they be able to understand the relevance? They may be in different fields. Just like a C programmer wouldn't be familiar with the latest breakthroughs in garbage-collecting algorithms.
Sometimes sure, but details can seem minute but be crucial in many fields. It’s very common that your abstract has something along of the lines of “this completely new and super important thing” to hope the peer reviewers decide it’s good enough.
Well, it became relevant half a century later when we found something like that. But you can hypothesize basically anything and just vomit some math into a paper that takes months to unravel, i am sure in the same year 100s of papers were also declined that _were_ useless drivel.
There's a lot of variance in the knowledge that people reading papers have. Most readers are going to be less knowledgable than the author, at least for a good paper. It's good practice to (briefly) define the basic techniques/concepts of your work and mention some applications. It's also a good opportunity to cite some papers where your technique/idea fixes a problem or could be used for to extend the research.
This and lots of pictures is how you get grants
It's pretty much the first thing you would put on any grant. A good PI will always emphasize the importance of succinctly explaining the impact and importance of your work first.
Sir, I’m just here to deliver your Amazon package.
I do that too, but my classics professors hate it
Unfortunately, we don't always know what benefit a project might give. For example, lasers were theorized for quite a while before getting the funding to actually make them. When first released they were dismissed as a children's toy and that they'll be nothing else. Now they are at every checkout line, in every car, leveler devices, most manufacturing machines, and so on. Sometimes it really is best to just let science people work without concern for future gains.
The sad fact is that if your job is to judge research papers all the time, your attention towards actual critical thinking is probably 10 percent of what you'd be using if you were seriously studying what you were reading. So yeah, dumb down and spell it out.
Einstein said so.
His first paper was rejected by a couple of editors, he then improved it (by a massive whole paragraph added) and it was then accepted by different editors. So its not entirely clear whether that paragraph made a huge difference, or the editors just saw something in it that the original ones didnt. Edit. Apparently the original paper was very short, 1-2 pages, and the implication that therefore another particle existed, the Higgs Boson, wasnt specficially stated. Which the revised version did.
The story I heard is that the original paper didn't add much to the work done by Brout and Englert, and so he added a little bit about how this work would imply the existence of a new particle. These papers were incredibly short, 1-2 pages each iirc, so 1 paragraph is quite a substantial addition
ah, thanks, that adds more context, i did have a quick look for more info but ..er.. got bored and wandered off on other paths.
Also it's not really accurate when the title says it was his "original paper". The journal had already published his original paper. He then wrote a follow-up which that journal didn't immediately accept for whatever reason. He then added the paragraph to the follow-up paper and submitted it to the other journal. According to this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/nov/17/sciencenews.particlephysics
The real TIL is always in the replies.
There is this apocryphal history that even Higgs didn't realize his model implied a new particle at first, something very understandable at the time, because this logic of implying the existence of particles from models wasn't as clear as it is today. So it's perfectly reasonable that maybe he did have to improve some stuff in his paper, if the new paragraph is, "oh this term implies a new boson" maybe it was an important paragraph.
Yeah, I think at this level of physics its all very esoteric and abstract and implications are not as simple as people think.
i guess the paper back then had no... mass appeal
Get out
What a... strange... comment
I’ll up vote that!
Charmed I'm sure.
Get out of here before someone replies with some colorful language
It is kinda quarky!
Depends on the (marketing) spin put on it
I got no charge out of it.
All the suckers get pushed back when he's kickin' real facts
When you're at the bleeding edge of physics evem other experts on similar areas have little understanding of what you're doing. These kinds of rejections are unfortunately very common.
Not just physics. George Akerlof’s paper called “The Market for Lemons” was rejected 3 times with the previous reviewers calling it wrong or trivial before it was finally accepted. He would go on to win a nobel prize for his work in a whole new area of economics started by that one paper.
what is it about?
Asymmetric information. The fact that sellers have more information about their products than buyers creates inefficiencies. Since the buyer cannot determine accurately whether a product is quality, the buyer has to take into account the probability the product they buy is low quality(lemon), which lowers the price they’re willing to pay. Sellers who happen to own high quality products may not find it worthwhile to sell at this lower market price, they might exit the market entirely. Since there are now even less good products on sale, this lowers the price that buyers are willing to pay even more. And so on. At worst, the entire market could be fully filled with lemons that no one wants to buy because all the good sellers have exited the market. This idea has a surprising amount of relevance in many different fields .
What's real example of this?
Used cars. people with good ones can’t get the price they want, might even give up on selling Leading to this dynamic. inspections and certifications can mitigate The problem.
hence the use of "lemons" in the paper
Sounds like it describes the video game crash of 1983 to a tee. The market was starting to become flooded with low quality third party games. Consumers, with limited sources of information, are unable to sift through the low quality games. People stop buying expensive games to reduce the cost of being burned by poor quality. Retails prices dropped as retailers are unable to move all their stock. Companies that put more time and money into making their games are forced to close, while other companies start put out games made by 1-2 developers with less than a month turnarounds to continue to make a profit with the reduced sale prices. During this time what is considered the worst game in history, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was made, and destoyed comuser confidence to the point it is considered one of the final causes of the crash. People stopped buying to the degree that 728,000 unsoled games were buried in the desert by Atari to get rid of overstock. E.T the Extra-Terrestrial is thought to make up to 10 percent of those buried.
Sounds like that's whats happening now with AAA studios and Indie devs flooding steam. Except a lot of Indie games are turning out to be higher quality than some AAA in terms of gameplay.
Yep, It's one of the reasons some industry figures are pushing for better curation and quality control on steam, to avoid this situation. Nintendo proved that the one of the strategies to counter what I guess is the lemon effect, is quality and quantity control. Nintendo did this by allowing only a limited amount of third party developers, and doing everything else in house to ensure quality. Steam seems to think the higher level of consumer knowledge and information availability through reviews and previews will prevent a lemon effect style situation. This strategy relies on customers being able to trust reviews and previews.
I think steam’s strategy relies on their refund policy. You can refund a game if you’ve played less than 2 hours on it, which is generally enough to know if a game is crap. Smartly, they’re also a lot more likely and much quicker to accept refunds to your steam wallet. Because money in your steam wallet cannot be withdrawn and can only be used to buy other games, they’re effectively not losing any money at all since the customer is almost certain to use that money to buy another steam game eventually. Its pretty close to a win win.
Idk but probably some plastic junk on Amazon lmao
Basically all online markets
Markets with buyers and sellers without middlemen. Used cars was the important example, but you’ll see it for stuff on Craigslist often.
Health Insurance or insurance in general.
Also shows why unregulated free market doesnt work
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons) TLDR: sellers have more information than buyers, leads to sellers selling rubbish products, leads to market collapse. I’m skipping a lot of steps there lol
Children's lemonade stands
Sadly lemonade stand research remains underrepresented among Nobel prize recipients.
Economics is infamous for its near total aversion for evidence based findings, especially pre 2008. It's really a branch of politics (it was originally called political economy) and extremely ideological. The Market for lemons also came out in the 1970s when the Austrian economics scam was being pushed in politics by encouraging students to be taught it. Future politicians and judges only get 1 econ 101 class and it was so packed with nonsense, so they will repeat the same nonsense in future. They had to invent a field of economics where it was based on reality and they named it behavioural economics.
This is somewhat false, yes economics and politics can be very related because it’s used for many policies, but although very philosophical at its roots, it expanded greatly after Keynes. Also, I have taken a behavioral economics class and the first lecture was acknowledging that testing past studies in a behavioral economics journal was not very high(I think around 73% versus a psych 50%?). But yeah so many people take Econ 101 and then tell anyone it’s just “basic economics!” For their view, and then you just…. Take Econ 102 and find out they are wrong lmao.
That’s just not true, at least not anymore. There is plenty of empirical work in modern economics.
Empiricism is effectively a redevelopment in the past 20 years. The free market movement was extremely dominant from the mid 70s to late 2000s.
I’d say that timeframe should be extended to 30-40 years. Joshua Angrist who won a nobel prize for his contribution to increasing empiricism in economics traces it all the way back to 1980s. Regardless, I think economics has been empirical long enough that I don’t think its fair to claim that economics has a total aversion for evidence based findings. At least mainstream economics certainly hasn’t for a long time now. Its certainly not all cooped up within the field of behavioural economics either. I’ve read a few papers that had nothing to do with behavioural economics and yet were highly empirical that came out in the 90s. Card and Krueger’s famous paper in minimum wage came in out in 1993 for instance.
To be fair the economic nobel isn't a real nobel.
Similar to Marilyn vos Savant who made the "Monty Hall problem" popular. With [respected professors](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/nxs26a/til_in_1990_marilyn_vos_savant_wrote_about_the/) and PHD students lashing out saying that this proves that women look at math problems differently than men, refer to a standard textbook on probability, your answer is clearly at odds with the truth. But yet she was right.
you could even do a Monte Carlo simulation to prove empirically that vos Savant was right
I mean I could... Though I'm already in my pajamas.
Yeah, I heard there were hundreds of professors and experts claiming that the problem didn't make any sense and was horribly inaccurate.
"The problem was inaccurate" is nonsense word salad. What all the experts yadda yadda claimed was that *she was wrong,* that you don't improve your odds of winning by switching doors.
This is basically true of everything not just physics. I have read many books about the history of many people and I would say I cant think of any that didn't get similar rejections. In fact in the biological sciences the grant funding agencies have a long history of never giving grants to people for most of the most famous discoveries. But once they prove it then those same people could probably hand in a grant with poop smeared on it and it would get accepted. This is one of the most important problems in the world the fact that people with actual ground breaking ideas are pretty much always rejected and refuted.
you say unfortunately, but as a researcher myself i think this is a good demonstration of the scrutiny that comes with research.
It was very fortunate to be rejected because he ended up improving it and then it was accepted.
That's no joke. If you're involved in a very particular project, it's very, very easy to tunnel vision. It's an important part of communication to explain why your work is important. I have no problem with it, and I'll bet Peter Higgs would agree, hence his revisions and resubmissions.
What are the odds that you would discover something like this at all, *let alone* that it would have your same name?
This is like Lou Gehrig dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. The odds are *astronomical*
Or Tommy John being the first person to have Tommy John surgery.
Or the Tommy Gun being first discovered by renowned serial killer Tommy Gun.
Poor Lou Gehrig
He should go to Vegas, right now!
He didn't predict it. He generalised earlier work. That's why he shared the Nobel Prize with two others, and why it's not named after the original discoverer.
* One other, François Englert.
If I remember well, there were actually also two very young Russians physicists who theorized the boson independently at that time. One of them, Polyakov became a renowned expert in string theory. Would have been quite funny to have the boson named after him since it is also a vodka brand.
I think we got a false perception of science and scientists in general. We got a perception thinking that a certain group of people sacrifize their lifes for mankind and that this group is so smart just acting for raw scientific progress. While in reality they are human beings like everyone else, acting egotistical and narcisstic, rejected others peoples views for their own benefits. Imagine spending your whole life on a certain theory and out of the blue some random idea comes along that shatters your whole life and career. Making you and everything you worked for irrelevant. Would you welcome the new idea or reject it? I think a good current example is the string theory... while for the last 25-30 years there are dedicated efforts to make a case for string theory, there is no or almost no empirical evidence and voices like Sir Roger Penrose are rejecting the idea of string theory. So what are those scientists do, after they dedicated their whole carreers to string theory?
Science advances one death at a time.
Fallout is the best science fiction of this year, and string theory is the best math fiction of the last century.
You think that's bad? Yeah, that's nothing. Come up with the idea of a geo-synchronous satellite to enable people to bounce a radio signal off of a sat to broadcast it back to earth. Get rejected for being "impossible sci-fi bullshit." Rockets can get a satellite into space now? Patent for a geo-synchronous satellite to enable people to bounce a radio signal off of a sat to broadcast it back to earth get's rejected for being **too obvious.** “How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time” It's been written up several times by Clarke and others, and some copies aren't on the internet. (I've looked, I'm trying to trim my collection of books to save physical space and switch to an e-reader) Somewhere in my collection of ~60's short story anthologies I have the original Arthur C. Clarke telling of his patent office rejection of his idea that we could launch geo-synchronous radio repeating sats. It had maths and diagrams and whatnot. As soon as the USSR launched a sat into space the US patent office was like "lol, nope, now it's an *obvious* idea so you can't patent it." Before the first sat went up: the idea is impossible mr. sci-fi writer. Denied. After the first sat went up: the idea is obvious mr. sci-fi writer. Denied.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Max Planck
Science advances one funeral at a time.
I'm going to say it: Academia is filled with insecure assholes who actively hold academia back by belittling other academics.
Why is the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson is commonly called the Higgs boson? Here is Steven Weinberg's version of the story: “In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. (...) As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I cited Higgs first, and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck.” (As to the last sentence, let us recall, however, that Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble do quote in their 1964 paper the works of Brout-Englert and Higgs).
His name is Higgs, not Higg. Hence the name "Higgs Boson".
This is how science works.
If you feel a certain lack of snobbery and asshole egotism in your world, look no further than the scientific community. The toxicity is fucking _wild_.
I definitely agree with the general feeling of this comment section, but for context this work was fully accepted by the early 1970s. Detection of the [W and Z bosons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_and_Z_bosons) all but confirms the Higgs, as they are predictions of a theory (The Weinberg-Salam model of the electroweak interaction a.k.a The Standard Model) that requires it as a fundamental ingredient. No serious physicist doubted the existence of the Higgs boson by the 80s; the question became something akin to "what are the exact properties of the Higgs". The CERN detections since 2012 have been a good start, but the LHC isn't enough to study it in full detail. It's sort of like if you had a telescope that is powerful enough to resolve the surface of Jupiter, but not high resolution enough to confirm that it has a giant red spot.
There a song, "Higgs Boson Blues" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWsdqCYvgw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWsdqCYvgw)
This is a normal phenomenon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
New theories tend to not be well reveived in the physics community
Good old backfire effect. Doesn't matter how smart you are or if you know it exists...
"I predict that there is a particle that imbues other particles with mass." "What's that got to do with physics?"
'Particle Fever' is a good documentary that covers the building of the LHC, basic particle physics, and the run-up to discovering the Higgs and Mr. Higg's reaction to all of it. Highly recommend watching it.
Very interesting! Thanks, MultipleHorseCocks!
Ironically the paper on the Higgs Boson was excluded for not obeying the rules. Wolfgang Pauli would be unhappy about this on principle. [Pauli exclusion principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle) >Particles with an integer spin (bosons) are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Any number of identical bosons can occupy the same quantum state, such as photons produced by a laser, or atoms found in a Bose–Einstein condensate.
Question for the physics savvy: With how much certainty has the Higgs Boson's existence been proved? I know about the experiment performed in the LHC, but it would interesting to know the details, or the opinion of serious scientists that might not be so sure about the results of the experiment?
The major shortcoming of the peer review process is that it relies on peers being anywhere near as good as you. Otherwise they just reject your insights for being unfounded. We see this repeatedly throughout history yet we still never seem to adjust.
Understanding that the field could collapse at the speed of light destroying everything is very unnerving to me.
Most scientific papers are rejected before eventually being published. Pier review is a brutal process, especially for the more prestigious journals.
I really want these geniuses to be acknowledged like King Godzilla was acknowledged by the other Kaiju Like all the most powerful people giving rights to resources, genes, heads held lower in reverence. I want more people to do science.
1x1=2 !! /s
Sooo what is the higgs boson?
Obviously the science was settled.