I was incredibly fortunate to meet him at CERN the day before the Higgs boson announcement. As an intern, I encountered him the evening prior; he was dining alone in the CERN cafeteria, blending in like a kindly elderly gentleman. He was exceptionally humble and courteous. I feel so lucky that I mustered the courage to speak with him and shake his hand. Rest in peace, Mr. Higgs.
The story of how Higgs predicted his mechanism was part of what got me into physics as a kid. It fit 10 year old me's obsession with the 'soft-spoken genius' archetype perfectly and formed a pillar in my belief that 'genius' was made through hard work (and some amount of luck) rather than being born with it.
The announcement of the detection at the LHC is a core memory of mine, I still distinctly remember where I was, what I was doing and very excitedly trying to explain how cool it was to my parents at the time.
Same, same, and same, + currently working on one of the LHC detectors as a phd student -- but it can all be traced back to the lore of the golden age of particle physics and the discovery of Brout–Englert–Higgs boson in 2012.
That is awesome, we need some more amazing scientists in the public eye to inspire the young. I know there are a lot of amazing scientists, but somehow need to get them on tiktok or something? Can you share the story?
My parents had a hard time explaining my dad's job to me, so they just told me he was a scientist because he had a masters in physics (he was a diplomat). Like any little kid, my parents were my heroes, so of course this led me to becoming obsessed with scientists and reading up on science stuff, eg trying to read my sister's university textbooks.
I developed a hobby of reading up on and sharing factoids I found online, and found one about the 'god particle'. At first I thought it was cool because it seemed to basically talk about a particle that causes mass (of course, this was actually wrong, but that didn't really matter to a 10 year old), but reading about how it was predicted 40-50 years ago and the largest single machine humanity had built was being used to try to find it made it my favorite factoid and I'd excitedly start talking all about it the moment anyone showed even the slightest bit of interest.
In 2012 when the detection was announced, we were on a short 2-3 day vacation in Dubai and were having breakfast in the hotel. The TV was right next to us, and seeing the news I was trying (and failing) to explain to my parents how the Higgs boson had been predicted 50 years ago and it took that long for the technology to finally catch up to be able to verify it, and how this would represent one of the last remaining pieces of the standard model (although back then I didn't quite grasp that the standard model was not a full theory of everything). I was trying to explain to them the size of the LHC, how it was the biggest single machine we've built, how when they were turning it on for the first time, there were fears about it creating micro-black holes which might swallow the Earth.
I think that while we need scientists in the public eye, we don't need them as social media entertainers, a lot of well known science communicators on social media come off as attention-seeking charismatic fakes/frauds to me (eg NDT). Stuff like the interviews and documentaries Stephen Hawking had appeared in (or to a lesser extent, the ones Michio Kaku has appeared in) did much more for me in being inspired, even without having known what research they were known for.
I think we could also do with more books like Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and encouraging kids to read them. Also, instead of over-simplifying everything and passing off scientists as geniuses in the traditional sense, we should be more open in showing that the people who made these discoveries or predictions were not inherently born with it, the vast majority of them were completely normal people who worked very hard to build skills in the thing they enjoyed.
Another discovery I feel was somewhat similar is that of discrete time crystals, casually predicted in 2012, turned out to actually be possible in 2018 and has a similar 'cool' factor.
I think a difficulty with science communication is that it is very rare to have someone who is both a great scientist and great science communicator, and even with the ability, it is difficult for them to devote enough time and focus to be great at both. Feynman was, if flawed in some ways as a communicator. Hawking was, but I got the sense that at some point later in his life his focus on communication to the public limited his ability to continue doing research rigorously (after somewhat idolizing him as a child, as a graduate student I went to a research talk he gave to the theory side of our department, possibly in the context of TAPIR, that was both embarrassing and depressing, as it both felt like he really wanted to keep doing good research and very clearly couldn't manage to, and it seemed like everyone in the room knew it, including him). Einstein, despite having the ability to draw a public audience, arguably wasn't a great communicator.
On the other side, while yes, NDT is problematic, I think there is a value to people who are great science communicators without being great scientists. Sagan was arguably a great science communicator and not a great scientist per se. But his communication to the public was inspiring and educational, with enough rigor but not too much complexity, with a sense of wonder but not too far into speculation presented as science, with intuitive explanations but without too disastrously overburdened metaphors. There's the view that his talent for communication and broad intuitive understanding was such that even his contributions to research came primarily from his ability to be, in Kuiper's words about him, a "liaison between sciences". But even when just to the public, someone devoted to that sort of work, and good at it, is not less valuable than a scientist.
There are definitely science communicators who _are_ committed to getting it right. Dr Brian Cox and Bill Nye strike me as good examples. The late Patrick Moore was another.
NDT, embarrassingly, often is just plain wrong. He treats “science” as a side, not an investigation into the wonder of the natural world.
I feel like the problem is that he is (whether its because he feels he must or some other pressure) "on" 24/7 thanks to social media. Other science communicators would pop up for some cool, edited, scripted, interviews or a documentary and slip away. What you get would be their best side 100% of the time in reruns on discovery or whatever. NDT seems to think that literally everything is an unmissable opportunity to advance science literacy and will jump in on literally anything to try.
If it wasnt for people sharing his dumbest tweets, I would only know him from the one documentary series, which was actually really impressive (to me). We really don't need "Ah but actually did you know transformers is impossible" or whatever every 15 minutes.
What I am saying is NDT please log off sometimes and let me remember the good bits.
In oz we have Dr Karl who can get a bit like NDT sometimes too. It really feels like he will repeat whatever the government hands him (he has repeated the governments misinformation about vapes, despite most of it coming from lobby groups and not scientists). And he clowns on socials and interviews. But because of that they have him mainly targeted at school age audiences.
I get your sentiment, but I think it's important for science communication to adapt to the times. Decades ago (and even as little as one decade ago), most scientists (maybe Hawking being the exception) who would dare appear in these 1hr documentaries would be belittled by the "hardcore" scientists with the same words you used "Science should not be over-simplified like that", "they are not real scientists, they just want to be on TV", etc.
The truth is that young people are mostly on TikTok et al, so this type of content needs to get there.
> "Science should not be over-simplified like that",
It is a difficult balance to strike, but science should be
> as simple as possible, and no simpler
The hard truth is that any simpler means inaccurate, which means when educating the public there __are__ inaccuracies. So the balance to strike is accuracy vs understanding. Most people do not understand the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, wave-particle duality, or many similar things (like how one of my namesake's Incompleteness Theorem, Super Position, and the Halting Problem are linked) yet will confidently correct explanations given that do hold more accuracy (even "teaching" those where it is clear one side is vastly more qualified than the other).
But think about it this way, the people getting mad at the over-simplification are not a force preventing public explanation but rather a pressure to find a better and more accurate explanation. The problem is when we frame these things as adversarial in the sense of enemies fighting rather than adversarial in the sense of improving one's self/group's position/arguments/discourse. Both sides can benefit from a reframing of these interactions by not holding the positions as equivalent to one's intellect but rather recognize that statements are independent. We are better as a coalition than separated, even with disagreement (especially with). It is clear here that everyone is on the same side after all, as all parties involved are seeking the same goal: better public education. It then becomes the duty to read between the lines to extract what the actual complaint is, because this is often also difficult to express (without a lengthy process) given we do not know one another's priors. We should not confuse critiques for attacks or dismissals. Nor should we dismiss or attack when we should critique! Though it is acceptable when errors are egregious or when people intentionally mislead. Unfortunately there is a large amount of that, but let's also distinguish idiocracy from maliciousness, as the former can be fixed (if we formulate with the above framing).
Won’t say that TikTok audience is a pound where you’ll find future scientists. I’ll invest on promoting alternative spaces both virtual and local best.
Yeah that's a fair point. As an early career scientist myself now and as someone not that interested in current social media trends, I certainly do risk being in the same spot as those 'hardcore' scientists.
> My parents had a hard time explaining my dad's job to me, so they just told me he was a scientist because he had a masters in physics (he was a diplomat).
I'm just curious about when you found out what he really did, and if you had known earlier if you would have been a diplomat today rather than a scientist.
I was able to understand it roughly around when I entered my teens, in part because he was transferred to another country, where the embassy was a lot smaller and the country more insular, so it was common to get kids involved in embassy stuff to get the otherwise lacking sense of community.
It's hard to say if I would've been a diplomat if I had known earlier. I feel like being a diplomat is harder to innocently romanticize and turn into hobbies for a child in the way that 'scientist' can be.
He gives me a similar feeling to say, SBF did prior to the FTX collapse. This isn't to say he's a scammer like SBF, but rather that he has a similar hard to describe 'dishonest' air around him, where I feel he's deliberately trying to make himself seem smarter than he is for the sake of the attention alone, which makes me distrustful of him. I'm not really sure how to describe the feeling besides "attention-seeking charismatic fakes/frauds", but as another example, Bill Nye also gives me the same feeling.
His X shenanigans don't help either, where he has a reputation of engagement farming by posting dumb somewhat condescending "but akschually" type comments on things people are enjoying. Eg, when the last American total solar eclipse happened in 2017, he posted something along the lines of "ignore people when they tell you eclipses are rare", it's technically correct that eclipses happen fairly often, but he obviously had to know that what makes them exciting is that they're rare for the location the viewers are at. It's become somewhat of a meme to call someone NDT when they're being a buzzkill.
Normally PhD programs have a timeline of progress. If you don't make regular progress toward those very generous deadlines, you are kicked out.
Neil did not make sufficient progress at Texas. Then he did something weird, where he wasn't ready to defend yet got a postdoc at (iirc) Princeton. Princeton had to rescind the offer because you (ahem) need a doctorate to be post doctorate. Then he got into Columbia's program and finally finished.
He had a lot of hobbies and interests other than astronomy, and he is actually a very smart guy, but it took him a bit longer to get his shit together. I think he's found his calling and is quite good at he does.
I have some sympathy for that because I had a couple advisors quit my program on me and the program still tried to enforce time to degree deadlines on me without asking my then advisor (in a different department by then) and misstating factual information about credits expiring (which is determined at the school level not the department level). I had to get the deans involved.
As a 5-10 year old, the books I remember liking the most were on the outer planets, with high quality full page photos of the planets and their moons. Closer to photobooks than books on the solar system targeted at children. One book was just images of the moons, mainly focusing on Saturn, I used to just look at the images and admire them even if initially I didn't quite understand the details. Most of my physics reading came from random sources on the early internet.
As a 12-13 year old, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design were by far my most memorable reads, although I already had my developing interest in physics by then.
Did you succeed with your parents? It's hard to be excited about theoretical physics as a layman. It has been a long time since any of those theories had any practical application.
They still aren't all that interested in this stuff, and on their advice I ended up studying computer engineering instead of physics, but I've still found myself working at one of the other labs with big particle accelerators, as a researcher who can link the computing side with enough of the physics side to work with physicists.
They don't fully understand what I do and don't really care too much about the details, but when they saw pictures of where I worked, they did immediately bring up that I used to go on and on about something that seemed similar, so they at least did understand what I liked.
I guess the closest they get to being interested in theoretical physics is that my Dad, having run through his stash of novels during covid, eventually read my left-behind copy of A Brief History of Time, and occasionally quotes it when he's in the mood to wax philosophical. My Mom instead tries to keep up with my other interest of space exploration/astronomy.
Damn. Tell your parents you love them often. This comment made me deeply pine for parents that feigned even the tiniest bit of interest in what I'm interested in. Your folks seem wonderful.
Yeah my mothers like this. She has given me exactly 1 compliment about my skills in my entire life.
I was in bed one morning, my cousin having slept over. I let him use the family PC when I went to bed the previous night.
I awoke to my mother screaming my name. Then she stopped. She said "No, x is too smart to let us find this." and then screamed for my cousin.
He had been cruising google image search for cartoon porn and had left it all in autocomplete. My mother accidentally let slip that she has an understanding that I would at least be devious enough to cover my tracks. Its something I guess.
> It has been a long time since any of those theories had any practical application.
That's a cliche, not why people are ignorant of science (if it's even true, which it's not), IMHO.
When you kiss your spouse or watch a sporting event or (go bird watching / play D&D / play your trumpet / <your hobby>), does it have a pratical application? Practical applications tend to be kind of boring, actually.
If you can't get excited about the fundamental laws of nature and a person's actual discovery of one - the reason for mass (such an incredible concept that it would be absurd to say if it wasn't true) - then the issue isn't partical physics.
For the broader public, I think these things just aren't explained well, and now there's the anti-science mis/disinformation.
With a layperson in mind, curious about physics, do you recommend any resource (hopefully not too math-intensive) to learn how the higgs boson actually "gives mass" to stuff?
Since you said 'not too math-intensive', I figure you're fine with getting more details and background than usual just without having to parse equations, in which case PBS Space Time is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Q4UAiKacw
Sean Carroll's pandemic era youtube series "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe"[1] goes into scalar fields and some gauge theory, but I don't remember if he covers the Higgs mechanism. Might be in one of the Q&A videos.
Most childhood prodigies don't end up being all that different from the average person as an adult, and of course no one's born with the knowledge of some revolutionary discovery in their head.
While all of us have things we find easier to do than the average person, short of a literal mental disability, we can build up skills in things we are not good at through practice. I used to barely pass in math class and didn't even understand the concept of negative numbers until 8th grade. A year of practicing daily for 2 hours after school, and my fundamentals had gotten good enough that I unknowingly derived a calculus-based solution to some problems I was stuck at, 2 grade levels before when I'd actually start learning calculus and got to skip a year as a result.
Similarly, I've been teaching myself to draw despite having been pretty terrible at it and discovering how 'deliberate' most professional artists have to be with practice and building skills.
I think it's pretty common for people to write off their inability to do something as just a lack of innate ability, when it's really just that no one really sees the struggle anyone famous for their work/skill has gone through to get there.
But there definitely is a wide variation in peak capability. I have been playing keyboard instruments almost my whole life, and while I can play relatively complex pieces, I've never gotten at the level of professional musicians, let alone the greats. It's true they wouldn't have gotten where they are without practicing, but practicing is just not enough.
But has the goal you've been aggressively working towards been to reach those levels? or have you been playing just for the enjoyment of playing?
Not to suggest that the latter is wrong, just interested in your actual goal. In teaching myself to draw (anime art specifically), I'm aiming to reach a professional level, but am not interested in becoming a professional artist. The only factor I've felt would limit my ability to achieve this is time commitment (since research is pretty time consuming already). I'm not interested in committing as fully to it as someone who makes their living off art, so I don't expect to match them in all ways. So, for instance, while I expect to eventually be able to match in terms of overall result, I expect to not be anywhere near as fast as a professional can be.
I'm confident that the technical skills can almost (e.g. disabilities) always be trained, given sufficient time.
Creativity/inspiration seems to be missing culturally. Consider for example Maths or Physics, where creativity is essential to internalize the material, but the teachings usually emphasize memorizing a few tricks to solve well-known problems and pass the year.
But even if it could be trained, there's 1) the luck factor 2) inborn quality variations. Some people just have it in their bones more than others, even if it manifests "just" as being more relentless in practicing.
That's to say, I mostly agree with you, but I'm curious as to how far we could reach with different teaching approaches.
Look, a lot of people throw their heart in soul into $FOO, and a lot of them give up or never succeed (if they can afford to keep failing) because they aren't getting the results, not just vice versa.
Slow and steady doesn't win the race against fast and steady.
I think the point is that if one aspires to be a figure like Higgs, one can't just coast on "innate propensities". It requires fiendishly hard work.
That really resonates with me. When I was a kid I got complimented a lot for being smart, especially when I did something quickly and easily. This trained me pretty well in seeming smart, but really discouraged me from things that required hard work or persistence through failure. It took me years to get over that.
No, what's at question is what "genius" means. He's asserting that "'genius' was made through hard work (and some amount of luck)". This is in sharp contrast to the common notion that genius is "innate propensity", where Smarty McSmartpants just goes around being brilliant because he's born that way. I favor his view and think that essentialism is mostly bunk.
Some of my professors during my physics BS worked with the LHC during the mad scramble to find the particle. I remember people saying tongue in cheek "The Higgs particle doesn't exist, but it's inside this energy range."
Lame claim to fame: Higgs was the PhD supervisor of one of my university professors. He told us that Higgs left a message on his desk before going hiking one weekend to the effect that he'd had a great idea and would tell them all about it when he got back.
I wonder if he got the idea from Hardy, who before undertaking a journey on a very small boat sent a postcard saying he had proved the Riemann Hypothesis:
Hardy stayed in Denmark with Bohr until the very end of the summer vacation, and when he was obliged to return to England to start his lectures there was only a very small boat available…. The North Sea can be pretty rough, and the probability that such a small boat would sink was not exactly zero. Still, Hardy took the boat, but sent a postcard to Bohr: “I proved the Riemann Hypothesis. G.H. Hardy.” If the boat sinks and Hardy drowns, everybody must believe that he has proved the Riemann Hypothesis. Yet God would not let Hardy have such a great honor and so He will not let the boat sink.
It's generally believed that Fermat thought he had a proof, but probably almost immediately remembered that not everything is a Unique Factorization Domain, so the "obvious proof" fails. Then he didn't bother returning to correct the error.
So no, probably not.
(+) I should go and learn more about the specifics of this to make sure I'm relating it correctly.
I just recently learned that the note in Fermat's margin was published posthumously by his son! So Fermat never necessarily publicly claimed to have a proof. So I would imagine you're absolutely correct.
It was a success for particle physics that they found the Higgs, but it was also a tragedy. Discovering the Higgs and nothing else new was the nightmare scenario for the LHC, and so it has come to pass.
Calling it a nightmare scenario is quite the overdramatic description of a successful experiment that validated a core prediction of the standard model
The scenario is a nightmare to people doing the work, since it seems to indicate there will be no new physics until energies at far beyond what can practically be reached. So, particle physics dies as an active field.
Sad to hear, I remember the excitement over the experimental evidence once his particle was detected. I'm always amazed by theoretical predictions that can actually be verified plus it was interrsting to hear about the higgs boson as part of my studies shortly after it was detected. Nowadays it seems many theoretical predications are not even close to being verifiable in the coming years or with the current and planned tech. Unless we are talking about superconductivity at room temperature ofc
(For me personally, I gave a massive sad sign when I saw this on the homepage. I really liked him a lot for a few reasons: He did his thinking in isolation, for a long period of time walking around the Scottish highlands . He was a keen disciple of interdisciplinary thought being pivotal to innovation. He appears to have imagined things and thought about things in a pretty weird way for his time, although that might seem obvious, how well he grappled with the reality of weirdness is exemplary. 힝)
With the knowledge and technology of today there is arguably very little direct economic value to be had from this part of particle physics. One cannot preclude potential future implications though (it has happened many times in the past that understanding phenomena that were far removed from everyday experience created later the conditions for massive technological breakthroughs).
Particle physicists and other researchers in fundamental science are also typically keen to point out at indirect effects. E.g., building the massive accelerators to detect particles pushes forward more conventional technologies. The Web was famously invented to serve CERN collaboration needs.
It serves as an important confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics, which is a foundational theory underpinning many other important discoveries. But the particle itself probably has no current practical application.
Don't downvote them! This is actually a good question! (and gives us a chance to talk about why we should pursue these things!)
It's also incredible difficult to answer! Can we define what it means? Direct or indirect?
=== Indirect (LHC) ===
Well one of the reasons the LHC was built was to find the Higgs. To do so, we had to invent a lot of shit along the way. Thing is, when you're pushing the bounds of human knowledge, you don't exactly have all the devices you need to measure and test everything. The WWW[0] is famously one of such "spin-offs" as we needed to connect scientists from around the globe to distribute the data from this project. Remember that it is an international project[1*]. There is also a lot about superconductors and refrigeration, both of which significantly contribute to modern medical devices. A lot for magnets, vacuum devices, and electronics, all of which have permeated into industry.
These scientific projects also are a big political effort and demonstrate good will and can be grounds for collaboration and building democracies. The hosting countries also have a lot to benefit from as direct collaboration happens there. Just think of the force of putting a bunch of very smart people in a room together, especially when they are experts in very different things. It's difficult to predict the direct revenue, but at such a cheap cost, even small innovations can easily end up covering the costs. Certainly the internet has more than paid for CERN, in the form of tax revenues to each country compared to the cost they give, not to mention benefit to the public (especially considering other indirect aspects).
=== Direct (LHC) ===
Maybe a bit harder. There's some slides here [2] that claim CERN nets 3.3bn for 1993 - 2038. You can find much more detail here[3] and another independent one here[4]. I'd just like to note [4]'s last line in their abstract:
We conservatively estimate that there is around a 90% probability that benefits exceed costs, with an expected net present value of about 2.9 billion euro, not considering the unpredictable applications of scientific discovery.
=== Specifically the Higgs ===
That's unfortunately impossible to say. To make use of it technologically we're at least 50 years away, which is to say "who the fuck knows". But also remember the cost is almost nothing. If we speculate, it is not unreasonable that the technologies that could be enabled through the understanding of this science (and the requisite further knowledge we'll need) could be insurmountable. We're talking about understanding how mass works. So if we're ever going to invent things like inertial dampeners (which would make mass an irrelevant aspect of transportation), mass effect drives, gravity generators, and so on, knowledge of the Higgs would be essential. But don't hold your breath on seeing technologies any time soon.
Remember that we're playing the long game with science. It is good to think about short term, but never forget the long game. If you forget you may win battles but will lose the war.
=== Side Note About Money ===
The LHC is actually one way I like to think about the ultra billionaires (like Musk, Bezos, Gates types). The reason being that with that level of wealth we cannot ignore the effects of compound interest, as this plays a significant role. Let's take Bezos, the #2 on the list (behind Bernard Arnault) with $203.3B. We can ask, how many LHCs could Bezos make? We assume 10 years to build at 0.5B/yr and then 1B/yr to operate. We'll assume a 7% interest rate, compounded yearly, which means 14.231B/yr! So clearly Bezos is worth at least 14 LHCs! We could get more precision and actually compound, but the quick version gives us a sufficient lower bound to really put into perspective either the wealth of Bezos or how cheap the LHC is. However your want to frame it. FWIW, with the same lazy analysis we get Forbes top 10 as: Arnault @ 15.2 LHCs, Bezos @ 14.2 LHCs, Musk @ 13.72 LHCs, Zuckerberg @ 12.7 LHCs, Ellison @ 10.7 LHCs, Buffett @ 9.6 LHCs, Gates @ 9.2 LHCs, Page @ 9.1 LHCs, Ballmer @ 8.8 LHCs, and Brin @ 8.8 LHCs.
[1*] I wanted to take a minute to mention the cost, so we can better guestimate the ROI. The project took 10 years to build and cost about $5bn and costs about $1bn/yr to operate, with Germany being the largest contributor and only contributing 21%[1^]. I'm not sure how it works, but the Federal budget is about 370B euros but total gov spending was 1.76T for 2021. That would be 0.065% of the federal budget or 0.014% of the total spending. Pretty fucking cheap if you ask me!
I read "Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass" by Frank Close and I found it an excellent read on the elusive Higgs Particle and the elusive Peter Higgs himself (Higgs went for a walk to hide from people on the day the Nobel Prize was announced).
I think it's fair to say the 'discovery' that this boson exists came with the LHC experiments. But Higgs did discover in 1964 that the Higgs boson could explain why particles have mass. His paper couldn't say "this is definitely the way the universe is", but rather "if the universe plays by the rules we think it does, this is a relatively simple way to explain this thing we see".
And in my mind, both of those achievements are awesome.
It's definitely semantics and I'm not sure it is worth arguing if we understand what one another means. Unless we're clarifying.
But I do think it is good to discuss the role that others have played in the discovery. After receiving the 2017 Kip Thorne said (Weiss and Barish were the other two)
It is unfortunate that, due to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize has to go to no more than three people, when our marvelous discovery is the work of more than a thousand.
Even discoveries of the past were due to the efforts of many. Einstein's shoulder's of giants, which I jokingly refer to as "3 scientists in a trench coat, all the way down". But with modern science, the problems are more difficult and the effort to make these breakthroughs more clearly depends upon the work of hundreds or thousands. It is good to promote these ideas and this recognition. I think it can also help motivate us to better work together, and not letting us think we are a lowly unimportant cog in a giant machine. Because while we may be small cogs, our work is still important (even if not as important as others).
I still wouldn’t use the word “discover” in this context. Physics is not pure mathematics. There are many theories that just do not correspond to reality. Would you say that strings and extra dimensions have been discovered? No, we’d say they’ve been predicted by a certain theory, but not discovered yet — the prediction may not even be right!
The same is true of every other boson, except arguably photons in the classical limit (e.g. you can put a multimeter on an antenna and detect them "non-probabalistically"). The Higgs detection is sound. A quick check of wikipedia says 5.9 sigma. Good enough for me, anyway.
> e.g. you can put a multimeter on an antenna and detect them "non-probabalistically"
I think I get what you mean, but we should be clear—every measurement is probabilistic, right? We can measure photons with low enough inaccuracy that we don’t bother quantifying the probability that they might not exist. But, it is actually on some philosophical level a difference of degree, not type. I’m pretty sure.
What does it mean for a measurement to be probabilistic?
I'm a math grad student, so still a layman, but here's the way I think about it: Every particle travels over every possible path as the wave spreads out. Once you measure the particle, it tells you a path.
So the measured value of the particle is probabilistic, not the measurement.
I don't know where you get 5.9 sigma but that might have been the confidence at the time it was discovered in 2012. Since then the LHC took a lot more data and the confidence is more like 20 sigma.
That said, these days it's harder to find a paper that gives a confidence for discovery, since they are all quoting the signal strength with respect to the standard model prediction. They generally measure this within about 5%, see for example
Any evidence of any physical phenomena is probablystic? Maybe this is true of you go deep enough into mathematical/philosophical/quantum rabbit holes, but it doesn't pass the intuitive smell test - I could off-hand name tens of physical phenomena that will perform as expected 100% of the time, deterministic physics (on the macro scale, at least) are like the entire basis for the scientific method.
Bells theorem says that he predictions of quantum mechanics are incompatible with any "local hidden variable model". Experiments show that the real world appears to follow the predictions of quantum mechanics, so no local hidden variable model can explain what we see in these experiments.
Therefore all you need to understand is what a "local hidden variable model" is, and what the lack of one would mean.
You should think of doing measurements in quantum mechanics as something like flipping a biased coin, or rolling a biased dice. Every time you do a measurement you get some outcome (maybe heads or tails or a number from 1 to 6) but the probabilities aren't generally the same, they're biased in a way which tells you something about the system. They can even be biased so much that the outcomes are deterministic (0 and 1 are still probabilities).
When you flip a coin or roll a dice, the outcomes are random from your point of view, but there isn't really any fundamental randomness going on. There's a bunch of data about how your hand moves, and the local wind speed and pressure and the physical characteristics of the coin which if you knew them then you'd be able to predict the outcome with certainty. People have even been able to build robots which can reliably flip coins to always get a desired outcome.
This "extra information" that makes the outcome deterministic if you know it we could call hidden variables. Its "hidden" because you don't generally know it.
If Bell's theorem said that there was no hidden variables model consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics we'd be done now. We would have decided that quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic and no extra hidden information could exist to make it deterministic. But Bell emphatically doesn't do that. The theorem says there is no local hidden variable model consistent with quantum mechanics. So what does "local" mean here? For that you can imagine that instead of rolling one dice I'm rolling one here, you're rolling a second one wherever you live, our friend on Mars is rolling a third one, etc. A hidden variable is "local" if it only affects the dice in once location.
Bell's theorem says that if you want to have a hidden variable model that reproduces quantum mechanical predictions then it needs to be nom-local. That is the hidden variable has to affect the experiment here, and the one with you, and the one on Mars all at the same time. We consider that non-local hidden variables are unlikely because they're essentially magic, they need to affect things arbitrarily far away from each other all at the same time. Amongst other things this is wildly on conflict with special relativity.
Unlikely does not mean the same as impossible, so no.
There are also some "loopholes" in the story I told above. For example the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is completely local and deterministic, but weird enough that the standard formulation of hidden variables models doesn't apply to it.
Just keep in mind that if this way present day, the Sabine hosenfelds of the world would be saying iTs NoT eVeN tEsTaBlE, and HN would be cheering her for fighting the evil corrupted mainstream academia.
