Kantian Physics: "Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space" by Lisa Randall

I’m going to do a review a la Randall.

Many further searches for the Higgs Boson have been performed and the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger since 2012. At one of the ICHEP conferences I read about at that time, analyses "rediscovering" the Higgs Boson in the new dataset were presented. The accumulated evidence for the 125 GeV Higgs was very strong, and there was no real chance that it would fade away (the chance would be extremely small). In contrast, the accumulated evidence for this hypothetical particle was much lighter than the evidence for the Higgs now is. (Though, in hindsight it appears that the early Higgs announcement might have jumped the gun a little bit, because it seems like the signal from the real Higgs boson was boosted by a statistical fluctuation in the initial data which is not exactly the same Randall states in this 2012 book).

I would like to see an end to the misleading idea that the Higgs field (or its boson) "gives" mass to particles. The Higgs field is not sticky and it does not slow particles down, and it loans energy more so than giving it. I think a better analogy might be two teachers walking through a daycare center--one popular and one unpopular. The popular teacher walks at the same velocity as the unpopular teacher but toddlers hopping on and off the popular teacher putting such teacher into a higher energy state AND increasing that teacher's inertia (resistance to acceleration) compared to the unpopular teacher who walks through unaffected. Since energy is equivalent to mass, the "mass" of the popular teacher has increased. Assume the daycare is so full of indistinguishable toddlers in indefinite energy states that the total background energy of the daycare does not change in a measurable way as one toddler or another jumps on or off the popular teacher. They come from and disappear back into the "daycare condensate". I'm sure one could do a better job in describing the toddlers in a weird choreographed single state as a better analogy for a condensate, but I'm not sure that aids the visualization.

Probably, in relation to the reported disappointment, the broad label of "physicists" should be replaced either by "particle physicists" or "physicists with a vested interest". In particular, those who have worked hard on the beautiful idea of supersymmetry, and haven't given up in the light of many years of negative results (including no proton decay), are seeing their field reduced from physics to mathematics - at least until the next breakthrough in observational particle physics comes along. Funding and the field will decline, at least for now.

At least they were fighting a good fight, with potential physical relevance, so there is no disgrace in their disappointment (and it must be remembered that the LHC data is certainly not disappointing per se - the LHC team should be rightly ecstatic about having nailed the Higgs!). In contrast, string theorists have only been doing mathematics for a couple of decades now, sitting well outside the physics spectrum. There is still plenty of good particle physics data coming in via astronomy, and hopefully from cosmic rays in the future, so the broader field is not yet moribund :-) (But particle physics probably is as this books amply demonstrates).

The physical properties of a telescope or particle accelerator determine a priori all physical realities observable through them. So when an instrument of observation does not offer anything new, it means that he has reached the limits of his own powers of penetration into the mysteries of nature. Physics is not an encyclopaedic science, which only observe and classify objects in nature, but is a hermeneutics of nature, i.e., an art to interrogate and interpret the responses of nature. Physical objects do not exist in and of itself, but they are created by our own faculty of imagination. Kant said that, two hundred years ago. So if we want to see something new, we must first imagine a different kind of existence and then another way of looking at things.

I'd say the excitement has, and the media emphasis should, begin to shift to astrophysics where things actually have been and actually are being discovered: dark matter, LIGO's gravitational waves and the possibility of primordial black hole dark matter, an estimated 6,000 fast radio bursts per day from unknown sources, and plenty of discoveries in the gamma ray part of the spectrum. Why are we so obsessed with particles? Maybe strict reductionism has been leading us down a dead-end rabbit hole. Maybe it is time to come up for air and see the light.

2 stars for the particle physics math in the book. 0 stars for the rest.

Smelly Socks:"Gravitational Waves - How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe" by Brian Clegg

By complete coincidence, last night I had my amateur radio telescope pointed at a certain part of the sky. I had left the recording equipment on, and when I played it back this morning there was this strange message:

"Oh freddled gruntbuggly,

Thy micturations are to me

As plurdled gabbleblotchits in a lurgid bee.

Group, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,

And hooptiously thrangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,

For otherwise I will rend thee in the gobberwartswuh

With my burglecruncheon."

See if I don't!"

(*Douglas-Adams-turning-in-his-grave*)

Black holes...That explains where all my spoons, biros, unicorns, and my wife's hair-clips that keep disappearing end up in. In order to find the Black Hole, we simply follow a large number of my smelly socks to their destination ((nah, the Unicorns are down to Noah; the silly sod got so drunk and confused he filled the Ark with the reject list, so instead of Unicorns, Centaurs, Mimsy Borogroves & c we ended up with the poisonous snakes and spiders, naked mole rats and the various parasites, viruses and such that infest the world now thanks to Noah's love of booze. Of course the book makes him out to be a hero, but who do you think wrote it? He and his family are the only people left, no wonder it's a hagiography! Hell, you don't want to hear what he got up to with the Mermaids!).

I wish we had a theory of quantum gravity.

What we describe as waves in a sea of energy aren't real waves but a representation of probabilities at locations. Particles can come in and out of existence at random, but they may hang around for quite a long time. Long enough to bind together into atoms, which accrete into a planet and eventually get taken up by a tree which is cut down to make my chair. The only visible signal would be if some material around the black holes started crashing together. The energy from the black holes themselves spiralling in just comes out as gravitational waves. You get visible light from the accretion disks of black holes, which are typically pulled off companion stars. But binaries both of whose components are black holes don't have companion stars, and hence have no accretion disks. So they are expected to be very dark electromagnetically. Energy doesn't have to be visible.

Gravity waves are it. I don't know that you would necessarily see any "visible signal", unless by "visible" one simply meant detectable, e.g. visible telemetry data. In which case it's exactly what LIGO and VIRGO are doing as Clegg shows.