Seite 2: Higgs Infotainment

But even when people are supposed to be not totally ignorant, like Brian Cox, a particle physicist who has become a kind of a science rock star, it is just some secondary information they offer you. To be able to repeat without stumbling is enough to be seen as a great physicist of our time (incidentally, the distinction between scientist and science seller has become invisible).

The point is that guys like Cox sometimes behave like reasonable physicists, thus you don’t realize immediately that they are particle physicists. I might like Cox’s mockery of homeopathic medicine, or I even might agree with him in stressing how important physics education is for the economy (though that probably served just to hide the fact that particle physics has no useful output at all).

It is also ok to publicize physics by slamming astrology, but to call it nonsense doesn’t prove that high energy physics makes sense. Cox praises the "most complex machine ever built" which found the "genuinely fundamental" Higgs particle, according to him "one of the most important discoveries in the history of science, on equal footing with the electron," and he claims physics is in "a golden age."

Verbiage. It’s an age in which science is close to politics, and this is another sign of sickness. In response to the July 4 news, UK Prime Minister David Cameron immediately jumped on the bandwagon, prompting a wry comment by a BBC moderator who asked Brian Cox: "Do you think he had any idea of what he was congratulating the science community about?" This just triggered a fawning statement from Cox about the effectiveness of Britain’s science budget. What a rotten business physics has become.

Hilarious language hides what are just technical superlatives. But that’s how physics popularizing works today. Combine that ever-smiling babyface with an emotional tremble in your voice, plus a smartass3 historical ignorance and sufficient nebulosity in your pseudo-scientific talk, and the BBC will call you "the best person to explain the Higgs boson."

Not Their Fault

It is tempting to blame journalists for their sometimes starry-eyed attitude and for letting the rigmarole off too uncritically. But they don’t have a real choice in today’s monoculture of scientists aping each other’s blurry metaphors. Sometimes you distinctly feel the interviewer’s uneasiness, but to bring the babble to the point is like nailing jelly on the wall. Expressing any serious doubt would cause a shitstorm about how embarrassingly ignorant the journalist’s question was.

Some occasional intelligent comments, such as Brian Cox being asked in the BBC interview mentioned above: "Doesn’t it worry you that there is a total lack of knowledge in the Commons?", grasp at nothing. They aren’t even worried by their own lack of knowledge. Thus even the intelligent journalists give up, thinking, "Well I don't understand but that is not my business, I did my best to squeeze out the most understandable statements from that guy."

While celebrating the hype, most are cautious enough to foresee the consequences and provide against the opinion "well the LHC has bagged the Higgs, now we pack up and go home." "The great discovery," they add thoughtfully, has to be followed by "even greater efforts" of investigating it, notwithstanding nobody knows how, what and why. But all this is surely exciting (the word most used in describing this boring period).

Jim Al-Khahili, another expert in pompous talking, said that "2012 promises to be a truly historic year for physics" (with an historically hilarious comparison to 1905, Einstein’s "miraculous year") and "we don't know what the masses of all these particles are" (true), but the Higgs might be the "key to telling us why these particles are as they are".

Al-Khahili continues with some soft babble about the Higgs being a possible "doorway maybe to other particles" (goodness, still more of a mess!), he is confident that it allows us "to tie down other uncertainties" (whatever that means), "looking in the right direction for other particles" (i.e. with blinkers) and being "on the threshold of another revolution."

Yeah, the giant nonsense is about to crash. Sorry Jim, but that’s not what one seeks as a physicist interested in fundamental questions. We need an explanation or, even better, a calculation with testable results, not a key, clue, signpost, direction or doorway. Dirac and Einstein would not have given a shit for that.

"We seem to be very close to perhaps discovering"

CERN knows how to do publicity. It’s worth watching their infotainment-style4 video collage of brief statements, including some Nobel laureates, entitled "The Higgs for Me".

Gerardus 't Hooft appears for three seconds, probably just to let this fairly critical mind not spoil the enthusiasm in the subsequent statement of David Gross, who "much more importantly" expects "new discoveries which give us clues," intending his pet supersymmetry. (The LHC found nothing that would give him a clue.)5 Then Jerome Friedmann, Nobel prize winner of 1990, thoughtfully declares,

If the Higgs is discovered, it will be a great triumph for the standard model, if the Higgs is not discovered, it is practically certain that there is something in Nature that is equally interesting, maybe even more interesting that would create the symmetry breaking required by the standard model. And why do I say it’s required? Because the standard model is so good.

Savor this statement. His logic is so circular. Is there any space left for possible failure? Can Friedmann imagine an outcome that disproves the standard model? Sorry, but according to Popper, that plainly demonstrates that he got the Nobel for fiddling around with something that is unscientific.

Murray Gell-Mann, the 1968 laureate, has nothing to say about the experiment, but never misses the possibility to insinuate that he also contributed to an important discovery: "The mechanism that so many people proposed - Peter Higgs among many others [pause, smug smirk] - must be responsible for generating masses."

The ever-present CERN mascot John Ellis, as usual, expects the unknown to come next (you can hardly do wrong). And as usual, he doesn’t understand that expecting the unexpected is not a scientific accomplishment, but a concession of ignorance if you have nothing else on your agenda.

Then four experimentalists appear on screen, all with the same smile of a just nursed baby, telling us that they were hunting the Higgs for twenty years, thus, whatever they found, it had to be the Higgs or some Higgs, and how exciting this is. No wonder it’s exciting them, that indeed is what the spiritual glance in their eyes conveys.

One of them tellingly declares, "I think I wouldn’t spend twenty years of my life if didn't believe that there is a Higgs there" - replace "Higgs" with "God" and you have exactly the kind of statement that Richard Dawkins uses to mock them in public when confronted with religious nuts. And, as if this wasn’t enough, the video (remember, an official CERN release) finishes with a choir singing a gospel, "Glorious Higgs".6 What kind of shit are we being served here?

CERN, with its cultural products "LHC Rap" and "Particle Fever", undoubtedly inspires the music and film industry. But today’s physics no longer has anything to do with the great accomplishments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is time to stop. Time to reflect. Time to dump a big science enterprise that has grown to absurd complication in every sense, has swept under the rug the important problems, has developed nothing useful and impedes any true progress in understanding the laws of Nature.