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The Big Show of Boasters, Parroters and Fake Experts

Physik-Nobelpreis für ein Phantom? Alexander Unzicker, der die Teilchenphysik bereits kritisch beleuchtet hatte (siehe in Telepolis: Quo vadis, Teilchenphysik? [1]), hat nun auch auf Englisch ein provokatives Werk vorgelegt. Zeitgleich mit dem Nobelpreis für Physik 2013 erschien sein Buch "The Higgs Fake - How Particle Physicists Fooled the Nobel Committee", in dem er die Entdeckung des CERN scharf angreift. Wir stellen hier Kapitel 12 vor, in dem er sich die populären Darstellungen zum Higgs-Teilchen vornimmt.

The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

John Maynard Keynes [2]

The amount of propaganda distributed about the Higgs is overwhelming. Let’s start with an almost amusing example. Michio Kaku, a famous string popularizer, said in an interview [3] on CBS news that the Higgs particle was the "missing piece of creation" and it "put the bang in the big bang." Whoever wonders about such claims should watch Kaku on Fox news, where he predicted the LHC would "show that our universe has collided with others where other laws of Nature held", to "tell us what happened before Genesis chapter 1:1" and so on.

This is considered to be blatant nonsense even by particle physicists. Matt Strassler, a member of the CMS collaboration, complained about Kaku’s "spectacular distortions" and wrote in his blog, "worse, Kaku presumably knew it was wrong." Well, scientists know, to say it with a quote of Barack Obama, who is the bullshitter. The problem for people like Strassler is that, at the end of the day, it’s not easy to draw a line between Kaku and themselves. Kaku certainly represents the top level of loudmouth who does not even care to parrot reliably when making a spectacle of himself. But on the other side of the spectrum, the person who oversees both experiment and physics, the person who might explain thoroughly what happened at the LHC, just doesn’t exist. It’s too complicated.

Matt Strassler, in his blog, serves the public with seemingly detailed information on how the whole experiment works, but once you try to point to a specific problem (like the unsolved issue of radiating charges), he also declares that things are complicated, unfortunately. The idea that the entire model is on sandy ground just doesn’t pass through his mind.

When I wrote in an email to him that Feynman had admitted that the problem is still there, he literally answered, "I am afraid even Feynman is out of date" and "There’s been just a tiny little bit of progress over the ensuing decades of the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s." You see, these particle physicists are just wired differently. They think that Nature’s problems become resolved by acclamation if they ape each other’s arrogance long enough.

Folks like Fabiola Giannotti or Joe Incandela, the speakers of ATLAS and CMS, are among the relatively innocent ones. When Incandela said that the discovery was like finding a grain of sand in a swimming pool full of sand, he was aware of the boldness of such a claim, his face expressing, "Please, believe us!"

Much more shrewd was Rolf-Dieter Heuer with his well-planned joke that he had forgotten the name of the particle they had discovered. He is a master in making the public believe wrong things without lying explicitly. The jewel in the crown was his invention of the notorious hair-splitting between the Higgs boson and a Higgs boson, the standard model Higgs boson, and other (all sorts of non-standard, or what?) Higgs bosons. And Heuer did not lift a finger when the false news (also by "official standards," not mine!) that the Higgs particle had been discovered spread around the world in 2012. I think he just does his job, as sport functionaries and pharmaceutical lobbyists do. But he shouldn’t be treated as someone with the credibility and reputation of a scientist.

Bookmakers and Buckmakers

There are many, too, who have some reputation in other fields of physics, who, though not having a clue about the experiment themselves, jump in and make a buck with their books which don’t do more than parroting.

The most insolent example is probably Lisa Randall, string-shooting star at Harvard and darling of science journalists. The sparsely covered 46 pages of her book contain just about half the characters of the Wikipedia entry on the Higgs. It takes some brashness to sell that. About the content, she had almost nothing to say in a recent interview [4].

Randall seems such a sympathetic person as long as she talks about freshman physics or things like education, but when the interviewer asked the right questions (What did the LHC do for your theories? Are we going to reach some strange point where our ability to test these theories is limited? Isn’t the future of your field so abstruse?"), she becomes increasingly nervous while pussyfooting around questions, and is downright lying [5] when she says that money limits the testability of modern theories, rather than string theory’s continuous failure to predict anything. If the interviewer had asked her about the detector components that delivered the evidence for the thing she hyped, she would probably just have had her mouth agape. Another parroter coaxed the 89-year-old Leon Lederman to appear as the first (!) author of a book, Beyond the God Particle, trying a rehash of Lederman’s 20 year old bestseller.1 [6]

Sean Carroll from the California Institute of Technology represents the cosmologists’ chumming up with particle physics, talking about useless theoretical fancy while praising the standard models. He tried to crop his share of the Higgsteria with a book, The Particle at the End of the Universe, as if he wanted to say, "Hey, we cosmologists have also hyped a lot of nonsense, don’t forget that."

His presentation is more worked out than Randall’s, it is ironic that in a way Carroll has collected all the information about the Higgs that is available - nevertheless it is the kind of rehash thousands of physicists could do, once they had read (and come to believe) the gospel of the standard model. Carroll, like most, then wanders off into wishful thinking about possible SUSY particles ("The hunt is on for yet more symmetries"), a stuff that would help cosmologists if it is declared to be the long sought-after dark matter (probably they just don’t understand gravity).2 [7]

In the end, people like Carroll are not honest, they are fake experts. Their own scientific activity should reveal to them in the first place what it means to understand, in contrast to repeating sciolism. And if asked to talk about something you don’t understand (because nobody understands what the heck the Higgs has to do with reality), you had better shut up. But the smart science presenters want to keep the semblance that physics has understood the world, with their posturing as untouchable wizards which would upset any of the deep thinkers of the past, who, in Carroll's place, would tell us that we haven’t advanced at all since 1930.

Metabaloney

Most of the documentary stuff about the Higgs is about uninteresting meta-information that you can impart even if you don’t understand anything of physics. The LHC has a circumference of 27 kilometers, it cost 9 billion dollars, its energy bill is like that of a major city, the protons cross the Swiss-French border, it is being paid for by 88 countries all over the world, the beam size is less than a needle and so on. A pleasant read for any pinhead.

The underground beam, with the energy of a train, is 100 meters below ground, there are more than 5 million wires, it runs in an evacuated tube, and the temperature there is "one of the coldest points in the universe" (liquid helium technology from 1911, it’s quantum optics instead that holds the low temperature records.) All this is technology, not science. And psychology, rather than science it becomes when one tells a heart-rending story about the scientists involved in the experiment, as the New York Times [8] did. It is interesting to read about emotions and tears, but it has nothing to do with their physics output, which is absent.

Almost every documentary about CERN mentions the big bang that presumably happened some 13.7 billion years ago, but this is again meta- if not dis-information. This figure is the product of the Hubble telescope, you particle guys contributed nothing! But that doesn’t prevent them from telling [9] the fairy tale of the big bang being simulated in Geneva (actually, we are unable to simulate the interior of a common star like the sun). And it is easy to mock nuts who predicted the end of the world when the LHC was started up.

None of these documentaries say a word about the crucial factors of the discovery, on triggering, detector components, their material physics and artifacts, the energy calibration of the detectors on which everything depends, on the computer code which eliminates the background multiply stronger than the signal, and so on. Nothing. Why? Simply because none of the fake experts had anything to say about those topics.

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 [10] 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 [11] 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 [12] historical ignorance and sufficient nebulosity in your pseudo-scientific talk, and the BBC will call you "the best person to explain the Higgs boson." [13]

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 [14]. 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 [15] 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" [16].

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 [17] video collage of brief statements, including some Nobel laureates, entitled "The Higgs for Me" [18].

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 [19] 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 [20] What kind of shit are we being served here?

CERN, with its cultural products "LHC Rap" [21] 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.

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Links in diesem Artikel:
[1] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Quo-vadis-Teilchenphysik-3397391.html
[2] http://quotationsbook.com/quote/20120/#sthash.JSomkdRo.dpuf
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfoq8kFC6xc
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDHta5Fq93M
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDHta5Fq93M26:30.
[6] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Higgs-Fake-Who-Is-Telling-and-Selling-the-Nonsense-3362292.html?view=fussnoten#f_1
[7] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Higgs-Fake-Who-Is-Telling-and-Selling-the-Nonsense-3362292.html?view=fussnoten#f_2
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/chasing-the-higgs-boson-how-2-teams-of-rivals-at-CERN-searched-for-physics-most-elusive-particle.html
[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7BTqKeP6Ks
[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSLGaUQRWHg
[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeTjPsnzH-c
[12] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Higgs-Fake-Who-Is-Telling-and-Selling-the-Nonsense-3362292.html?view=fussnoten#f_3
[13] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKz07k04D70
[14] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeTjPsnzH-c
[15] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af1FyQyTWT4
[16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq6VHedjIEI
[17] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Higgs-Fake-Who-Is-Telling-and-Selling-the-Nonsense-3362292.html?view=fussnoten#f_4
[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anhPnnyocxA
[19] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Higgs-Fake-Who-Is-Telling-and-Selling-the-Nonsense-3362292.html?view=fussnoten#f_5
[20] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Higgs-Fake-Who-Is-Telling-and-Selling-the-Nonsense-3362292.html?view=fussnoten#f_6
[21] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6aU-wFSqt0&list=TLNYsohA4AsQM

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