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by leeoniya
2105 days ago
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> Huge difference: when Higgs was predicted there was a clear path to how to find it. is that really a huge difference? plenty of eventually-proven math conjectures were initially posed with no knowledge of how a proof will be found. perhaps with the higgs it was easier because it was conceivable that we could produce the necessary collision energies here on earth, while other problems remain at unattainable scales for a clear path to exist today. |
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As a theoretical math major and a practicing scientist, I'm just going to have to say that these are not comparable, neither in process, nor ontologically.
> conceivable
that's a very weak way of saying the scaling factor of collision energies was known, and the technology to build the required machine right around the corner (we could have found the higgs with technology proposed for the hole in texas, only 20-or-so years after the prediction of the higgs; at the time higgs was postulated superconductors were already known for 10 years and the first superconducting NMR was 10 years away).
Anyways, my point is that there is a categorical difference. At the time of its postulation, building an experiment that could say yay or nay about the existence of the higgs was largely an engineering problem.