[BurnGpuBurn]

I always loved the following thought experiment:

Lets' assume the Higgs boson doesn't exist. A large group of scientists has spent 10 billion dollars of public tax payer money to create an experiment that will prove it's existence. It cost them many years to do, decades, and most scientists have staked their entire career on the outcome of the experiment. Turns out, they were wrong, and the particle doesn't exist.

Those scientists now have two options: 1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers (and income!), evoking the wrath of the taxpayer, and basically becoming the laughing stock of the scientific community. 2) Just make some shit up for a while and go on and enjoy your pension which is only a couple of years away.

What would you do?

[blahblahblah10]

You are right about the incentives being aligned a certain way. But, while the justification for the LHC might have been Higgs, what most high-energy physicists (theoretical and experimental) really cared about was validating beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) physics e.g. supersymmetry, hidden valleys etc.

Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.

So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.

What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.

The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.

Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf

[BurnGpuBurn]

Thank you for your explanation of what else could've been found with the LHC and that a lot of work was actually done to disprove the existence of a lot of stuff.

Kinda kills my thought experiment though, but I guess that's the point. Thanks.

[aardvark179]

There were lots of things people really were hoping to see from the LHC, and weren't seen. supersymmetry being one example. Not seeing those things is just as important to everyone involved as seeing them is, so although the theories may try to modify their theories to explain why nothing was seen at those energies, it isn't in any of the experimenters interests to pretend they observed something they didn't.

See also the number of experiments conducted to try and observe things like dark matter candidates with various properties. All those experiments are in competition to either show presence or absence, and absence is just as important because it's proving that you made an incredibly sensitive detector and have used that to show that a particular possibility really wasn't the right one.

[bdndndndbve]

By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?

[BurnGpuBurn]

I just said I loved the thought experiment. There's multiple ways to see the flaws in it. Like: how would that large group of scientists (be it at NASA or CERN) keep such a fraud a secret for such a long time? In NASA's case there'd be a lot of people coming clean on their death beds, which hasn't happened of course.

[bdndndndbve]

"thought experiments" like this are worse than useless, it's a way for people on the internet to discuss any hypothetical topic without actually knowing anything. You take some contrarian view and say "yes if I constructed the whole world to back into my preconceived view it could be true". It's unfalsifiable. TFA has actual facts.

[fastasucan]

>1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers

By writing this it seems like you are under the impression that no science happened until they discovered or "non-discovered" the particle. But that is of course wrong.

[flatline]

It would be no harm to the bureaucracy if they did not find the Higgs. The scientific community would have reacted with excitement and the search for the hole in the standard model would have been apace. In many ways this would have been better for particle physics funding. The standard model is now complete, and we still don’t have a unified field theory. I’m not a physicist but have been following this search through popular writing since I was a kid. Is there now any reason to build a bigger supercollider, and/or is there a risk of the entire field stagnating till someone comes along with a testable theory?

[nick3443]

Any favorite resources for a fellow science-interested laymen interested in getting to your understanding level?

[flatline]

Off the top of my head, Hawking’s books talk a lot about the GUT and are still relevant, Greene’s book on string theory is an advancement of conceptual attempts to find one. It’s harder to point to now because so much of the public discourse since the mid-2000s has moved online.

[PaulHoule]

Actually “No Higgs” would have been as big a scientific discovery as a Higgs, maybe bigger.

[BurnGpuBurn]

Yes? Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?

[Filligree]

Not hardly. If there was no Higgs, then some other mechanism would be needed to cause the same effects the Higgs does. We’d need the LHC even more then.

[ejolto]

No it would mean the standard model is wrong and there would be more to discover.

[rcxdude]

No, you keep running the machine, hoping to find a useful signal. More data means more fidelity. A lot of that has been probing the properties of the Higgs, but it's also spent a lot of time ruling out quite a lot of proposed extensions to the standard model.

[seanhunter]

Not even close. The party would seriously be on because then you'd need some alternative that explained the new hole in the standard model.

[empath75]

The LHC wasn't built to discover the higgs. Another primary motivation was looking for supersymmetry and dark matter candidates. But really it was more general than that. Every time we've built a bigger collider we've found something new, and on some level, they just wanted to see what would happen. New data means new things to explain.

[fastasucan]

>Wouldn't that mean that "the party" is over, just write a single paper and you can shut down and dismantle the machine you've just finished building?

No, not at all.

[12_throw_away]

No. This has been answered multiple times up and down the thread.

[lokimedes]

From the perspective of the (real) physicists involved the outcome is the same. Most of my colleagues who have stayed in particle physics post Higgs are wishing it was never discovered. The motivation of scientists is not well-understood by others, but assuming people make a career in particle physics for the income or job stability is ridiculous. The alternative cost is so high it has to be that they actually really like what they do.

[sanderjd]

Yep, every single physicist I know would be twice as good at my job as I am and would have twice the earning potential if they switched with me. They don't do it because it sounds incredibly boring to them. "You mean someone might ask me to tweak the size of a button on a website? No thank you!"

[elashri]

Ironically, some physicists (specially maintaining webpage for their project on CERN) might actually have to tweak the button sometimes. But usually they rarely do it and usually without being asked /s.

[empath75]

We know what they did because a _lot_ of scientists desperately wanted to find supersymmetry and various dark matter candidates with the LHC and they've found absolutely _nothing_ and didn't actually just "make some shit up".

Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.

[SideQuark]

> What would you do?

The scientist calling bullshit that can back it up gets in history books. The others eventually lost credibility.

So I (and pretty much all scientists I'e ever worked with) would call it a failure.

By your implication, nuclear fusion researchers would have "found" it decades ago. But since reality wins in the end, and scientists are generally not pathological liars, they did not. They continue to advance the field.

There's ample other cases demonstrating the flaws in your story. Bad scientists don't tend to last long under the gaze of reality.

[burkaman]

Your options are reversed. Under the mass conspiracy scenario, any individual scientist could become famous and promote their own career by whistleblowing about the fraud. But if the scientists are truthful as a group, they can guarantee further research and grants because the standard model is wrong and more experiments will be needed.

[BurnGpuBurn]

Oh I like this argument a lot, thanks.

[ttpphd]

This but it's HIV and circumcision.

"A new Tuskegee? Unethical human experimentation and Western neocolonialism in the mass circumcision of African men"

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dewb.12285?...

[mrguyorama]

You don't seem to understand what "thought experiment" is. It is not when you pull some contrived nonsense out of your ass and make conclusions from it.

You also don't really seem to understand how scientists view science. When something that nobody expects DOES happen, and similarly, when scientists expect very very much to see something and clearly do not, both of those outcomes are exciting for scientists.

Predicting something from a model or theory and then having it be confirmed very successfully sure is great for that theory or model, but is the most BORING outcome for the scientists working on it.

Confirming someone else's fairly successful and well developed model is rarely how you gain money or fame in science.

[g4zj]

> Being thruthful [sic] about the non-discovery

> Just make some shit up

Is that how it works in the scientific community? I'm not actively involved, but I feel like publishing my findings, one way or another, would require explaining how I arrived at them in a manner that would be reproducible (and thus, verifiable to an extent) by others. What am I missing?

Not asking rhetorically, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious.

[rcxdude]

The challenge with the results from the LHC is that there's no second one, so no completely independent reproduction. That said, there were two experiments which were seperate apart from using the LHC for the collisions, and both of them have published their full raw data and methods of analysis, so a fabrication would require falsifying quite a large quantity of raw data in a way that hasn't been detected yet, and co-ordination between quite a lot of people.

[tpoacher]

Imagine the earth isn't round!

[kjrfghslkdjfl]

I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research.

If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.

Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".

Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.

[BurnGpuBurn]

You're quite wrong in your guess but that's ok. I work in a research lab actually, and there's lots of experimental physics going on here.

I never claimed people are choosing a career in physics research for the money, I just used the argument of having to choose to lose ones income. Also, I can't help but notice though that, when ascended high enough on the academic ladder, the income isn't a joke either.

[SirHumphrey]

Do you know what severely hurts your income as a scientist? Lying about the data and then other people finding out. With the amount of data both of LHC detectors were publishing covering up the lie would be impossible- it’s exceedingly difficult to fabricate data convincingly (see Jan Hendrik Schön).

I would be much more worried about errors in methodology than falsifications.

[sanderjd]

The income is a total joke compared to what those people would be able to make on any private sector job ladder. Anyone who can be a tenured research physicist could easily make seven figures (likely more) in finance.

[poincaredisk]

>easily make seven figures (likely more)

I agree that income is a joke but... more than seven figures as in eight? That's quite a lot.

[sanderjd]

Yeah I guess this might be hyperbolic. But my sense is that quite a few quants make seven figures, and that people capable of being tenured research physicists could be at least in the top of that group, if not partners / executives at those firms, which I believe is often an eight figure job. If they could stomach the work, that is...