Higgs Boson
This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Higgs boson
| Scientific Theory | |
|---|---|
| Name | Higgs Boson |
| Type | Elementary particle and mass-generating mechanism of the Standard Model |
| Author(s) | Proposed 1964 by Peter Higgs, and independently by Englert & Brout and by Guralnik, Hagen & Kibble; reported discovered at CERN in 2012 |
| Keywords | Higgs field, Standard Model, Particle Physics, electroweak symmetry breaking, mass, CERN, Large Hadron Collider |
| Year | Proposed 1964; announced 2012; Nobel Prize 2013 |
The Higgs boson is the particle associated with the Higgs field, the mechanism by which the Standard Model of particle physics accounts for the mass of elementary particles. Its reported discovery at CERN in 2012 was presented as the capstone of the Standard Model and rewarded with the 2013 Nobel Prize. It is also, for the researchers catalogued on this wiki, one of the most disputed results in modern physics — challenged as unnecessary, as misinterpreted, or as a statistical artifact of the very machine built to find it. This article sets out what the Higgs boson is claimed to be and why mainstream physics values it, and then what the critics here say.
What the Higgs boson is
In the Standard Model the elementary particles are, in the first instance, massless. Mass is introduced through a device called electroweak symmetry breaking: space is held to be filled with a Higgs field whose lowest-energy state is not zero, and particles acquire mass in proportion to how strongly they interact with that field. The mechanism was proposed in 1964 in three near-simultaneous papers — by Peter Higgs; by François Englert and Robert Brout; and by Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble — as a way to give mass to the carriers of the weak force (the W and Z bosons) without spoiling the mathematical consistency of the theory.
A field of this kind must have an associated particle — its own quantum of excitation — and that particle is the Higgs boson. Finding it was therefore treated as the decisive test of the mechanism. On 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced a new boson at a mass of about 125 GeV with properties consistent with the predicted Higgs, and in 2013 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Higgs and Englert. The particle had earlier been nicknamed the "God particle", a label from a popular book that most physicists dislike.
Mainstream physics regards this as a genuine and hard-won discovery. The Standard Model, of which the Higgs is the final piece, predicts quantities such as the electron's magnetic moment to around twelve significant figures, and the ~125 GeV boson was found in the mass range the theory required. Any criticism has to be weighed against that record.
The view from this wiki
The researchers catalogued here do not share that assessment. Their objections fall into several groups.
The discovery as artifact
The strongest criticism holds that what was found is not a particle at all but a statistical bump in an ocean of collision debris, over-interpreted by a community committed in advance to finding it. The fullest statement is Alexander Unzicker's book "The Higgs Fake" (2015), subtitled How Particle Physicists Fooled the Nobel Committee. Unzicker argues that the Standard Model has grown unfalsifiably complicated, that the "discovery" rests on blind faith in expert opinion, group-think and parroting, and that with sufficiently intricate techniques particle physicists are fooling themselves. His technical companion paper addresses the probability of the detection itself.
Milos Abadzic, in "Mr. Higgs Doesn't Reside There" (2009), written before the announcement, predicted exactly this outcome: that the LHC would yield "an increase[d amount] of particles' debris created by decomposition", to some of which the desired properties of the Higgs would then be attributed, without this amounting to the deeper knowledge of nature being sought.
Francis Viren Fernandes, in "CERN Manufactures the Higgs Boson" (2014), presses the same point in his title: any mass can be manufactured for a fleeting moment by applying electromagnetic fields, and that fleeting manufactured mass — not a fundamental particle — is what was observed.
The Higgs as unnecessary
A second line grants nothing to the mechanism, because it holds that mass can be explained without a Higgs field at all. Athanassios A Nassikas, in "Is There a Higgs' Boson?" (2010), argues from what he calls Minimum Contradictions Physics that the interaction of gravitational with electromagnetic space-time already accounts for mass, so that "Higgs' boson is not necessary for the explanation of nature's function". On this view the search was for something the theory never needed.
The Higgs field put to other uses
Not every mention here is hostile. John R Warfield, in "A New SRT Based on the Higgs Field" (2006), keeps the Higgs field but reinterprets it: he lets its value differ between reference frames so that the "value of mass" and the "rate of time" vary with it, and uses this to reproduce the results of Special Relativity on a different foundation. Here the Higgs field is a building block for an alternative, not a target.
The Higgs as emblem of big science
Finally the Higgs recurs as a benchmark of difficulty and cost. Nassim Haramein, in "The Quest for the Higgs Boson and the Planck Black Hole Production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider" (2003), folds the Higgs search into a wider speculation about Planck-scale black-hole production and the structure of the vacuum. And Zifeng Li, in his commentary "Comments on 'Five Experiments as Hard as Finding the Higgs'" (2012), takes the Higgs as the very measure against which other hard experiments are judged, while dismissing several of the programmes he reviews as "false theories pulling physics into [a] morass".
Common ground with the Standard Model critique
The Higgs debate is a special case of this wiki's broader quarrel with the Standard Model, and the same commitments underlie it: a rejection of the point particle, a preference for mechanism over formalism — mass should be caused by something physical, not conferred by a field inserted to make the equations balance — and a demand for fewer inserted constants. Readers should hold these criticisms to the same standard as the theory they attack: the ~125 GeV boson was predicted and then found, and no alternative catalogued here has yet reproduced the precision tests the Standard Model passes. Whether the 2012 signal is the discovery of a fundamental particle or the manufacture of a fleeting resonance is precisely the question these researchers keep open.
Papers and books on this wiki
- The Higgs Fake — Alexander Unzicker (2015, book)
- CERN Manufactures the Higgs Boson — Francis Viren Fernandes (2014)
- Comments on "Five Experiments as Hard as Finding the Higgs" — Zifeng Li (2012)
- Is There a Higgs' Boson? — Athanassios A Nassikas (2010)
- Mr. Higgs Doesn't Reside There — Milos Abadzic (2009)
- A New SRT Based on the Higgs Field — John R Warfield (2006)
- The Quest for the Higgs Boson and the Planck Black Hole Production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider — Nassim Haramein (2003)
See also
- Standard Model — the theory the Higgs completes, disputed here
- Alexander Unzicker, and his related critiques Bankrupting Physics and Einstein's Lost Key
- Particle Physics · Special Relativity