The New York Times: "A Crisis at the Edge of Physics"

[JHL]

5-Jun-15 A Crisis at the Edge of Physics

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/op ... ysics.html

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

[Etc.]

To date, no supersymmetric particles have been found. If the Large Hadron Collider cannot detect these particles, many physicists will declare supersymmetry — and, by extension, string theory — just another beautiful idea in physics that didn’t pan out.

But many won’t. Some may choose instead to simply retune their models to predict supersymmetric particles at masses beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider’s power of detection — and that of any foreseeable substitute.

[Etc.]

Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, and Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, are co-founders of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog.

[Melusine]

That seemed promising indeed so I looked up the original article in Nature that this one refers to.

http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-m ... cs-1.16535

I smelled a rat when i found out that the authors, George Ellis and Joe Silk, are two very well rewarded mainstream cosmologists. And after that, i pretty much stopped reading at this sentence:

"These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy."

I guess Ellis and Silk must've been having a spat with some of their string physicists buddies of theirs that day.

[Electro]

Something as absurd as String Theory has gained respect in the scientific community, even though it'll never be testable, but the mainstream rejects Plasma Cosmology completely. They're spending billions on CERN for quantum mechanics theory (and it is a theory) and God particles, but they deny the evidence...

[ztifbob]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/op ... ysics.html

Excerpt:

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

[moonkoon]

In light of what the editor of "The Lancet" (that's about as kosher as you can get in the scientific journal world) says about fudged research results, perhaps the idea of abandoning empiricism has some merit.

“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last week—touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. ... The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. ...

But he then goes on to point to particle physics as the paragon of scientific virtue which others might emulate in trying to clean up the inaccurate results problem.

... One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profile errors, the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. ...

I wonder what he thinks of the call to downgrade the weighting given to results and observations in favour of more weight being assigned to the relative elegance and explanatory capacity of the competing theories? It would solve the dodgy data problem...

[Melusine]

... One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profile errors, the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. ...

I wonder what he thinks of the call to downgrade the weighting given to results and observations in favour of more weight being assigned to the relative elegance and explanatory capacity of the competing theories? It would solve the dodgy data problem...

Haha... riiiight.
And puhlease... how can anyone present particle physics as the model of integrity for other scientists to follow when particle physics has become perhaps THE most esoteric field of all science.

Particle physicists checking and rechecking data... most likely, that means they're rechecking their math.
Well... good. We're taught to do that in elementary school, aren't we?

[kiwi]

Melusine

Haha... riiiight.
And puhlease... how can anyone present particle physics as the model of integrity for other scientists to follow when particle physics has become perhaps THE most esoteric field of all science.

5-Sigma and the Higgs ....

5 sigma is a measure of how confident scientists feel their results are. If experiments show results to a 5 sigma confidence level, that means if the results were due to chance and the experiment was repeated 3.5 million times then it would be expected to see the strength of conclusion in the result no more than once.

One analogy is trying to find an odd dice in a set 60, just by looking at a summary of all the rolls. Imagine you have one dice that had a 5 on every face in your set of 60. After each roll of the 60 dice, you are told how many 5’s were rolled. On average you would expect ten 5’s. But as the rolls of the dice are random you might see perhaps nine 5’s the first time or twelve 5’s the second time. As you continue to roll the dice, you can measure the spread of results around your expected result of ten 5’s. One way to measure the spread is the standard deviation, or sigma. The more you roll, the smaller the standard deviation gets. After enough rolls, you might get to a point where the average number of 5’s is 11 and your standard deviation is 0.2. You expected a result of 10 but your findings are higher by 5 sigmas. So you can be 99.9999% sure you have a dodgy dice in your set.

In particle accelerators, scientists look at the particles produced by the collisions to work out what happened. Lots of particles are produced at the collisions but only some come from important reactions that scientists are looking for, e.g.a Higgs Boson decaying into two photons at a specific energy. But there are many other processes that can produce two photons at the right energy. The LHC looks at millions of particle collisions and counts the number of times two photons at the right energy are produced and compares this to the number predicted by current. Similar to the dice when there was an excess number of 5’s, the LHC looks for an excess number of times two photons are produced; with the excess number being produced by the Higgs Boson. Once the excess reaches a 5 sigma level, the Higgs is considered discovered. http://www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=103

[justcurious]

I remember watching a youtube, with this lady physicist from Harvard, one of the leaders at the large hadron colider project. The LHC seems to turn up more questions than answers. She mentionned something about the difficulty in finding some particles, or dark energy or whatever, and that it must be hidden IN ANOTHER DIMENSION
Of course it would take a lot of money to go to another dimension, whatever that means

[Michael Mozina]

I remember watching a youtube, with this lady physicist from Harvard, one of the leaders at the large hadron colider project. The LHC seems to turn up more questions than answers. She mentionned something about the difficulty in finding some particles, or dark energy or whatever, and that it must be hidden IN ANOTHER DIMENSION
Of course it would take a lot of money to go to another dimension, whatever that means

The mainstream has become desperate on the "dark matter" problem. Not only are they blind to every mistake they made in 2006 with respect to *underestimating* stellar masses and plasma mass in that bullet cluster study, they are blind to every "result' they've gotten from the lab to date too.

Every theory is judged by how well it 'predicts' things in future experiments. Exotic matter theory has yet to predict *anything* accurately in the lab. The "standard' particle physics model however has *nailed* even some exotic decay predictions. I'd have to say that the standard particle physics model is stomping all over exotic matter theory in the lab. It's not even a horse race at this point.

Even *assuming* that LHC finds some other "exotic" particles in future high energy experiments, what are the odds they will have the necessary properties to prop up their otherwise *falsified* cosmology model? First it would have to be *long lived*, in fact it would have to show up and also *stick around* for human lifespans, not mere milliseconds. It would have to *not* interact with EM fields and light and it would have to have all these "ad hoc" properties that only required by *one* otherwise falsified cosmology theory. The odds are *staggering* against anything of the sort ever occurring at LHC or anywhere else.

I think a few more years like the last few years in terms of blowing out all remaining SUSY models could spell the end of SUSY theory at least, but I somehow doubt it will end the whole 'dark matter" snipe hunt.

[kiwi]

end the whole 'dark matter" snipe hunt.

My OCD couldnt let this go Michael

The Hunting of the Snark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark