The Higgs-boson walks into a church, and the priest tells it to go away. The Higgs-boson replies: “but you can’t have mass without me!”
“One of us (Wilczek) recalls that as a graduate student he considered the now standard SU(2) x U(l) model of electroweak interactions to be ‘obviously wrong’ just because it requires such ugly hypercharge assignments. … it still seems fair to call the model ‘obviously incomplete’ for this reason.”
“Stephen Weinberg and Abdus Salam tried to combine quantum electrodynamics with what’s called the ‘weak interactions’ (interactions with W’s) into one quantum theory, and they did it. But if you just look at the results they get you can see the glue, so to speak. It’s very clear that the photon and the three W’s are interconnected somehow, but … you can still see the ‘seams’ in the theories; they have not yet been smoothed out so that the connection becomes … more correct.”
– Richard P. Feynman, QED, 1990, p. 142.
Woit has hade the classic “the hypothesis fallacy” interpretational error. Observational test: if the sun’s position changes across the sky in a daily cycle, that proves the sun is orbiting the earth, and the “null hypothesis” is that if it doesn’t change position, then the sun doesn’t orbit the earth. Clearly this is a “false interpretational” set up: you can do all the statistical tests to how ever many sigma (tens or hundreds) that you want, but you’re always excluding the alternative null hypothesis that the earth rotates daily. So your “deciding experiment” or Popperian test is a hoax at the interpretational level. This is also the “epicycle problem”: every experimental or observational finding is interpreted solely within one fashionable mainstream model, with alternatives ignored using fascist bullying. (Another classic example is that climate change proves AGW. Simple! Everyone understands that rising CO2 correlate to rising temperature, you can statistically test the “correlation”. Case proved! Science settled! Also, drink whisky and water and you get drunk, drink gin and water and you get drunk, so water is the “common factor” which must make you drunk, and you can throw a lot of impressive looking graphs of correlation statistics into your paper to try to intimidate all doubters and call them the quacks. But as Delingpole says, it’s simply not science! It ignores other possibilities.)
The diabolical and obvious error is assuming that a spin-0, 126 GeV boson with electroweak interactions must be the specific particle breaking the electroweak theory’s symmetry. You don’t have a realistic null hypothesis to test that theory! You’re just assuming that any spin-0 boson is the one you’re looking for, because you’ve censored out the publication of fact-based experimentally tested rival electroweak unification models, which actually predict all particle masses (unlike Professor Higgs’s epicycles, which are an abusive insult to scientific ethics)! The Chi-squared test for the “Higgs boson” has two “possibilities”: either it doesn’t exist, or it does exist and is the particle in the mainstream electroweak theory. This is fraud. It’s precisely Joesph Priestley’s error in his phlogiston experiment: either phlogiston exists, or it doesn’t. There was a third possibility: oxygen exists, replacing phlogiston theory. This was recognised by Lavoisier. You need to take account of alternative theories to the Higgs mechanism and the standard electroweak theory, before you can claim that the spin-0 boson (if it exists) is the one you are actually looking for. Otherwise, it’s like interpreting the “motion of the sun” across the sky as clear evidence that the sun orbits the earth daily. The fascism in the search for the “Higgs boson” is that it’s lying propaganda that is deliberately prejudiced in favour of only one theory in honour of Professor Higgs and colleagues who have it wrong, failed to predict the cosmological acceleration in 1996 two years ahead of observational confirmation, and failed to develop any checkable theory of mass (quantum gravitational charge). Whatever is found is instead assumed (not proved) to be the particle needed in mainstream epicycles. If you assume that the data are a critical test of one idea only, when other alternatives have been censored out by fascists, you’re in PR-propaganda like 1930s “eugenics” groupthink lies! The motivation of these monsters is the Orwellian corruption: money, funding, lavish conferences, sneering at proved predictions and “peer”-review censorship of facts.
That’s exactly the same two-hypothesis fallacy that “proved” the changing position of the sun across the sky is due to the daily orbit of the sun around the earth:
(1) If the sun’s position in sky changes, it is orbiting the earth.
(2) If the sun’s position in sky doesn’t change, it is not orbiting the earth.
Collect as much “hard data” as you want and if you analyse it using fake two-hypothesis Popperian criteria, you can “prove” that the sun orbits the earth daily, to however many sigma you want. Pure pseudoscience! Pure dictatorship by thugs!
Science is not about fiddling your hypothesis testing to only two possibilities produce fake Popperian sigma “estimates”. Science must take account of all possibilities, not merely your contrived mainstream delusions, that the spin-0 boson must be the Higgs boson!
Sorry to tell you this, but this is a fallacy: the “Higgs boson” is not any old electroweak symmetry breaking spin-0 boson. It’s defined as a particular part of the Standard Model. If you detect an an electroweak symmetry breaking spin-1 boson, there can be no evidence whatsoever that it is the “Higgs boson”. The “Higgs mechanism” is deeply flawed, it is a vague theory which doesn’t predict the mass quantitatively, and a non-quantitative theory is not science. In addition, it’s method of giving mass to weak bosons is intrinsically anti-quantum gravity. We proved in 1996 that the U(1) Abelian hypercharge gauge of the standard model is actually gravity, correctly predicting the cosmological acceleration of the universe two years before it was discovered: http://rxiv.org/pdf/1111.0111v1.pdf
The electroweak theory of the standard model contains errors, and a spin-0 boson comes from an internal SU(2) electroweak symmetry breaking, not an U(1) X SU(2) Higgs mechanism symmetry breaking.
If you collide particles and see two gamma rays going in opposite directions with similar energy, that “could” be a Higgs or it could just be a random fluke. There is no solid signal that is definitely going to a Higgs, it’s thus a statistics game. You look for two gamma rays or four leptons coming off. When you find this, is it a Higgs, or just a random pattern due to your own prejudice, like seeing the face of Jesus in a tomato?
Because the number of “interesting” or “candidate” events is small, but it’s guaranteed that some noise will occur several sigma or standard deviations beyond what is “expected”. There is an expected fluctuation around what is expected. It may just be random luck. All these interactions are described statistically in terms of cross-sections, which are directly proportional to probability, not absolute certainty. With such a vague “signature”, a lot of events in the random noise will look identical to a “Higgs” signal. But even if a spin-0 Nambu-Goldstone boson can be unambiguously determined with a high probability (not certainty) of not being data “noise”, it will not be the mainstream electroweak theory “Higgs boson” because we have disproved it: the U(1) group is gravitation which means mass is given to SU(2) weak bosons by mixing of gravitational charge, and not by a “Higgs mechanism”!
Two gamma rays or 4 leptons with 126 GeV don’t prove the electroweak Higgs. CERN LHC 2.3 sigma “Higgs” excess for 126 GeV assumes null hypothesis of no Higgs, ignoring alternative. Analogy: climate change proves AGW! LHC’s CMS four electron channel detector flashy animations again prove nothing scientific whatsoever. Prediction: next year this piece of trash will break down when run at full energy by the thugs (due obviously to the usual faulty solder joint which can’t take the current), so this lying, hype and obfuscation will drag on for years, until all the pseudoscientific experimenters have been pensioned off (at great expense to the European taxpayers). Experimenters have a vested interest in the “Higgs boson” and BITTERLY ignore all alternatives which are unfashionable and gain no media publicity! The longer they drag this out, the safer their continued research funding… How many kids in Africa could have got clean water using the £6billion cost of CERN’s LHC? Fight the thugs! Oppose their lying!
Jeff Forshaw The Observer, Sunday 11 December 2011
The LHC experimenters are closing in on the standard Higgs particle. We already know enough to say that the results on Tuesday will either reveal its existence or almost exclude it. “Almost” because there will probably not be sufficient data to rule out a Higgs particle with a mass not much larger than 120 times the proton mass. But even that hiding place will be eliminated in 2012 and, by the end of next year, we should have either discovered the standard Higgs particle or decisively excluded it.
I have been waiting more than 20 years for this. Personally, I am most excited by the possibility that there is no Higgs particle and that nature has chosen a different path. If that is the case, then we are going to have to be patient for a little longer. It will be worth the wait.
Jeff Forshaw is a professor of theoretical physics, University of Manchester, and co-author with Brian Cox of The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen (Allen Lane)
Woit reports on Not Even Wrong that tomorrow (Tue 13 Dec), CERN will reveal some LHC (large hadron collider) results from the Higgs boson search. Britain’s Daily Mail reports: “‘Observation’ of God particle expected at CERN tomorrow”. It has been reported that pairs of gamma rays with a total energy of about 125-6 GeV have been observed, but this doesn’t have to a massive Nambu-Goldstone boson (i.e. Higgs boson). That’s only the case if there is explicit symmetry breaking in U(1) X SU(2), as in standard electroweak theory where electromagnetism is treated as conserving parity, despite the fact that the magnetic field helicity around the direction of moving charges violates parity conservation, just like the left-handedness of spin in weak interactions. Maxwell himself pointed out in 1861 that magnetic fields are conveyed by exchange of angular momentum through the vacuum (i.e. gauge boson spin), which by Lenz’s law implies left-handed helicity in electromagnetism. Weyl in 1929 pointed out the same thing in his chiral, parity-breaking spinor for Dirac’s equation (Pauli objected with a false no-go parity conservation argument). (It is trivial mathematically to show that in the existing parity-conserving electrodynamics theory, parity is conserved. But this is a circular “Jacques Distler”-type sophistry argument, which simply ignores Maxwell’s physical facts.) The relevance is this: if electrodynamics and weak interactions both have the same chiral properties, there is no explicit symmetry breaking, only spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Then the 125-6 GeV gamma ray pair could come from a massless Nambu-Goldstone boson, not a massive “Higgs boson”! The fact a spin-0 pion decays via a spin-1 weak boson (apparently violating the conservation of spin angular momentum) into a lepton doublet is given by Prof. Noboru Nakanishi as evidence of the existence an “unobservable” Nambu-Goldstone boson, on the basis that spin angular momentum is conserved, so there can be no decay of a spin-0 pion into a spin-1 weak boson (he assumes the charged pion decays directly into leptons, with the Nambu-Goldstone boson permitting this non-standard model decay). This argument demonstrates the interpretation problems in this subject. In fact, the spin arguments are simple: any spin-1 boson can be interpreted as a condensate of two spin-1/2 fermions, just like Cooper pairs of electrons in superconductivity, and bosonic condensates in superfluidity. The pion can thus be considered an effective massive or pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson due to the breaking of the QCD symmetry at low energy. Breaking a fermionic symmetry likewise gives “Nambu-Goldstone fermions” with spin-1/2. The problem is that censorship is used to censor all alternative theories from publication, leaving just one theory to be tested; there is then pressure for the experiment’s results to be announced as confirming the theory. (In England phlogiston theory dogma ruled when Priestley discovered oxygen: he announced the discovery of phlogiston to get past censorship. French Lavoisier visited Priestley, saw his experiment, duplicated it, and published the discovery of oxygen. As Feynman said, nature cannot be fooled. But epicycles can be used by groupthink officialdom to chain up physics for thousands of years, as for Aristarchus’s suppressed solar system of 250 BC. As George Orwell said, it’s quite easy to fake any interpretation you want for scientific data, simply add epicycles.)
SU(2) electroweak theory was first tried in the 1956 Schwinger-Glashow Yang-Mills theory, but they got it completely wrong: they lacked partial (Glashow-Weinberg) mixing of SU(2) with U(1) gravity to produce the mass of the SU(2) bosons. They were confused.
Instead, what Schwinger and Glashow did in their SU(2) electroweak theory was to manually assign the two charged bosons to weak interactions and the neutral boson to electromagnetism. It was a failure, and was prior to not just neutral currents (massive neutral SU(2) bosons), but was also prior to the discovery that the weak force is left-handed. Weak parity violation was discovered in 1957. The resulting theory of SU(2) electroweak interactions was not only wrong, but also a complete mess, like epicycles.
The correct SU(2) electroweak theory mixing only gives mass to half the SU(2) bosons at low energy because the mass arises not from a “Higgs mechanism” but instead from a partial mixing of U(1) gravity with SU(2). Because the mixing is only partial, some SU(2) bosons become massive (acquire gravitational charge from U(1)), but the rest don’t and they are electromagnetic charge. This explains the handedness of the magnetic field vector in electric currents in terms of spin; weak and electromagnetic interactions are properly unified by SU(2).
As proved with solid experimental prediction-confirmed evidence in our paper, there is no “Higgs boson” because the Standard Model’s U(1) X SU(2) electroweak theory with explicit symmetry breaking (and thus a massive Nambu-Goldstone boson, the “Higgs boson”) is false: the correct electroweak theory is SU(2) with massless SU(2) bosons, and the U(1) “hypercharge” is actually quantum gravity. The mixing of U(1) with SU(2) gives mass to some (not all) of the SU(2) bosons, giving massive left-handed weak bosons. There is no explicit symmetry breaking of the gravity-electroweak U(1) X SU(2), because there is no U(1) X SU(2) symmetry (equality of couplings above the electroweak scale) of the linked gravity and electroweak interactions, just mixing. Gravitation and electroweak interactions are not a “broken electroweak symmetry”; instead they are just mixed (hence the link), and the mixing is controlled by the running mixing parameter (Glashow-Weinberg mixing angle). The successful prediction of the size of the cosmological acceleration in 1996, two years before confirmation, and much further evidence since then substantiates this still further, e.g. particle mass relationships to the Z boson mass, which gives short-ranged neutral currents in the vacuum, conveying gravitational charge (mass) to all the particles.
As we prove in the paper, the left-handed SU(2) weak force properties show up in electromagnetism (the massless SU(2) boson exchange, taking account of the self-inductance of charged massless bosons) as the helicity-type handed curl of the magnetic field around the direction of propagation of electric charges. Weyl was right in 1929, and Pauli was wrong; electrodynamics violates helicity parity when you take account of Maxwell’s mechanism for magnetism, which is Lenz’s law of the handed curl of the magnetic field helically around the direction of propagation of a given electric charge! Absurdly, this was consequence of the SU(2) Pauli spin matrix for electrodynamics was ignored by Pauli himself, who put down Weyl’s 1929 suggestion of parity violation (based on Weyl’s spinor analysis of the Dirac equation). Instead, we are told the party line: only weak interactions are left-handed! Not true. The photon’s “antiparticle” is indistinguishable from the photon, and this causes the confusion. Taking Maxwell’s argument that magnetic forces are conveyed by gauge boson spin, the handedness of the magnetic field helicity around the direction of propagation of a charge must break parity conservation in electromagnetism. So SU(2) with parity breaking unifies both electromagnetic and weak interactions: the odd hypercharge assignments in the electroweak theory are correctly explained by the simple mechanism with predicts particle masses.
Even if the 126 GeV gamma ray pair (or whatever LHC has seen) is correct, it’s just phlogiston-mentality to try to interpret it as evidence for a massive Higgs particle.
The hype problem (thanks Peter Woit, for allowing criticisms of hype):
Horizon on BBC2 did the same trick using Sir Paul Nurse earlier this year in a different documentary which tried to lynch James Delingpole for asking questions in a different science. The trick is used by politicians over here. You first give a long subjective argument full of one-sided biased hype, then just when everyone is brainwashed, bored and changed channels, you inject a brief disclaimer to look objective.
It’s the two-way bet used extensively by politicians, lawyers and the media here. Whatever happens, you claim credit. If you’re right, you’re right. If your hype is wrong, you highlight the brief disclaimer as “proof of rigorous objectivity”.
Copy of comments submitted to James Delingpole’s blog on groupthink hubris:
Tomorrow we are set for the second biggest piece of scientific crackpotism after the groupthink that we live in a greenhouse with a glass ceiling that stops evaporated water from forming cloud cover that cancels out CO2. This is the world’s largest particle accelerator, our £6 billion 27 kilometres circumference underground CERN Large Hadron Collider. Tomorrow, Tuesday 13 December 2011, they announce their first official results for the search for the “Higgs boson”, the modern equivalent of searching for “phlogiston”.
The theory is that electromagnetism and weak force symmetries are explicitly broken by a massive “Higgs boson”, which also provides mass to every other massive particle by acting like an aether. The problem is, the theory doesn’t predict a mass and they are just a pair of equal and oppositely-travelling gamma rays (or maybe weak bosons) with a total energy of 126 GeV. This – if the data are statistically significant – is only going to “confirm” the standard theory because it’s the only theory that is now dogma, just as AGW is dogma. It’s a great achievement to spend £6 billion of European Union taxpayers money on this toy, but how do you know the pair of gamma rays are not coming from another interaction? How do we know that the emails in CERN are not a duplicate those in Climategate 1.0 or 2.0?
You see, I predicted the cosmological acceleration of the universe correctly in 1996 using quantum gravity (the prediction was verified by Perlmutter in 1998, who got the Nobel Prize in physics for setting up some software to automate supernova redshift observations electronically from CCD telescopes). Nature, Classical and Quantum Gravity, later Physical Review Letters, all rejected it as a “non-standard” theory. So do I call them “DENIALISTS”, for ignoring the evidence.
“Denialism” can be directed both ways in science. It’s just a vacuous piece of playground name-calling. What matters is the substance of the science, not how fashionable something is. Fashionability matters for getting funding, of course, and this is where Lord Acton’s “All power corrupts…” comes in. Scientists are no more ethical than anyone else.
Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: the Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” in D. A. Goslin, Ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand-McNally, Co., Chicago, 1969, pp. 347-380) has found that peoples go through six stages of ethical development:
(1) Conformity to rules and obediance to authority, to avoid punishment.
(2) Conformity to gain rewards.
(3) Conformity to avoid rejection.
(4) Conformity to avoid censure. (Chimps and baboons.)
(5) Arbitrariness in enforcing rules, for the common good.
(6) Conscious revision and replacement of unhelpful rules.
The same steps could be expected to apply to scientific ethical development. However, the disguised form of politics which exists in science, where decisions are taken behind closed doors and with no public discussion of evidence, stops at stage (4), the level of ethics that chimpanzees and baboons have been observed to achieve socially in the wild.
Note that the CERN quango (like the EU itself) has 20 European members and Britain contributed the 3rd most to the LHC. CERN fiddles its accounts figures on its website: just giving annual running costs, not the gross outlay. Other figures CERN gives are for the LHC machine minus construction and infrastructure costs. If they lie about the costs, will they also lie in their “data”? Who can replicate their data if they fiddle it?
Note also that twenty years ago, American planned to search for the “Higgs boson” by building the “Superconducting Supercollider”, but Congress cancelled it to save money. The whole story of the “Higgs boson”, the “Standard Model” and the superstring theory (which predicts 10^500 different Higgs bosons, one in each parallel universe) is hubris. It’s dictatorship. They only maintain their dogma by Gestapo censorship of alternatives. If they were honestly testing a theory, fine, but it’s a contrived “heads you lose, tails we win” test, where whatever the results are, they will be interpreted within mainstream dogma, which is infallable by virtue of “peer”-review. It’s Climategate, with more obfuscation.
CERN did host a pre-print paper of mine in 2004, see http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/706468 but I cannot update that now because they now only accept papers from the string theory “peer”-review censored arxiv.org. CERN has been a complete loss to science since the weak bosons were discovered in 1983.
Update: ranting email received from pro-Higgs mechanism quack ends by asking: “What have I ever done to you?” Umm, isn’t that a plagarization of Colonel Gaddafi’s self-righteous last rant? One VERY HAPPY AND VERY CHEERING 2011 story of oppression being overcome by civilized means without the evil fanfare of endless lawyers and lying media propaganda on TV for years during costly and unnecessary “trial” farces while a basta*d lives in luxury and then goes to a luxury hotel “prison” in the name of groupthink “civilized” fascism (rewarding evil): “Colonel Gaddafi was executed with a single shot to the head — after begging one of his captors: “What did I ever do to you?” … The young freedom fighter who found him hiding in the pipe under a road was hailed a national hero and paraded shoulder-high. Grinning Mohammed al Bibi, 20, was greeted by wild crowds in Sirte amid volley after volley of celebration gunfire. He told how the tyrant was armed with only his James Bond villain-style “golden gun” — which he was often photographed with — when he was discovered. … The young rebel — wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap instead of an Army helmet — said that as he grabbed it, Gaddafi begged: “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”
18 December 2011 update: Dr Marni D. Sheppeard writes at http://pseudomonad.blogspot.com/2011/12/through-looking-glass-iii.html: “… Professor Jones frowned and thought for a minute, and finally he said: I think the 4 is the 4 of the four color theorem. So let us look once again at the successful Higgs mass prediction by Dharwadker and Khachatryan,
M = (1/2)(mW++mW-+mZ)
Observe that 2M is 250 GeV, the electroweak scale. Fourier twisting the (W+,W-,Z) triplet gives a (Z,Z,Z) color triplet, and dualising this triplet we get the right handed (e+,e-,ν). The left handed triplet comes from (W+,W-,γ), which we can send to the (e+,e-,γ) of creation and annihilation with a mixture of Fourier duals. Three massive (weak interaction) bosons and three (electromagnetic) particles, two sides of a coin.”
Then the electroweak (W+,W-,γ) gauge boson triplet would have a massless (e+,e-,γ) gauge boson triplet if massless versions of electric charges exist and if these massless electric charges behave as bosons rather than as fermions (which is of course what happens when two fermions form a bosonic condensate with their half integer spins adding up to an integer); then SU(2) describes electromagnetism as well as weak interactions, provided that a mechanism adds mass in the right way to produce the left handed weak force from part of the electromagnetic interaction. The expected electroweak scale is roughly the sum of the masses of the three weak bosons, (W+,W-,Z) = 81 + 81 + 91 = 253 GeV. Halve that, and you get about 126 GeV, the number the LHC data shows an excess at. This may be a consequence of the fact that only left handed particles – i.e. half of all particles if they exist equally in both helicity states – undergo weak interactions and thus are “visible” to the instruments. The other half of the mass doesn’t undergo weak interactions, so is “invisible” or dark matter, if this is correct. We could be talking about an internal SU(2) symmetry-breaking Nambu-Goldstone boson that is not the mass-giving Higgs boson (mass is instead given by mixing with quantum gravity gauge), but which has a mass equal to M = (1/2)(mW+ + mW- + mZ) ~ 126 GeV.
19 Dec 2011 update: Marni has elaborated/obfuscated the suggested connection to the Koide formula before conveniently heading off into the mountains of New Zealand for “Newton’s birthday” (which translates into plain English as “Christmas” to you and me, since he was born 25 December 1642):
Meanwhile, I can assemble a brief paper just get it rejected by the self-publicist of unproved, uncheckable speculations about determinism, Gerardus ‘t Hooft, the editor of the wacky journal Foundations of Physics. Why should we do this when the longer, more complete version is now freely available (see the previous blog post, below)? Politics. Nobody really cares about what a theory predicted and when, only about whether something is “politically correct”, i.e. fashionable, which means in the correct journals, regardless of whether they are hidden behind non-free high cost firewalls. Woit has a disgusting blog post up now, called “Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons and Alternative Theories of Everything”, about a book about nonsense, leading to the old Gestapo tactic of trying to conflate and stereotype all non-mainstream ideas with a single “example” which is no good, and acts as a strawman target for abuse (like having a hearing problem for high frequencies as a kid, affecting speech, and making you appear stupid, thus a target). This way, Woit and others can avoid discussing or even reading about accurate quantitative checked predictions ahead of observations, by the same politically-expedient tactic used by racists and Colonel Gadaffi, simply stereotyping all the people you don’t want to exist into the same category. (Gadaffi, you remember, lumped all his regime’s critics into the category of Al Queda rats, proceeded to give them the treatment, then complained when finally caught with his golden gun in a rat sewer himself.) I hope this lamentable attitude doesn’t last. The statistics from this blog show a gradually increasing interest in verified facts over groupthink hubris:
Quantum field theory 
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