Eliezer apparently wrong about higgs boson

duckduckMOO

So someone told me that Eliezer Yudkowsky predicted no 5 sigma evidence of the higgs boson, and that 6 sigma evidence had been found. A quick search found the post referred to, and a slightly longer but not particularly thorough search did not find anything discussing it.

So:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb (02 November 2009)

I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.

(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)

Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.

In the post below rolfandreassen sets the condition of 5 sigma evidence before 2014 and offers a bet of $25. In the post below that Eliezer accepts.

Discuss.

So:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb (02 November 2009)

I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.

(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)

Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.

In the post below rolfandreassen sets the condition of 5 sigma evidence before 2014 and offers a bet of $25. In the post below that Eliezer accepts.

Discuss.

I haven't seen the data, or even firsthand accounts; the only thing I've seen thus far are second and thirdhand accounts, which conflict on whether or not the decay modes seen are the decay modes expected. They match in type, but not probability, and AFAIK this discrepancy, if not resolved, is a major problem in classifying the particle as the Higgs Boson; if further/better observations resolve this discrepancy, then the decay modes become evidence for it; as they exist right now, it's mild evidence against it. My inclination is to "Wait for further evidence."

(I'm accustomed to the "Higgs Boson" being evidence for Higgs Field Theory. If it turns out Higgs Field Theory, and Standard Theory more generally, is wrong, then I'd be reluctant to call it the Higgs Boson even if it's otherwise exactly the particle predicted, but generated for different reasons.)

If it turns out Higgs Field Theory, and Standard Theory more generally, is wrong, then I'd be reluctant to call it the Higgs Boson

There's different “kinds of wrong” in science, as noted by Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong:

"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Which of these “wrongs” did you mean?

2Dreaded_Anomaly14y

Here are the press releases from CERN, CMS, and ATLAS. They show several plots directly, and they have links to the very thorough PDFs presented in the July 4 seminar which took place before the press conference.

3Mitchell_Porter14y

In the Higgs mechanism, the W and Z acquire mass by pairing up with degrees of freedom from a Higgs field. (Fermions get their mass differently; a purely left-handed massless fermion and a purely right-handed massless fermion pair up into a single massive fermion via their interactions with the Higgs field, but the massive fermion does not incorporate degrees of freedom from the Higgs field into itself, the way that the massive gauge bosons do.) A Higgs boson comes from the unused degrees of freedom of a Higgs field. In the long run, the new particle will be called a Higgs boson if, and only if, it continues to look like a degree of freedom left over from a Higgsing. So it can still be a Higgs without being a standard model Higgs; for example, it might be one of several Higgses, or its couplings to the other particles might be different from the standard model values. The fermions could get their masses in some other way entirely (e.g. by being composite), but this particle would still be a Higgs so long as it's the residue from the acquisition of masses by the W and Z. That's the aspect which has to be false, if it is not a Higgs.