Comments on: Suspiciously Vague LHC Forecasts

By: frelkins

frelkins — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:48:29 +0000

Is this more along the lines of what you wanted - a prediction on finding the Higgs? "CERN is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims. Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best."

By: tndal

tndal — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:42:24 +0000

Just finished watching Google Tech Talks presentation by Edward Farhi at

“Why Physicists Need the LHC”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xwSfuY8xA

Farhi hopes that something (anything, please!) will be found that is not currently predicted by the Standard Model. Otherwise High-energy particle physics in its current form, accurate to 10 decimal places, will be almost completely explained.

What’s wrong with the Standard Model being correct? It would appear that 10 decimal places accuracy is sufficient to indicate a theory correct and complete.

High-energy particle physicists are worried that, should the LHC prove to be a $6B boondoggle contributing little or nothing to knowledge, they will be unable to get future funding and will face future unemployment. Farhi admits he is hedging his bets by doing side research in quantum computing (that’s why he’s at Google).

I hope the LHC finds nothing new. Then research money could be redirected from high-energy particle physics to more productive areas of physics and the other sciences.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:35:01 +0000

I think you misunderstand the nature of dialogue in physics. Certainly certain physicists research predominantly certain ideas, and many if not most view the ideas they research more favorably than those who don’t research those ideas. However, physicists appreciate that it is Nature that decides which theories are correct. If person X’s theory is confirmed, X will NOT claim to have been “right” or to have “known all along,” as if he or she had some special access to truth.

There is some historical precedent for this. For example, long ago Coleman developed a unified theory of all (non-gravitational) forces, and its simplicity and elegance made it quite compelling. It made a testable prediction about proton decay, which subsequently was shown to be incorrect. This history is described among physicists as “unfortunate” — in the sense that Coleman’s theory could have been correct but it simply wasn’t the way of things — and not as if Coleman somehow lacked insight for making an incorrect prediction.

Perhaps it helps to clarify that physicists are hoping that the LHC will discern between different *theories*, not the predictions of a given theory. Perhaps at times, a given theory was seen as complicated or not fully understood, and different people decided the theory should predict different outcomes for the same experiment. Then, if the experiment were performed and one were right, the community might view that physicist as the “more insightful” one. But that’s because physicists view the theory as making just one prediction, and understanding that prediction is a matter of understanding the theory. In the present case, we have competing theories, and there is no understanding that can reveal which theory is correct — all you can do is check the results of experiment and see.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:44:29 +0000

It should be noted that Mike Kenny made an excellent series of comments in this thread.
Mike, I don’t see why Robin would be skeptical about your proposals, they sound modestly achievable, sound, and useful in filling an information gap.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:37:30 +0000

Garrett, was great to meet you and to realize you actually knew who I was! Good to hear you make predictions, but yours aren’t quite scoreable yet, as you neglected to assign them probabilities.

By: Garrett

Garrett — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:58:43 +0000

Hi Robin, it was good to meet you at SciFoo. To generalize your post, I think it would be very cool to have a technical futures market, where anyone could bet money on scientifically testable predictions. But, barring that, Sean's probabilities seem about right, though mine differ a little. In particular, my horse in this race is consistent with the appearance of a Higgs, a W' and Z', and some colored bosons. If some of these are seen (which Sean guestimates at less than a 2% chance) I will be extremely happy, and probably crow a bit. If anything else appears at the LHC, my horse and crow are probably cooked.

By: Rolf Andreassen

Rolf Andreassen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:33:50 +0000

I don’t think that’s what I said. “If X, then Y” is a prediction. But we have no means of favouring that prediction over “If A, then B”. If we did, we wouldn’t need the experiment. So, nobody is going to come out and say “A is true, so we will see B”. There’s a difference between believing “If A then B” and believing that A is more likely than X.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:44:05 +0000

If you can't say which theories predict which experimental results now, how dare you say so after peeking at the LHC results?

By: Rolf Andreassen

Rolf Andreassen — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:40:11 +0000

Well, I think this is sort of the point – physics doesn’t have any information to choose one model over another. If we did, we wouldn’t have to do the experiment. It’s all of the form “if X, then Y”, with nothing to tell you how to choose between the X other than seeing which Y you get. Nobody’s going to stake any reputation on a gut feel.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:45:54 +0000

onymous, if people want to crow about being vindicated, then people must make forecasts. It is not enough that there were 1000 papers that each made a forecast, and then crowing in retrospect about the one paper that got closest – bigshot physicists should choose now which of those paper forecasts to endorse to what degree.