Of Bosons and Paradigms

(via)

Last month scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (which is probably a front for supervillany; think about it: it's a large mysterious underground science facility that some people say could destroy the world; sounds like a Batman villan to me) announced that it may have possibly seen the first observable evidence of the Higgs boson, the theoretical elementary particle responsible for mass.

The LHC, which was built specifically to find the Higgs boson, is anticipating that it will be able to claim discovery sometime within the year, which would be huge for theoretical physics because it would validate the last half century of work in quantum mechanics, which has been really important to theoretical and particle physics for the past century. But I think it would be way more interesting, and have much more profound implications, if they didn't find the Higgs, or if they found evidence that it didn't exist.

I'm no expert on theoretical particle physics, or really anything at all, but I have taken enough science classes to understand that most of what we think we know about the universe at any given point is usually wrong. Sometimes, all the equations work out, and we think we finally understand what is going on, provided we ignore some of the nagging problems that the theory can't explain, and we still turn out to be wrong. The most enduring example of this is Newtonian gravity versus general relativity. As a complete outsider to physics, that where it seems like we are standing right now with quantum mechanics. There are a lot of things that work out really well, and many more that it is most likely correct about because we have things like advance electronics that work based on the principles of quantum mechanics, so it must be mostly correct. But still, we don't have a unified field theory, and there are other problems, meaning that there are still pieces missing. Those pieces may not be in the current directions of research, they may be in the complete opposite direction, or in a direction that we haven't found yet. Not finding the Higgs, could completely overturn a lot of the research and theories from the last fifty or sixty years of work, and it would force a paradigm shift the likes of which we haven't seen since the development of quantum mechanics at the turn of the last century. And just maybe, the answers we have been searching for would be found the new paradigm that would be generated.

That's one of the things that I find so exciting about science: there's always something we don't know, and it's always possible that what we think we know is wrong. It illustrates the difference between knowledge and understanding. We know the equations and the experimental facts and what we have observed, but we don't always understand what they mean on an intuitive level, or even any level at all. That's the gap we are constantly trying to bridge.

Skeptical scientist is skeptical (via)

I have no idea what the future of scientific research holds, and what the coming discoveries will mean, and I suspect that no one does. Who knows what finding the Higgs boson will mean in terms of future research (assuming they find it), and what doors it could open, in terms of both research and technology. I could be incredibly significant or it could only matter to the people writing scientific papers and never have a wider impact. (Equivocation much?).

We have this need to explain the world around us, whether it has the potential to improve it or not, but we can't seem to settle on an explanation that we are happy with. So, we settle for smashing protons into each other at near the speed of light just to see what happens. I don't know about you, Imaginary Readers, but I'm okay with that.