Thursday, July 19, 2012

Higgs as a belief



I have been following the postings of Lubos Motl about Higgs (here is one example). It seems that Lubos has developed a real complex from Higgs. He has written posting after posting trying to convince the reader that the new spinless particle cannot be but Higgs. "Why Higgs had to be discovered" was the title of one posting. "Idiot" belongs to the vocabulary used about those who think differently.

I wonder why Lubos does he have this fix idee, one of many other extremist beliefs, many of them irrational. Is this related to assimilation with existing theory or with establishment? Lubos lived his childhood in a totalitarian society. Did he somehow inherit the strong tendency to totalitarian thinking in which arguments are justified by names? To me Lubos in many respects looks like a mirror image of a fanatic communist from Soviet Union.

As a theoretical physicist Lubos should be able to see that Higgs is just one explanation, and that one never can prove that Higgs exist, only its non-existence. At best its presence allows to explain the data but there are alternative explanations. Standard model Higgs seems to be even excluded already now if data are taken at face value. Here most of the bloggers follow text book thinking and neglect the data: Phil Gibbs is a refreshing exception in this respect.

How dangerous the Lubosian thinking is for theoretical physicist himself is, can be demonstrated by simple example.

  1. Suppose - in accordance with string models and TGD - that higher-dimensional space-time exists in some sense as the arena of dynamics.

  2. Suppose that baryon and lepton numbers are conserved separately and correspond to different chiralities of the spinors of higher-D space: there is indeed not a single proton decay to prove that this is not the case. One can also consider giving up the separate conservation but keeping the identification of quarks and leptons.
The argument is very simple if one accepts these assumptions.
  1. Suppose first that Higgs is scalar in this higher-dimensional space. With these assumptions the only conclusion is that Higgs decays to lepton-quark pairs and that the theory does not conserve baryon and lepton numbers separately. This is a contradiction with basic assumptions and also conflicts the existing data for the spin 0 boson.

  2. One could alternatively argue that Higgs is actually a vector in higher-D space having components only in "internal degrees of freedom". This would fix the dimension of internal space to D=4 and imbedding space would be 8-dimensional. In this case it becomes however very difficult to imagine how gauge bosons could "eat" the components of Higgs.
The entire Higgs paradigm falls down with single quite reasonable assumption: B and L are separately conserved and correspond to different chiralities of imbedding space spinors.

In TGD framework problem disappears in zero energy ontology.

  1. Higgs is not needed and p-adic thermodynamics describes particle massivation. A very important and testable outcome is that it is longitudinal mass squared which obeys p-adic thermodynamics: total mass squared vanishes and al particles are massless at basic level. This implies twistorial picture and Yangian symmetry and absence of IR and UV divergences since virtual particles are on mass shell massless particles with propagator defined by longitudinal momentum.

  2. But what about Lorentz invariance? Since causal diamonds characterized by longitudinal sub-space M^2 have Lorentz boosts as moduli, Lorentz invariance is not broken and one obtains a nice connection with the basic picture of QCD involving parton distributions depending on longitudinal momenta.

Lubos should be also able to see that Higgs is just a phenomenological description and that there must be a real microscopic theory behind Higgs in the case that it is needed. p-Adic thermodynamics is my proposal.

4 comments:

Zephir said...

/* ..I wonder why Lubos does he have this fix idee, one of many other extremist beliefs, many of them irrational.. */

He's borderline autist, so he cannot judge the things from their dual sides.. Black & white vision is everything, what the people like him are able to use.

Zephir said...

/*..How dangerous the Lubosian thinking is for theoretical physicist himself is, can be demonstrated by simple example...*/

IMO Lubos Motl is not taken seriously by anyone - if anything, than just from personal reasons. In addition, the specialized thinking isn't favoured with mainstream science from occupation perspective - so that the mainstream physicists rather tend to piling of theories, than into their reconciliation - as former president of APS recognized and named before years. What may be dangerous for mainstream physicists is rather their ignorance of important findings, like the cold fusion at the moment, when the rest of people would realize, they're feeding a parasites of human society, which are prohibiting its further progress.

matpitka@luukku.com said...

It is a pity that Lubos has this dark side. But he has also the other side. For instance, today he wrote an excellent posting about experimental work with dark matter. By the way, it was mostly about particle around 130 GeV for which evidence comes from several measurements.

The standard interpretation is as WIMP identified as neutralino: this interpretation seems to be excluded now.

My proposal is that the dark matter candidate need not have anything to do with dark matter in ordinary sense and that it could be the same particle as seen at LHC: pion like state of M_89 hadron physics with mass about 145 GeV claimed earlier by CDF.

As also you noticed in some previous posting there is structure in production cross section which suggests periodically occurring satellites of 125 GeV state. As Lubos reported in some earlier posting, some experiments report evidence for a lower lying state which could be just the 125 GeV state.

Similar satellites for ordinary pion have been reported a couple of years ago and my interpretation would be as "infrared" Regge trajectory reflecting directly the energy spectrum assignable to the flux tubes "color magnetic body" of hadron.

I do not of course expect that his observation will be taken seriously for a long time: particle physicists have been educated to believe that QCD solved everything for decades ago and the rest is just hard calculation. These years have taught me that interaction at intellectual level is practically impossible with professionals receiving monthly salary.

Lubos is amn excellent example about this although he does not even receive the corrupting monthly salary. He simply refuses to "see" anyone without name or high enough academic position. This causes Lubos himself a lot of communication problems: how to comment the criticism of some-one that one does not "see" at all;-).

Ulla said...

About microtubulis link to cell regulation.
http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=24998

http://www.imb.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=11722

http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ncb2532.html?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureCellBio