External Confirmation Required

At every laboratory where I've done research there have always been at least two major experiments designed to investigate similar scientific questions. At CERN, where I currently do research, I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the two "general purpose" experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) constructed to explore a broad range of scientific questions with LHC data. The CMS experiment, which sits at the opposite side of the 27 km (17 mile) circumference tunnel, is also a general purpose detector designed to look at a broad range of scientific topics. Despite the fact that having two somewhat redundant experiments costs twice as much to build and maintain, this arrangement is optimal so that each experiment can corroborate the results of the other. New discoveries and measurements require external confirmation to affirm their validity, and so complementary experiments are established in order to provide the necessary verification.

There have been a few times during my career in particle physics that one experiment seemed to have evidence for a discovery of something entirely new, but was eventually shown to be wrong, partially because other experiments were unable to provide external confirmation. Such cases involve the false "discoveries" that quarks have substructure, that particles can travel faster than the speed of light, and that weird particles called lepto-quarks actually exist. (These things may still turn out to be true but the past experiments that seemed to have found them have all been shown to be incorrect.)

External confirmation is not only one of the requirements for determining if a proposition is valid or not in any scientific endeavor, but also in other arenas where claims about objective truth are made. In a series of blog posts I have been applying some of the same principles used in my scientific research to the beliefs and world-view of Christianity to investigate whether or not they seem to have objective validation. I have already addressed the questions (1) "Is the data logically self-consistent?", (2) "Is there enough evidence to support the hypothesis?", (3) "Is the hypothesis compatible with other known data?", (4) "Is contradictory evidence conclusive?", and (5) "Is something essential missing?". This blog post will address the sixth question, (6) "Is there External Confirmation?", while two future posts will discuss the final two questions,  (7) "Can the hypothesis be falsified or confirmed with other data?", and (8) "Are there other possible explanations that are more feasible?".

Probing the God Particle

Almost six years ago headlines throughout the world declared the discovery of the "God Particle" at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The name "God Particle" is not used by any physicists but is the popular name in the press for the particle that physicists call the Higgs Boson or simply the Higgs, named after Peter Higgs, one of the theoretical physicists that proposed its existence in 1964. In an earlier post, I discussed the discovery of the Higgs Boson and its significance within the standard model of particles and fields. Although the discovery of the Higgs made international news, there has been a lot of hard work that has been done since that discovery was made. In experimental particle physics the discovery of something new is often the easiest part of the process and the hard part is trying to really understand what has been discovered. Much of my research life since 2012 has been dominated by further studies of the properties of the Higgs Boson.

Why do physicists spend so much time and effort studying something that has already been discovered? What is the motivation and the expected outcome? There is a complex and comprehensive mathematical model of nature that particle physicists use. This model makes detailed predictions about what we should expect to find in our experiments. One of the most exciting possibilities is to discover something in the data that does not fit the models. When that happens, and the discovery can be confirmed and verified, it means that we have found something new that we did not know before. That is the most thrilling outcome for an experimental physicist. It is always nice to confirm something that has already been predicted. But it is even more exciting to find something not predicted and then have to figure out what previously unknown secret of nature has been discovered.

The World at CERN

And now for something completely different...  The main focus of this blog is to discuss issues relating science and reason to Christianity and God.  However, I have spent the last week at CERN attending meetings, talking with people, trying to develop computer code to analyze data, and other such activities.  So I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about how experimental particle physics research is done within large collaborations like those at CERN.

I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration.  ATLAS is the name given to both the detector that we use to analyze data from proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider and the group of scientists who use the data from that detector to try to understand the fundamental particles and forces in the universe.  There are currently about 5000 scientists from about 180 institutions in 38 countries who are members of the ATLAS collaboration, with 1200 of those scientists being students working toward their Ph.D.  It takes that many people to operate the ATLAS detector and to analyze all of the data that we take with the detector.

The God Particle...and God

On July 4, 2012 two collaborations of over 3000 physicist each independently announced the discovery of a particle colloquially known as "The God Particle."  Where did this elusive particle get its name?  Why did its discovery make international news?  And does it have anything to do with God?

Every scientist I know dislikes the moniker "The God Particle."  Physicists, instead, have named the particle after one of the six people who predicted its existence in 1964, the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.  Thus, it is the "Higgs particle" or "Higgs boson."  (For those of you who don't know but care about such things, a boson is a subatomic particle with an intrinsic quantum mechanical property of spin equal to an integer value times the Planck constant, named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.)

In 1993, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, wrote a book about the search for the Higgs boson and named the book The God Particle at the urging of his publisher in order to maximize sales.  So the nickname "The God Particle" is mostly a marketing gimmick to sell books.  The name doesn't give any insight into the particle's properties or its place in the ensemble of fundamental particles.