9 February 2011

Spaghetti without Higgs sauce?

Reading through Schiller's strange spaghetti model of nature, I found that he predicts that the Higgs boson does not exist.

Not that I agree, but his argument is more or less this. The Higgs is a massive spin 0 particle. Massive particles are knotted spaghetti (he calls them strands).  Some knots have symmetries. Spin 0 implies spherical symmetry. A knot never has spherical symmetry. Thus, no knot can have spin 0, and the Higgs does not exist.

Basically, this is one of those many old arguments that spin 0 is impossible for an elementary particle. The argument is very old, and was made to Salam, Weinberg and Glashow already in the 1970s. Does anybody know what they answered?

My own idea is that the Higgs will be found at around 120 GeV, and that it will be the greatest discovery of fundamental physics ever. Nothing in our environment points to the Higgs; predicting it required to understand nature in a deep and fundamental way. Finding the Higgs will be one of the greatest triumphs of scientific thinking.

Now, if by a quirk of nature the Higgs does not exist, we definitely are in trouble.

No comments:

Post a Comment