20 October 2011

How will CERN manage the lack of discoveries?

CERN management is nervous. After having spent 5 billion euros to build the LHC, the lack of discoveries, unanimously predicted by all physicists in the world, is embarassing. The latest internal CERN proposal on how to deal with the situation makes two statements.

- No discovery is even more interesting than the discovery of the Higgs. It would be "revolutionary".

- CERN needs to take more data to say more.

What a weak report! Since the report is so weak, I bet that:

- CERN will NOT publish the Higgs results for the first 5 inverse femtobarns this year.

- CERN will SPREAD the results (say for 3 fb^-1, then for 4, then for 5) over various months in 2012, to stay in the press, even though the results will be available long before those dates.

There will be a distressingly long waiting time ahead, due to bad politics only.

In the meantime, CERN people should read Schiller's strand model. He predicted the lack of any new discoveries a few years ago. He also proposes a consistent solution for all open problems of the standard model. And he did not need 5 billion euros to do so.
Posted by Clara, once known as Nemo at 05:10

7 comments:

  1. Vladimir Kalitvianski21 October 2011 at 16:18

    If Higgs is reliably excluded, it will be a very nice discovery: the Standard Model fits experiments because of multiple "fitting parameters" rather than due to correct physical model implemented. No, if even the fundamental constants are "running" to "describe" data, that's the end of theoretical physics.

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  2. Clara, once known as Nemo23 October 2011 at 15:40

    Of course it will be a pretty discovery. It is a good idea to call the fundamental constants "fitting parameters" - I had never heard this expression used in this case.

    About the running, the standard model makes clear predictions with no additional fitting parameters. And all these predictions have been checked by experiments, so I am less negative than you.

    But why are there so few fitting parameters?

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  3. Vladimir Kalitvianski23 October 2011 at 19:47

    Why then the constants are running if not to fit data?

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  4. Clara, once known as Nemo24 October 2011 at 06:51

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. Clara, once known as Nemo24 October 2011 at 06:52

    Well, nature let's them run, as experiment shows.

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  6. Vladimir Kalitvianski24 October 2011 at 15:05

    Ha-ha! "Nature lets them run!"

    Don't you know that it is we who write equations, not the Nature? It is we who fits parameters and make them run our errands.

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  7. Clara, once known as Nemo24 October 2011 at 21:38

    I gather that we agree to disagree on this matter.

    ReplyDelete

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