Spaghetti still have a chance

Schiller should not despair. True, he expected from the spaghetti model that no Higgs exists. But he even had an alternative in his book, with a drawing for a Higgs candidate, and a mass prediction of around 117 GeV. It looks as if his alternative might have been the correct one.

Will his strand/spaghetti model survive this disappointment? The newest edition of his book, from July 2012, is still optimistic. It is only a question of waiting until the end of the year. We then will know definitely whether the Higgs exists and really is the Higgs.  We will know whether supersymmetry still has a chance. We will see whether anything beyond the standard model will be found. If all the other negative predictions from the spaghetti model hold up, the model will be one of the few candidates that agree with experiment! 2012 is an exciting year.

Why is CERN silent?

The LHC is producing collisions at a steady pace. The amount of 2012 data (12.7 inverse femtobarn) is already the double of that used in the July 2012 announcements (below 6  inverse femtobarns). But there are no updates on the results. A few week ago I questioned why the ATLAS experiment changed its data retroactively, and Matt Strassler answered that he hopes that this will happen regularly. (I am simplifying the statements somewhat, of course :-)

Well, it is now time for CERN to change their old data again! We all remember that the Higgs bump was huge in December 2011, and then much smaller in July 2012. We are all waiting to see, using the newest data, whether the Higgs bump remains or whether it is reduced even further.

Of course, people have invested 5 billion Euro to show that the Higgs exists, so they will probably produce new data that confirms it.  After all, who will ever be able to check the result? Nobody will spend 5 billion to do so. Whatever CERN says, it will be the "truth". For ever.

Remember what Putin said to his aides when the United States failed to find nuclear arms in Iraq: "If I had been the president of the US, I would have found them."

So why is CERN silent? Is it because faking the new data is taking too much effort? (Last time, it took only a few days.)




P.S. I am not sure that the CERN people can stand satire. A few weeks ago, I added some satirical comments on a page of Dorigo's blog, and when I came back to read the reactions, he had taken the whole page down... 

Men at Strings 2012

The talks at Strings 2012 (see here) are worth following, if you want to see a group of older men in their 50s telling how nature should be, even though nature is in fact different. If you listen to the talks, you will get goose skin. Ideology really does bad things to smart people.

Update: For a positive exception, look at the pdf by Sandra Kortner; it gives an excellent summary of LHC results. All these experimental results show that there is nothing beyond the standard model.

Banks has given up

The latest preprint, http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5096, where Tom Banks predicts an axion at LHC scale, supersymmetry breaking, 'pyramid scheme' etc., shows that also Banks, one of the smartest guys in physics, cannot stop working on topics that do not correlate with experiment.

Though he provides one idea that sticks: he writes (in the appendix) that any effective theory that yields the standard model should "stem from a microscopic theory of quantum gravity at the Planck scale".

Why does nobody look for such a theory and then deduces the standard model from it, instead of guessing intermediate steps? (Arxiv does not have such attempts since years.) Guessing intermediate steps, like the 'pyramid scheme' that Banks presents in his paper, shows that he gave up on the real task: he gave up searching for the microscopic theory at the Planck scale.

But why do all these smart people give up? They are smart and famous, have the best theory jobs in the world, the best preparation, the best knowledge, they know what to do, they know where to look - and then they don't. What happened to them?

Questions about the ATLAS 2011 results

This link shows the original 2011 data results from the ATLAS experiment, taken from https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HIGG-2012-17/



We all recall that the peak was much higher than the expected peak, if the Higgs is at 125 GeV.

In summer 2012, the same 2011 data was analyzed again, when it was known that CMS had also seen something at the energy, and it was graphed as follows: https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CONFNOTES/ATLAS-CONF-2012-091/fig_09a.png


Even though the bump in this reselected 2011 sample looks in a sense less clear than in the original 2011 sample, it now fits much better with the prediction. I was even told that the sigma value of the second graph is higher than that of the first. (Is that so?)

Maybe somebody can explain this? Did I use the correct graphs? Is there some mistake in this post?


Update: This seems to be such a touchy issue that nobody dares to comment, not even anonymously. That is a really bad sign.

Are ATLAS people serious?

Is this the 5 sigma result of a serious experiment? Nobody in his right mind will agree that the black data points are due to the dotted curve. (Taken from https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CONFNOTES/ATLAS-CONF-2012-091/ )

Bonus question: Are there more points above or below the red line?

Are CMS people serious?

Look at  slide 42 of the CMS presentation of July 4th, shown above. If you manage to see any peak at 126 GeV in any graph that shows the 2012 data, you are really special.

Nobody in his right mind will agree that the black data points are due to the red dotted curve. From this slide, by adding the 2011 data, CMS people deduce the clear peak of page 43. The whole process looks more like magic, less like science. Are these people all dreaming? I do not believe the conclusions by CMS yet. More data is needed.