Requiem for a visionary

I was saddened to hear of the death of the brilliant British physicist Peter Higgs on Monday, April 8, at the grand old age of 94.  Higgs is most famous for his proposal in 1964 of what has since come to be known as the "Higgs mechanism" (he was far too modest a man to name it after himself; that was the doing of colleagues who recognized his genius).  This springboarded off work by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese physicist Yochiro Nambu, who was researching spontaneous symmetry breaking -- Higgs's insight was to see that the same process could be used to argue for the existence of a previously unknown field, the properties of which seemed to explain why ordinary particles have mass.

This was a huge leap, and by Higgs's own account, he was knocking at the knees when he presented the paper at a conference.  But it passed peer review and was published in the journal Physical Review Letters, and afterward stood up to repeated attempts to punch holes in its logic.  His argument required the existence of a massive spin-zero boson -- now known as the Higgs boson -- and he had to wait 48 years for it to be discovered at CERN by the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments.  When informed that the Higgs boson had been discovered, at exactly the mass/energy he'd predicted, he responded with his typical humility, saying, "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."

It surprised no one when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year (2013).

Higgs at the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bengt Nyman, Nobel Prize 24 2013, CC BY 2.0]

Higgs, however, was a bit of an anachronism.  He was a professor at Edinburgh University, but refused to buy into the competitive grant-seeking paper-production culture of academia.  He was also famously non-technological; he said he'd never sent an email, used a cellphone, or owned a television.  (He did say that he'd been persuaded to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory once, but "wasn't impressed.")  He frustrated the hell out of the administration of the university, responding to demands for a list of recent publications with the word "None."  Apparently it was only caution -- well-founded, as it turned out -- by the administrators that persuaded them to keep him on the payroll.  "He might get a Nobel Prize at some point," one of them said.  "If not, we can always get rid of him."

In an interview, Higgs said that he'd never get hired in today's academic world, something that is more of an indictment against academia than it is of Higgs himself.  "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964," he said.  "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department.  I thought I was well out of it.  It wasn't my way of doing things any more.  Today I wouldn't get an academic job.  It's as simple as that.  I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Reading about this immediately made me think about the devastating recent video by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, a stinging takedown of how the factory-model attitude in research science is killing scientists' capacity for doing real and groundbreaking research:

It was a rude awakening to realize that this institute [where she had her first job in physics research] wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about money-making.  And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor.  It was generally the case.  The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money-making.  Here's how this works:

If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, the institution gets part of that money.  It's called the "overhead."  Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration.  But academic institutions pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming.  Small scholarships don't make much money, but big research grants can be tens of millions of dollars.  And the overhead can be anything between fifteen and fifty percent.  This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money.  And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves...  And the overhead isn't even the real problem.  The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.  That's how academia works.  Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grant holder.  And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.  The result is a paper-production machine in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution...

I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or to get hired.  You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.  You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy.  It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.  And since most grants are three years, or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly...

The more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that the research there wasn't based upon sound scientific principles...  [Most researchers today] are only interested in writing more papers...  To get grants.  To get postdocs.  To write more papers.  To get more grants.  And round and round it goes.

You can see why a visionary like Peter Higgs was uncomfortable in today's academia (and vice versa).  But it's also horrifying to think about the Peter Higgses of this generation -- today's up-and-coming scientific groundbreakers, who may not ever get a chance to bring their ideas to the world, sandbagged instead by a hidebound money-making machine that has amplified "publish-or-perish" into "publish-or-never-get-started."

In any case, the world has lost a gentle, soft-spoken genius, whose unique insights -- made at a time when the academic world was more welcoming to such individuals -- completed our picture of the Standard Model of particle physics, and whose theories led to an understanding of the fundamental properties of matter and energy we're still working to explore fully.  94 is a respectable age in pretty much anyone's opinion, but it's still sad to lose someone of such brilliance, who was not only a leading name in pure research, but was unhesitating in pointing out the problems with how science is done.

It took 48 years for his theory about the Higgs mechanism to be experimentally vindicated; let's hope his criticisms of academia have a shorter gestation period.

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God particle jewelry

It's simultaneously amusing and frustrating to see the woo-woos trying to incorporate the latest scientific findings into their wooism.

Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, there was a great deal of babbling about "etheric bodies" -- basically, their conception of the soul, which could project through time and space and which survived the physical body after death.  The "etheric body" was, supposedly, made of "ether," the mysterious substance suggested by scientists as the medium through which light waves propagated in the depths of space.

Because, after all, if the "etheric body" is made of "ether," then if the scientists say that the "ether" exists, the "etheric body" must, too.  Right?

Of course right.

But then the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity demonstrated conclusively that the "ether" didn't exist, and unfortunately, the woo-woos of the time didn't use the reverse logic, and conclude that souls didn't, either.  They just changed the name to "astral body" and kept right on blathering.

Bait-and-switch, that's the ticket.

The master of this technique these days is the inimitable Diane Tessman, who uses scientific words incorrectly so often that someone should design a drinking game based on her writings.  (It is not recommended that you take a shot whenever she uses the word "quantum," however.  I'd prefer not to have any of my readers end up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.)

Yesterday, though, I ran into the pinnacle, the epitome, the crowning glory of this technique.  If you know of a better one, I don't want to hear about it, because this one caused so many faceplants that I'm already going to have to go to school this morning with an icepack strapped to my forehead.

Most of you probably have heard of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle whose existence was proposed by Peter Higgs way back in 1964 as the manifestation of the Higgs field, which permeates space, interacting with matter and giving it the property of mass.  Higgs, now age 84, was fortunate enough to live to see his theory vindicated.  In March of 2013 an experiment in CERN generated traces of a high-energy particle that most physicists believe was the Higgs.

Unfortunately, twenty years earlier, physicist Leon Lederman had given the elusive particle the nickname "the God Particle" -- apparently because his publisher wouldn't let him use his first choice for a nickname, which was "the goddamned particle."

But far be it from the woo-woos to let an objection like "it's just the nickname, for cryin' in the sink!" stand in their way.  Because now we have someone is selling jewelry made from ball bearings pilfered from CERN...

... and claiming that they are infused with God Particles, and that wearing it will bring you divine guidance.

Here's the pitch:

The God Particle, which was recently discovered by our colleagues in CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, forever the Holy Grail of particle physics and nuclear research. The God particle is regarded as one of the fundamental forces of the cosmos. Many religious philosophers believe it constitutes the very ground of being, while others assert that it is the fabric of creation upon which the tapestry of the universe is woven. There are some who refer to the God particle as the clay of existence, whereas the Shaivites of India know it as Brahman and regard it quite reverently as sacred supreme Consciousness.

We still don't know if one of these theories is true, or maybe they all are. What we do know is that you are on the verge of a once in a lifetime opportunity of letting this infinite power into your life.

You deserve God's help, you deserve God's particle.

So these people apparently pilfered bits of scrap from CERN -- although frankly, they could just as well be steel ball bearings they picked up from Home Depot for $0.99 each, there's no way to tell for certain -- and made them into jewelry.

And are selling them for two hundred bucks each.

But the bullshit doesn't end there.  Oh, no.  These people are way more sophisticated than those "etheric body" yokels from the 19th century.  Read on, and be amazed:

Samples from the parts exposed to the surge of energy which showed substantial evidence of having the God Particle were sent to the leading universities and research centers in the world.

According to preliminary evidence found thus far by researches in the medical field, the energy of the God Particle has some amazing effects on migraine prevention, on treating different kinds of skin conditions, up to a surprising improvement among those who ailing from sexual dysfunction disorders. All those among a long list of other medical conditions.

The effects of the God Particle is also tested in the field of mental health and in this field the patients are also getting some surprising improvements in a wide range of medical cases, for example treating phobias and depressions of different kinds.

One of the theories being researched by the scientists is that the God Particle doesn't really cure the listed conditions but provides the human body with the energy needed to normalize and cure itself.

All those researches are performed in scientific methods demanding them to comply with a strict criteria before publication.

Therefore all the above should not be taken as a scientific fact, but should only be understood the way it is, a positive influence of material exposed to the God Particle on treating and preventing a wide range of medical problems.

The results of the researches are still censored. But there is an increasing assumption in the scientific community that in the future, when it becomes less expensive to produce the particle, it will completely change the face of modern medicine.

I especially love the penultimate paragraph, which to my ears reads like the woo-woo alternative-medicine's "Not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose human illness" that appears in microscopic print on things like herbal remedies.

And how did these folks come by chunks of one of the most famous pieces of scientific apparatus in the world, you might ask?

We are a part of a maintenance team in CERN. Among our responsibilities is to replace some of the worn out parts inside the collider.

We notices that something amazing was happening to many people during those days, and when we were summoned for tests by the research groups we realized that we were not the only ones who felt that way.

When the moment came to replace some of the parts around the center of the collision, we felt that we cannot dispose this material as waste. Instead, we started collecting the remaining bearings from the section which is under our responsibility. This material was exposed to the most powerful energy.

After the remaining bearings are collected, we remove them from the compound and later from the country, back to our countries of origin. Initially we gave small spheres which came from the collected bearings to our relatives and friends. In a short period of time the spheres started to leave their mark, and along with great responses we were flooded with requests from other acquaintances who heard about the amazing experience.

Which is either an outright lie, or else illegal, since profiting off of materials taken secretly from a scientific research facility is usually considered theft.  Of course, given that they are also making fraudulent claims about what said ball bearings can do, there are so many ethical angles from which you could attack this website that I almost wouldn't know where to begin.

So I think, instead, that I'm just going to stop here and leave it up to your consideration.  For one thing, in doing the research for this post, I did such a colossal headdesk that I think I jarred a Higgs boson loose from my skull, and my etheric body needs some time to recover before I go to work.