An Essay Concerning Human Misunderstanding: Why It Cannot Be Inferred From Empirically Acquired Information That The Higgs Boson Has Been Observed by Marcoen J.T.F. Cabbolet

Marcoen,

I've just checked for a response and bizarrely my post has vanished! Do let me know if you find it, I didn't keep a copy!

In any case I strongly support your position and case, and may even go a little further about particle physics (I discussed this within my 2011 essay).

I hope I also have a proof about particle structure which has proven robust in the optical and QM and relativistic regimes, deriving a resolution of the EPR paradox in my essay!

Do look and tell me if you think I'm going crazy, of if this may just signal the beginning of the end for outdated doctrine. Ignore the dense abstract, the rave reviews in the blog include; "groundbreaking", "clearly significant", "astonishing", "fantastic job", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "deeply impressed", etc.聽so just perhaps...? Mind you. two 7th places were passed over in the last two years so it may be buried again anyway. All points welcomed.

But this should be about yours, as the original one. Excellent, concise and precise. Good score going on. Very well done.

Best wishes

Peter

Dear Marcoen,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest,

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Dear Marcoen,

Your, nicely argued, article is an eye opener to those who believe in the propaganda that the mass of the particle found by CERN would correspond with that of the Higg's particle and hence the particle found by them is indeed the Higg's particle. This declaration is rightly challenged by you. I hope the truth persists ultimately. Please, go through my article and post your comments on it in my thread. (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827).

Best of luck,

Sreenath

Dear Marcoen,

I had previously read and rated your essay without commenting since I was in virtual total agreement and you were right on target. But perhaps it helps to still state this all the same at least for encouragement.

What brought me here now was the brilliant exchanges with Chidi Idika. That was the work of a well-meaning objective critic which is what this forum needs more than flattery of one's work.

I would love to benefit from your criticism even if you don't score my essay. Mine though may be more philosophical than hard core math or physics. The nature of space I think supersedes the claims of finding the Higg's boson or what do you think?

Following additional insights gained from interacting with FQXi community members, I wrote on my blog a judgement in the case of Atomistic Enterprises Inc. vs. Plato & Ors delivered on Jul. 28, 2013 @ 11:39 GMT.

Best regards,

Akinbo

Marcoen,

The point you make is one that needs to be repeated frequently, but it does so because the process of intellectual editing is essential to gaining any real grasp of a reality which bombards us with more information in a moment, then we will ever comprehend in a lifetime. It is reductionism of the reductionisms. Frequently I come across people who think only the last few decimals need to be measured, of a reality that is been conquered by human reason, when the opposite is true; The more we know, the more we know we don't know. I think in the current development of our social and technological functions, we are mimicking processes biology was evolving hundreds of millions of years ago.

Just as a very minor example of how we really don't consider what we think, take the basic mathematical function of addition; If you actually add two objects together, you have one larger object. So when you say 2+3=5, what you are really saying is that adding a set of two objects to set of three objects, gives you a set of five objects. I think ignoring this basic reality causes significant intellectual distortions, in that we don't appreciate how whole objects arise from multiple inputs. We always think something is best understood in terms of its parts, yet its parts are unexplainable outside of their context. The parts of your body add up to a whole that gives meaning and context to those parts, in a way they do not have in isolation.

In physics, this view is pervasive. We treat quanta as discrete units, yet it becomes a big mystery when they become "entangled" and start acting as one over larger areas than we can explain when everything must be point particles on a fundamental level.

Not to mention how this leads to atomized cultures and the resulting short term thinking, but that is looking at the ever larger picture and it's hard enough to get even those who are paid to be logical to think through the consequences of their assumptions.

Regards,

John Merryman

Marcoen,

This is physics! Ask yourself; how, where and when does change usually happen? It happens in the breaks, the phase transitions. As the old saying goes, "Change happens one funeral at a time."

So then ask yourself; How do we know when such a break is going to happen and what should we do to prepare for it? As I've been saying, you know you are at the top of the wave when it's mostly foam and bubbles and no more upward momentum. I think that about describes the state of physics today. So the question then is to figure out how to prepare for what happens when this structure really does start to crumble and that would be to have another model that answers the issues more effectively. Now that may seem obvious, but it would seem that if there were such a model, this being science, everyone would quickly be talking about it anyway, but that would only be true if it in some way fit into any of the various schools of thought currently accepted. If it is outside that range, it would be like stepping out a window for anyone trained within the schools to consider it. Not only would no one follow them, and they would not only lose the support of the community, but also the value of what they had been taught.

If, on the other hand, the real problem is so fundamental to the model, eventually these structures will crumble to the ground and they will have to start from the ground up anyway. Given that, there is a strong political impulse to keep supporting and fixing old models.

Now obviously I am leading up to the issue I keep raising, but only because it really is foundational, not only to physics models, but to the rational thought process. It was the topic of my last years entry in the Questioning the Foundations contest

We experience time as a sequence of events, from past to future and physics reduces this to a measure of duration, but the simple physical reality is that it is action creating change that turns potential into actual, ie. future becoming past. For example, the earth isn't moving/existing along a vector from yesterday to tomorrow, rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.

Duration doesn't transcend the present, but is the activity occurring between events, like the wave cycling between peaks.

In my this years entry I'm arguing it further. That reality is a dichotomy of energy and information, in which energy manifests information and information defines energy. Since energy is conserved, in order to create new information, old information has to be erased, thus giving rise to the "arrow of time."

Now can you see how much of a problem this poses, not only for many complex physics models, but to our very notion of reality? Consider that both narrative and cause and effect, linear logic are based on this sequential perspective of time and they are the main pillars of what creates human civilization, so while it seems normal to me, having thought about it for years, I find it really throws a monkey wrench into most people's ways of thinking and they react negatively to it, even if they don't have an argument against it. It would be like telling the average person of 500 years ago that the earth is just a small planet circling its local star. Consider we still, today, see the sun as moving across the sky.

Now I can go on about this idea, but it may have tripped some circuit breakers in your thinking, so the point I'm making to you, is that it is this sort of paradigm breaking that is required and sitting around a physics classroom discussing the various models of black holes, or multiverses, or string theories, is not going to lead to that sort of outside the box thinking.

So it is a matter of waiting until the ideas emanating from the physics community become so outrageous that the larger society begins to question whether they are worth the cost. Then really new ideas will have an opportunity.

Regards,

John Merryman

PS, I'm always willing to discuss it further, in fact, recently posted a thumbnail sketch at the bottom of Carlos Rovelli's thread.

Dear Marcoen,

Just to say thank you for that exchange at my blog. Its important to me. And I will appreciate to know if or when you read my concluding post.

All the best,

Chidi

Dear Marcoen,

I thank you for rating my essay and in turn I have given you a high rating.

Bet regards,

Sreenath

Dear Marcoen,

You raise some good points that should really be said more often. Particle physicists don't observe particles, they find evidence that there were particles in a particular energy state. The notion of a theory's "predictive power", which you take issue with here, is something that has been blown out of proportion, as physicists often take such confirmations as proof of what they were looking for. If A then B. B, therefore A. This doesn't logically follow.

However, there's really more to it than that, which I was hoping you would have commented on in your essay. A theory, such as the Higgs mechanism, is supposed to have predictive power if it predicts something novel, which hasn't been observed yet, and there's no other real contender that anyone can think of. In that case, physicists find it acceptable to infer A from the observation of B. This was the case with the CMB, for instance, as with most of the Standard Model. So I was hoping you would say something about what else that observed peak could have been. I might have missed that in your essay, and if I did, I'm sorry. But if not, could you say something about that here? What would you have the 125 GeV peak produced by, if not the Higgs? I imagine there are other candidates, but haven't looked into the problem myself.

I look forward to your answer.

All the best,

Daryl

Marcoen,

I have wondered if epicycles would have lasted 1500 years if the Dark Ages hadn't occurred.

I think though, that outside of HEP, there are alot of issues that are not being easily swept under the rug, along with some that are overlooked, but will not look well when considered critically. If a system cannot continue to support fresh energy and input, then that energy will start to react to it, rather then support it. I think you will see a great deal of questioning by the younger members of the community, because they are not going to spend their careers chasing theories that cannot be furthered. Rather than prove themselves by finding holes in theory to patch, they will start finding holes to dissect the model, pulling everything apart, not overlooking the niggling problems. The pendulum starts to swing the other direction. We are just in that plateau between going up and starting back down. Things are just faster paced then they have ever been and things that seemed impregnable will suddenly look delusional. It may well take a few years, if not another decade to really take hold, but it is coming to a point. There is the politics of physics and there is the physics of politics.

Regards,

john

Marcoen,

I come from a long line of farmers in a fairly wealthy area, around Baltimore Maryland. Now we are mostly into horseracing. To say that moral "flexibility" is part of the culture of racing would be putting it mildly. Because we have been at it so long though, there is this deeper understanding of it in fairly complex terms, to where it is not so much a good/bad issue, but as simply a character health issue. Just as people and all forms of life, can be varying degrees of healthy and unhealthy for any number of reasons, so can people be morally weak. corrupted, amoral, etc. in a wide range of fashions.

Because I found it so pervasive, I early on decided that it really didn't matter to me to be successful, as much as it mattered to be true to what I felt was right. Consequently I've mostly spent my time working with the horses and within the family, while trying to understand where the larger society is headed. Here is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago, laying out some of my conclusions.

Now there is an old(apparently very old) African saying, that; "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with a group." So much of the corruption today, in all of society, is simply due to people doing whatever it takes to get ahead, ie. to go alone. Now as you point out in physics, it is the opposite, conforming to the model at whatever the cost, but the result is the same; Short term thinking eventually meets up with the long term and the bubble pops.

The fact is that at the level of social movement we are discussing, 20 years is little more than an eye-blink. There are theological models which have been building for millennia and economic models that have been building for centuries. That doesn't mean their built in fallacies will never catch up with them. When I was young, it was assumed the conflict between capitalism and communism would go on until they went to war. Yet the built in fallacies of communism, which was also an over-reliance on conformism, caught up with it before the fallacies of capitalism have caught up with it, yet that doesn't look too far off, now.

So, yes, those being trained in the mold find it confining and this is good, as long as they truly believe in where it is going, but when disbelief sets in, this confinement then becomes unstable pressure and like a rocket that starts to wobble, will actually be a force against the model.

Regards,

John