Big Physics is Big Fraud
Published by admin January 29th, 2008 in PhysicsThis quote from Scientific American proves that LHC is not a scientific experiment.
The nearly 100 million channels of data streaming from each of the two largest detectors would fill 100,000 CDs every second, enough to produce a stack to the moon in six months. So instead of attempting to record it all, the experiments will have what are called trigger and data-acquisition systems, which act like vast spam filters, immediately discarding almost all the information and sending the data from only the most promising-looking 100 events each second to the LHC’s central computing system at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics and the collider’s home, for archiving and later analysis.
By picking ”the most promising-looking” measurements physicists define what they will find. It is the oldest tradition in physics to impose their doctoral authority over experiments. If you start with white noise and filter it through a sine curve what you will find in the data will be a sine curve.
LHC is not even a black box experiment as I wrote before. It is judgment. Physicists will filter data they don’t like and will find what they want to find. The fraud is not punishable because no one physicist knows what is going on. Each paper that will be written will have 700 authors. Science by committee is no science but fraud.
The vast majority of collisions are stuff that is quite well understood, and therefore not interesting. They don’t save it only to allow more interesting stuff to be kept. An example of something that is not interesting is a collision that only produces a couple electrons.
The stuff they’re culling is not actually ignored. It’s used to calibrate the machine. They ignore it when they’re looking for new physics, but it gets regularly examined when they recalibrate (which they probably do every day.)
The more common consequences of a collision were carefully examined decades ago. The grad students got PhDs, the researchers got grants, and a few people got Nobel prizes. But since it’s already been done, there’s no reason to redo it. No PhDs, no grants, and no Nobel prizes, so they throw the data away.
The new experiments are different for several reasons. First they are at higher energies. But the most basic particle stuff that happens at lower energies also happen at higher energies, with various probabilities. Second, they’re getting better “statistics”, that is, they are measuring the probabilities to a higher accuracy. Mostly that means looking for deviations from what is already known and that means building an experiment that throws away stuff that is easily explained. Other improvements in newer experiments are things like making tighter beams (which makes for more collisions per second), tighter controls on energy / momentum, and better shielding and stuff.
If there really were some secret violation of common sense sitting around in particle physics you’d be the last person to discover it. Some disgruntled grad student would have publicized it long long ago. People leave the industry constantly as there are never enough jobs for the grad students who get PhDs.
Carl,
Thanks for setting this straight. Please tell me if this analogy corresponds roughly to what physicists are doing:
If I plot Moon’s motion it will look like a sine curve. If I increase the precision of my observations I would see other regular motions called “first anomaly,” “second anomaly” and so on. Collider physicists are done with first and second anomalies and they are now looking for finer oscillations so they put the data through a filter which eliminates anything above the precision they are looking for. If this is correct then of course I would say there is no fraud. There is my ignorance.
Once again, thanks for the thoughful explanation. I hope to get into the theory of this stuff more later this year. Just browsing Google books today I saw a book you are probably quite familiar with by Karl Blum Density Matrix Theory and Applications. He says, if I remember correctly, that density in this context refers to statistical density rather than density as in density of lead or density of water.
And by the way, if there are any “disgruntled grad students” out there who are aware of “secret violation of common sense” in particle physics I grant you immunity from prosecution! Please feel free to comment here
Yes, your analogy with the moon is very good. In fact, pretty much of all of physics can be described that way, which is both its strength and its weakness. The strength is that it (almost) always builds on prior results, the weakness is that it tends to add epicycles to epicycles rather than explore an alternative explanation. Density matrix theory is an alternative explanation, but it is quite closely related to most of the usual quantum mechanics.
I’ve seen the Karl Blum book in the library, but it costs well over $100 and I’m too cheap to buy it. Instead, I’m writing my own book on density matrix theory. Kea just pointed out to me a lecture at the Perimeter Institute on density matrices which I will listen to as soon as I’m done with my blog reading and have exhausted my patience with the new tool I’m learning, Gimp.
The density is a probability density. That distinguishes density matrices from the alternative (which is generally preferred), “state vectors”. To convert a state vector to a probability you compute it’s length as a vector, and then take square of that length to get the probability. Feynman’s book QED talks about this. With density matrices, it’s a little more complicated, but the probabilities are already there.
My favorite short description of “density matrix theory” is that it assumes that quantum states consist of actions or “operators” rather than snapshots. So instead of breaking a movie up into a series of still frames (which is how state vectors work), one breaks it into a series of pairs of adjacent still frames. In the language of quantum mechanics, a pair of frames consist of an “initial” frame and a “final” frame. As a pair, they tell you how the picture changed between those two moments. But in density matrix theory you are not allowed to split the initial and final frames apart and to think of them as separate objects. The quantum state is the activity between the frames, not the frames themselves.
If you do split them apart, what happens is that you find that you cannot split them in just one way. Instead, you have a bunch of choices on how to split them. These are called “gauge choices” in the physics language and “gauge theory” permeates the usual quantum mechanics. Switching from one choice of split to another is called a “gauge transformation”. In density matrix theory, there is no need for a gauge choice, and “gauge theory” becomes the more simple principle that quantum mechanics should be written in density matrix form.
What I’ve said above will be perfectly understandable to a typical physicist in the context of scalar valued wave functions (with U(1) symmetry) and probably also in spin-1/2 wave functions. Where we split ways is when one talks about the non commutative gauge transformations. I think that they can be put into a natural Clifford algebraic form where the gauge disappears when you convert to density matrix form, but a typical physicist will not see things this way (and doesn’t have the time to learn anything new).
A problem with all these books (and my own) is that they all assume a great deal of prior “knowledge” about what the various words they’re using mean. Some of that knowledge is not understood by the authors, who tend to be experts in the use of mathematical techniques rather than experts in the foundations of quantum mechanics. The only introduction to quantum mechanics I’ve seen that I really like is the inexpensive book titled QED by Feynman that we were talking about here recently.
In fact, pretty much of all of physics can be described that way, which is both its strength and its weakness. The strength is that it (almost) always builds on prior results, the weakness is that it tends to add epicycles to epicycles rather than explore an alternative explanation. Density matrix theory is an alternative explanation, but it is quite closely related to most of the usual quantum mechanics.
Carl,
Suppose I wrote your simulation of E8 in Python. I would exactly get the same result. Two different languages, Java and Python, are used to save the same phenomena to the same precision. They must be equivalent. No new insight about what is simulated is gained. Would you say that your method of density matrix formalism is analogous and equivalent to other representations of QM? (I see you already say that they are “closely related.”)
I believe that all these representations are simulations, they are not rules hidden in the database, because the hidden rule of the database is its probabilistic nature.
In astronomy Kepler’s 1.5 power rule is the rule. I believe that this rule is different than mathematical simulations.
So, data reduction always consists of fitting a curve to the database, in other words, taking the difference between computed and observed and the error becomes knowledge.
As far as I understand your method and other mathematical methods are used to compute the computeds. Is this correct?
I suspect that in reality computeds are computed from computer simulations (like this?) not from notational forms described in physics textbooks. Correct me if I am wrong.
Usually I like to approach a subject from a historical point of view and that takes long time. I will eventually read Feynman’s QED, I hope. But I know that Feynman too could not understand Quantum mechanics and he went to original sources and wrote his own version.
Thanks again for the comment.