The Higgs Fake

Unzicker

The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded very soon after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle at a press conference at CERN on July 4, 2012. The breaking news caused excitement worldwide. Yet the message conveyed to the public, as if something had happened like finding a gemstone among pebbles, is, if we take a sober look at the facts, at best an abuse of language, at worst, a lie. What had been found by the researchers did not resolve a single one of the fundamental problems of physics, yet it was immediately declared the discovery of the century. Whether this claim is fraudulent, charlatanry, or just thoroughly foolish, we may leave aside; that the greatest physicists such as Einstein, Dirac or Schrödinger would have considered the “discovery” of the Higgs particle ridiculous, is sure. They would never have believed such a complicated model with dozens of unexplained parameters to reflect anything fundamental. Though on July 4, 2012, the absurdity of high energy physics reached its culmination, its folly had begun much earlier...

A few authors, such as Andrew Pickering and David Lindley, have lucidly pointed out the shortcomings, failures and contradictions in particle physics in much detail, providing, between the lines, a devastating picture...

In the last decades, a cascade of increasingly rare effects that needed colliders with ever more power were forcibly interpreted as new particles: the bottom quark, W and Z bosons, the top quark, the Higgs boson. The sieve is getting finer and finer, and it is ever more likely that artifacts of the analysis come into play that do not genuinely exist in Nature. In our metaphor, the finer and finer grains, rather than existing beforehand, would be produced by abrasion during the process of sieving, when the nuggets have long gone...

The identification of the allegedly new particles has become a task so complex that it is methodologically hilarious. It’s not that you have to find a needle in a haystack, the needle is in a needle stack, as CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer phrased it, apparently being proud of having developed a metaphor for absurdity. Joe Incandela (speaker of the CMS experiment), when talking about the Higgs discovery, referred more technically to a photon background of $10^{12}$ , and said it was like identifying a grain of sand in a swimming pool full of sand. No streak of doubt in the data analysts' abilities seemed to have bothered him either. Physicists see Mississippi water level rise because a boy peed in it. Believe that headline? If it comes from a scientific press conference, yes, we do.

But let us address more seriously this ludicrousness. Consider the half-life of W bosons or top quarks (both of which enter the Higgs analysis) of some $10^{-25}$ seconds. It means that the poor particle, during its lifetime, cannot travel more than the radius of a proton. It will never get out of the mess of the collision point where 600 million protons crash into each other every second, never get into any detector (!), never cause any physical process that can be clearly identified unless you pile dozens of theoretical assumptions on top of each other. But high energy physicists claim to know precisely what's going on...

When physicists try to separate 100 billion pairs of photons of “background” from the one pair which originated from the decay of a Higgs boson, it is rather contrived to speak of an “observation.”... “Event generators”, as particle physicists call them, are used where the usual theoretical calculations (which are already superficial descriptions) don’t work anymore. They constrain themselves to simulate the collision (with some poorly justified simplifying assumptions), at a still inferior level of understanding.