“Never fall in love with your hypothesis.”
– Adage of Scientific Research
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Leaving some comments at two physics-related communities in which I participate, I was greeted by several withering responses. In one case, I was even derided as “…ridiculous and disturbing,” and associated with Trump and Putin.

I’m fairly thick-skinned. But I’ll confess that the comment, left by an academic science writer whom I quite respect, left me rather disappointed. In that particular case, my transgression was the observation that the recent announcement of an experimental result seemed rather dubious as it didn’t agree with results from two other recent experiments. In another instance, I simply observed that there was an alternate, logically consistent potential explanation for a quantum effect.

In both cases, I was simply making honest, accurate, and verifiable observations. At least someone came to my rescue with a little humor in the former case, using a physics pun to imply that the announcement perhaps included some degree of “spin”. My takeaway from all of this, however, is to have acquired a somewhat better understanding of the extraordinarily defensive sociology of some in the high-energy particle physics community.
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The first time I really came to understand the predictive power of mathematics was in middle school algebra. I was amazed that I could calculate and graph the trajectory of a baseball, even into orbit around the Earth!  I had to make some unrealistic assumptions… no air resistance, that gravitational effects would remain constant everywhere, and that my “baseball” was a point-like perfect sphere.  But the approach revealed an approximation that could be experimentally verified. And the math could always be adjusted to give it a more precise predictive power.

In physics, such an approach is called a “spherical cow”. These are mathematical approximations that allow scientists to get themselves at least into the ballpark when working on complex problems. Imagine trying to calculate the aerodynamics of something as complex and variable as a cow. A good starting point might be to assume that it takes the form of a sphere, then add on some cylindrical “legs”, and perhaps another sphere for a “head”. Eventually, the description can become more precise, perhaps eventually to the point of including factors for the effects of fur and of horns in various sizes and shapes.

In current physics, “Quantum Mechanics” and “The Standard Model” are both probably spherical cows. Put simply, Quantum Mechanics is a description of how the tiniest bits of the universe change and interact over time. And the Standard Model is a collection of fundamental particles that interact through quantum mechanics (and Einstein’s Relativity) to create the matter and the forces of the universe.

Modern Quantum Mechanics was formalized in 1932, formally extended into “Quantum Electrodynamics” by the 1950s (which includes one of the most accurate predictions in all of physics), and then into current “Quantum Chromodynamics” by the 1970s. This resulted in the finalization of the current Standard Model in the mid 1970s, with the 2012 observation of the “Higgs Boson” at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern as the Standard Model’s final, verified prediction. That’s a pretty good record for a spherical cow!

However, neither model gives a reason for why they have the values that they do; nor do they necessarily agree with Einstein’s “General Relativity”, which is likely also a spherical cow.   So adjusting these theories to more precisely reflect reality, as well as to better work with one another has been a long term goal of physics.

Spherical cows, however, shouldn’t be confused with Sacred Cows.

These animals mark the point when a “scientific” theory ceases being a testable hypothesis and moves into the realm of mere conjecture, philosophy, or even theology. And this epistemological drift does indeed happen in science, resulting in approaches that begin to sound more like the kinds of rationalizations that keep Santa coming down the chimney. The physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, called such ideas, “Not even wrong,” meaning that they are both unverifiable and useless for making predictions.

In 2014, the well known physicist, Sean Carroll, wrote that “falsifiability” is a scientific idea that’s ready for retirement.  I won’t apologize for thinking that this is a ludicrous suggestion, entirely eliminating one of the fundamental distinctions between science and pseudo-science. Indeed, the whole perspective opens up a virtual infinitude of useless explanations for the workings of the universe, from “’God’ did it” and that the universe is a simulation, to “many worlds” and that my writing this is just the spontaneous hallucination of a “Boltzmann brain”.  While this approach might make for a good book, philosophy, or maybe even a new religion, it’s definitely not a constructive approach to actual science.

Carroll’s argument strikes me as little more than a rhetorical attempt at justifying “research” programs that are fundamentally untestable (inaccessible “multiverses” in this case).  And applying this kind of thinking to “science” encourages the investment of expertise, time, money, and resources into programs for which there exists no evidence, nor any expectation of testability.  What might be expected from such endeavors more likely explains why that in the nearly fifty years since establishing the Standard Model, particle physics has made almost no progress in refining its workings.

Apparently, this is a triggering observation among many in the academic physics community, and especially among those invested in “String Theory”, which since the 1980s has been among the principal paradigms of theoretical particle physics. The idea postulates that all of the universe’s smallest particles are actually tiny, vibrating strings.  The approach initially promised discoveries which would unite all of theoretical physics; but problems began appearing early on, some of which were glaringly obvious.  Regardless, physicists moved on, over the years patching the holes and raising the bars of testability as they went.

One early problem was that string theory needs at least 11-dimensions (10 in space, plus one in time).  The seven extra dimensions beyond our everyday 3+1 are merely predicted by the math… meaning that they were added in to make it work.  And the explanation for why we don’t see these extra dimensions is that they are too small to be observable.  And that’s among the theory’s least controversial claims.

Even by the time that I was shopping around for a post grad program in the early 90s, there were already subversives discouraging following in the footsteps of anyone invested in string theory. Several more advanced peers as well as at least one adviser quietly echoed the sentiments, “It’s a waste of time,” It’s unworkable”, or even, “It’s a dead end.”

Regardless, press releases recently reported as “news” by popular media have been repeating the claim that scientists at Fermilab have determined that the “W boson” is maybe a bit heavier than we thought.  And according to the pundits, this must also mean that our understanding of the Standard Model is entirely broken!  Then, almost as if on cue, a “super-symmetric particle” was suggested as a solution, another undetected prediction of string theory (though essentially ruled out by a well documented Fermilab/LHCb data investigation in 2015).   Regardless, all physicists need now is to move the goalpost into a bigger experiment… bigger than the last bigger experiment anyway.

Before getting too excited, however, I’ll again observe that there hasn’t been an independent measurement to confirm Fermilab’s result, nor an independent evaluation of the process by which the data was analyzed.  Moreover, the “ATLAS” measurement, described in 2018 in the European Physical Journal C, as well as the CERN “LHCb” experiment were both in line with predictions as reported in the January 2022, Journal of High Energy Physics.  And even if the measurement is correct, there are several less dramatic explanations for the discrepancy.  So despite the criticisms, I’m still filing this latest press-release-posing-as-news under, “Spin.”