On the other hand, it would arguably have been more interesting had they not.

However the earlier predictions about which will be the energy where the resonance will be observed had been wrong.

The predictions have been revised a few times upwards after not finding a resonance at the predicted lower energies, then they have been proven wrong again and the cycle has been repeated until the actual discovery.

It doesn't take much to look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_oscillator

I assume that you do need maths but not something developed only decades ago. That's what physics students learn today and represent a very conservative body of knowledge, which would be never trivial though.

real data - background model = bump

This is all just counting statistics, it actually is that simple. (The resonance equals particle is quite a bit more complex, but for a basic treatment the bump is a particle could probably just be understood as jargon.)

> Goes on to completely omit this apparently trivial mathematics.

You're being somewhat unfairly downvoted because "now draw the rest of the fucking owl" is a huge problem in modern physics. All too often it turns out that the person teaching owl drawing has never seen an owl, has no idea how to draw any animal, but can explain at length the differences between the various pencil types.

For example, I've never seen a satisfactory definition of what a particle is as defined by modern field theory.

Either you get a hand-wavey "it's an excitement of the field" with zero elaboration, or they talk only about the secondary properties of the particles such as their symmetries.

Imagine explaining cars in one of only two ways, and flat refusing to ever describe them in any other terms:

1. Cars are personal automobiles with three or more wheels.

2. Cars are largely left-right symmetric objects that can fit into a tunnel but not through a sieve. When set into motion they have a decreased longitudinal resistance compared to lateral. If two cars are smashed together a loud siren noise can often be briefly heard after a delay of a few minutes.

Now you know what a car is!

You are right about the incentives being aligned a certain way. But, while the justification for the LHC might have been Higgs, what most high-energy physicists (theoretical and experimental) really cared about was validating beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) physics e.g. supersymmetry, hidden valleys etc.

Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.

So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.

What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.

The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.

Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf

There were lots of things people really were hoping to see from the LHC, and weren't seen. supersymmetry being one example. Not seeing those things is just as important to everyone involved as seeing them is, so although the theories may try to modify their theories to explain why nothing was seen at those energies, it isn't in any of the experimenters interests to pretend they observed something they didn't.

See also the number of experiments conducted to try and observe things like dark matter candidates with various properties. All those experiments are in competition to either show presence or absence, and absence is just as important because it's proving that you made an incredibly sensitive detector and have used that to show that a particular possibility really wasn't the right one.

By this rationale the moon landing also never happened, because everyone from NASA was incentivized to lie about it. Why bother even going when you could fake it?

>1) Being thruthful about the non-discovery, thereby suiciding their own careers

By writing this it seems like you are under the impression that no science happened until they discovered or "non-discovered" the particle. But that is of course wrong.

It would be no harm to the bureaucracy if they did not find the Higgs. The scientific community would have reacted with excitement and the search for the hole in the standard model would have been apace. In many ways this would have been better for particle physics funding. The standard model is now complete, and we still don’t have a unified field theory. I’m not a physicist but have been following this search through popular writing since I was a kid. Is there now any reason to build a bigger supercollider, and/or is there a risk of the entire field stagnating till someone comes along with a testable theory?

Actually “No Higgs” would have been as big a scientific discovery as a Higgs, maybe bigger.

From the perspective of the (real) physicists involved the outcome is the same. Most of my colleagues who have stayed in particle physics post Higgs are wishing it was never discovered. The motivation of scientists is not well-understood by others, but assuming people make a career in particle physics for the income or job stability is ridiculous. The alternative cost is so high it has to be that they actually really like what they do.

We know what they did because a _lot_ of scientists desperately wanted to find supersymmetry and various dark matter candidates with the LHC and they've found absolutely _nothing_ and didn't actually just "make some shit up".

Instead what they are doing is insisting that we build an even bigger particle accelerator.

> What would you do?

The scientist calling bullshit that can back it up gets in history books. The others eventually lost credibility.

So I (and pretty much all scientists I'e ever worked with) would call it a failure.

By your implication, nuclear fusion researchers would have "found" it decades ago. But since reality wins in the end, and scientists are generally not pathological liars, they did not. They continue to advance the field.

There's ample other cases demonstrating the flaws in your story. Bad scientists don't tend to last long under the gaze of reality.

Your options are reversed. Under the mass conspiracy scenario, any individual scientist could become famous and promote their own career by whistleblowing about the fraud. But if the scientists are truthful as a group, they can guarantee further research and grants because the standard model is wrong and more experiments will be needed.

This but it's HIV and circumcision.

"A new Tuskegee? Unethical human experimentation and Western neocolonialism in the mass circumcision of African men"

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dewb.12285?...

You don't seem to understand what "thought experiment" is. It is not when you pull some contrived nonsense out of your ass and make conclusions from it.

You also don't really seem to understand how scientists view science. When something that nobody expects DOES happen, and similarly, when scientists expect very very much to see something and clearly do not, both of those outcomes are exciting for scientists.

Predicting something from a model or theory and then having it be confirmed very successfully sure is great for that theory or model, but is the most BORING outcome for the scientists working on it.

Confirming someone else's fairly successful and well developed model is rarely how you gain money or fame in science.

> Being thruthful [sic] about the non-discovery

> Just make some shit up

Is that how it works in the scientific community? I'm not actively involved, but I feel like publishing my findings, one way or another, would require explaining how I arrived at them in a manner that would be reproducible (and thus, verifiable to an extent) by others. What am I missing?

Not asking rhetorically, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious.

Imagine the earth isn't round!

I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research.

If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.

Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".

Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.