This Article Makes Me Angry

Slate.com is usually a great place to get news and slightly unorthodox and mostly left leaning commentary. Their big shtick seems to be semi-shocking headlines designed to lure the reader in. For example, a story on the movie "Casablanca," might be titled "Casablanca is not a very good movie," and so on. All of this is rather amusing, except for when it takes place in my house.

For your consideration: this idiotic piece of science writing . The writer's (a dude named James Owen Weatherall) main point seems to be that the discovery of the Higgs is bad because apart from it, we expect no new physics until the GUT scale (very high energies that our particle accelerators won't get to anytime soon). Let's go though it part by part. The author comments on a rumor that they may have discovered the Higgs at the Tevatron (something I have not heard anything about here at TASI, a summer school filled with many of the leading students and professors, surely if there were something to this rumor we'd be abuzz (?) ). Various comments:

1. First of all, the author claims that the standard model was "put forth by John Iliopoulos in 1974." Huh? I've never heard that one. After googling this, it seems the Iliopoulous was perhaps the first to use the term "standard model," but I would, by no means say that he "put it forth". The heavy liftiing for the SM was done by Glashow, Salaam and Weinberg for the electroweak (SU(2) X U(1)) part of the theory. For QCD (the SU(3) part), the work was done by many, but Wilczek, Gross, Politzer and maybe t'Hooft deserve the most credit. Iliopoulous? (Don't get me wrong, he's no slouch, he's done many important interesting things in physics.) Maybe he was going for technical correctness in that Iliopoulos first proposed the term, but either way it's either wrong or grossly misleading. Don't journalists have to do research?

2. "...if the rumor is true and the standard model Higgs has been found at the Tevatron, the LHC is in big trouble: Immediately, its "guaranteed" success—the final particle of the standard model, not to mention a couple of Nobel Prizes for European scientists—is gone." This is actually the author's only good point. Physicists are most confident about finding the Higgs "or something like it" (Nima Arkani-Hamed's words). I wouldn't say that the LHC is in "big trouble," though. This leads us to the rest of the article...

3. "Physicists have developed such a complete description of elementary particles that, once the final piece of the theory is in place, the chances that the LHC will find anything the standard model doesn't predict are almost negligible." What?! Where is Mr. Weatherall getting his information from? It's hardly surprising that he quotes no physicists in the article. Even if the Higgs is found, there is still very good reason to expect new physics at the TeV scale (the energy range probed by the LHC). In fact, the biggist indication that there is new physics is the unnatural fine tuning of the Higgs mass. Physicists have assumed for decades that the Higgs would be found. Once you believe in the Higgs, the numbers come out such that its mass has to be incredibly fine tuned in order to account for observed physics. Nobody studying particle physics finds this physically natural. There is a loophole out of this if there is new physics at precisely the energy scales that the LHC will be investigating. Let me repeat again: Everyone expects new physics (besides the Higgs) to be found at the LHC.

4. "But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well, then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. " No, no it does not. Shmuck.

5. "That's why particle physicists, and the EU member states that have spent Nepal's annual GDP to build this accelerator, are hoping that no one, in Chicago or Switzerland, finds the Higgs." Not true either, champ. In fact all particle physics expect the Higgs or something like it. I, and I think most theory graduate students and researchers would be quite overjoyed at the Higgs discovery and the final test of the standard model. But even then, all signs point to there being more than the standard model, and that we will begin to find those signs soon after.

Mr. Weatherall, shame on you. Next time, you should talk to some actual physicists. Though I've complained about science journalism on this blog before, I'd take the frothy, meaningless musings of Dennis Overbye over James Owen Weatherall's just plain wrong reporting.