The Higgs Fake – How Particle Physicists Fooled the Nobel Committee by Alexander Unzicker (PDF)

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Did the 2013 Nobel Prize In Physics Make Einstein Turn In His Grave?The Higgs Fake – How Particle Physicists Fooled the Nobel Committee is a merciless critique of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and of the theoretical model on which the world’s most expensive experiment is based. Unzicker, a German physicist and award-winning science writer, argues that the reaction of the Swedish Academy to last year’s discovery appears to be a result of being beguiled by CERN’s attempts to justify the billions of dollars of public money being spent.The book starts off by claiming that the greatest physicists such as Einstein, Dirac of Schrödinger would have considered the “discovery” of the Higgs particle ridiculous. The reasons, according to the author, are that: “1) the so-called standard model has grown unbelievably complicated, 2) none of the great riddles of physics that have persisted for a century have been solved, 3) history suggests that the current model is a dead end, 4) with their ever-more intricate experimental techniques, particle physicists are fooling themselves with alleged results, 5) scientific convictions in the community are established by blind faith in expert opinions, group-think and parroting, and 6) the data analysis in its complexity cannot be overseen by anybody.”Unzicker gives a historical survey of the field, and concludes that particle physics, as practiced since 1930, is “a futile enterprise in its entirety.” The book is peppered with a series of funny quotes from famous philosophers and scientists. In the last section, “Antidotes,” he specifically attacks “the overstated claims by famous physicists such as Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Michio Kaku, Lisa Randall, Sean Carroll, Brian Cox and Jim Al-Khalili.” At the end, Unzicker lists questions that he would like to be asked to particle physicists at press conferences, hearings and discussions.Unzicker’s books have been praised as “well-grounded, sound, [and] informed,” and as “vehement pleading for physics as a natural science, in its best tradition,” but also dismissed by particle physicists as an “incoherent rant” and “time-wasting nonsense.” The new book, written in an even more explicit and provocative tone, is likely to scandalize the high energy physics community.Dr. Alexander Unzicker is a German theoretical physicist working on gravity. He has degrees in both physics and law and a PhD in neuroscience. Unzicker became known for his popular science books published by Springer (a scientific imprint) and Hanser. While his arguments about both the standard models of physics as well as theoretical approaches like strings and multi-verses provoked controversial reactions. Unzicker’s first book won the award “Science Book of the Year.” Its English edition, “Bankrupting Physics,” was published this year by Palgrave Macmillan.Praise for previous books of the author:The assertion that “science means, after all, not being a sucker” is well worth taking to heart. – Publishersweekly A broad dismissal of modern theoretical physicists…Unzicker also targets the massive expenditures of funds on high-energy particle accelerators. – Kirkus ReviewsUnzicker dares to think outside the mainstream. A refreshing and provoking book… – Prof. Hans Volker Klapdor-Kleingrothaus, University of Heidelberg Timely needed revision of contemporary physics´ idiocies. – Prof. Antonio Ruiz de Elvira, University of Alcalá de Henares A passionate and profound search for scientific truth. Unzicker’s questions to particle physicists at CERN are justified. PD Peter Thirolf, nuclear physicist at Munich University.A major contribution to physics… Unzicker is pointing out that the emperor is naked… The establishment scientists will curse and moan. – Edwin E Klingman, author, former NASA Research Physicist Book contains about 46k words

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⭐This is the book that has needed to be written for many years, as modern physics has gone off the rails since 1960 with its dangerous amalgam of mathematical fantasy and experimental gigantism. Ever since the physicists made their Mephistophelean deal with the US military, they have conned the public with their unending list of weird particles; eventually, in July 2012 CERN announced their ultimate sleight of hand – the magical Higgs particle! Unsurprisingly, the Nobel Committee awarded their prize for physics in the following year to bless this hugely expensive ($9 billion) enterprise.Unzicker is a science journalist that has been tracking these ‘atom-smashing’ projects for several years and is almost unique in challenging the researchers both directly and in print. As a result, he is now able to share his deep criticisms with the general-public, some of whom have been long captivated by this modern saga. He does a magnificent, ‘no-holds’ hatchet job on this merry band of 10,000 bandits led by famous academics with super-sized egos, such as Gell-Mann, Glashow, Lederman, Ting, Rubbia, etc. (all well rewarded with Nobel prizes and huge salaries) while promoting abstractions that can best be understood as modern theology. The whole process illustrates consensus construction (‘group-think’) through sociological pressures. This project is one of today’s major secret scandals.Far too many careers in physics, over the last 50 years, have been constructed around these endeavours, so that few professional physicists dare join Unzicker and risk their own careers by publicly criticizing what has become the orthodox mainstream of academic physics. As one who decided many years ago that modern physics had just become a “math game” and resigned from professional physics to pursue real world opportunities, I have no hesitation in adding my informed support to Unzicker’s attacks on “baloney”.I share Unzicker’s respect for the ‘giants’ of quantum mechanics (Dirac, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, de Broglie, etc.) who moved our investigations down to the atomic level in the 1920s and 1930s. This reductionist program went off the rails when the search for smaller and smaller components of matter was pushed below the nuclear level while many unsolved problems still remained at the atomic level. In fact, the whole research program needs to be reversed and science needed to start investigating the synthetic challenge of how larger and larger aggregations of matter arise in nature. Even the “second simplest” atom (namely helium) has resisted insightful investigations that were so fruitful with the simple two-body hydrogen atom. Indeed, contrary to modern mythology, quantum mechanics itself is still riven with massive problems of its own interpretation (such as ‘waves’ and ‘spin’); when the truth is that all we have are “mathematical recipes” for calculating simple results in trivial situations. These were the challenges facing the quantum giants when they died but the following generations quickly avoided these deep problems and substituted massive (and expensive) machinery to continue smashing matter into increasingly ephemeral fragments. These never-seen (imaginary) ‘particles’ are simply bundles of imaginary (unobservable) mathematical properties, such as: strangeness, isospin, colour, fractional electric charge, which are all localized to a point (thus particle), so the mathematics of field theory may then be invoked. Unzicker summarizes all this quark quirkiness as “eightfold crap” [p. 104].Unzicker loves to contrast this earlier QM search for meaning with today’s invention of these fictitious, short-lived “particles”. These lie at the heart of ‘The Standard Model’ with its hundreds of arbitrary parameters, not least of which are the masses (or even mass ratios) of these so-called ‘particles’ – a key physical concept (‘inertial mass’) at the heart of physics since Newton’s revolutionary theories around 1700. As few realize, the mathematics of field theory cannot explain ANY mass, so why the invention of a new field – the Higgs “boson” should ever have been thought to provide an answer has long been a mystery to me. Unzicker does a lovely dissection in his chapter 11 of the nonsense thrown up in this area, such as “symmetry-breaking” mechanisms, while failing to predict a single mass anywhere in the Standard Model; the foundational reason for this whole expensive exercise. Few physicists today dare criticize the primary mathematical toolset of theoretical physics, namely field theory, even though it is intrinsically riddled with self-contradictory infinities (except for finite crystal models in Solid-State theory). Every student selected to study physics today has to be at the high end of mathematical ability, so that PhD students in theoretical physics are simply applied mathematicians; today’s intuitives, like those earlier giants, such as Einstein and Rutherford with their huge intuitions for nature, are no longer given a chance to research the modern world.The extensive use of super-computers for simulations and data analysis mean that few can check these calculations; indeed, experience with large commercial software programs implies that there are probably very many software bugs hidden in these millions of lines of computer-code that remain uncovered for years. Unzicker does a thorough job exposing the great likelihood that almost all these Nobel-earning “discoveries” are probably no more than instrumental artifacts due to selective data filtering based on anticipated underlying assumptions, such as the decay of unmeasurable, electrically neutral (invisible) intermediaries. What is never emphasized is that all we may be seeing in these super, high-energy collisions are ‘harmonics’ of complex interactions: effectively, just “wiggles on wobbles” – not new particles at all, especially as the inelastic “scattering process is not understood” [p.85].Even Unzicker himself gets caught up in the mania for numbers that were assumed by Enlightenment mathematicians (like Newton and Galileo) to characterize nature when most people would be just satisfied with greater insight built on new (and often) simplifying assumptions. Just because a few experiments agree to huge precision with measurements does not mean that our theories are on the right track: Ptolemy’s model was vastly better (judged by numerical confirmation) than Copernican models. Unzicker also skewers several of today’s ‘pop’ physicists for their fatuous remarks, such as Brian Cox’s comment that: “The Higgs particle is one of the most important discoveries in the history of science, on equal footing with the electron.” [p. 130]. As Unzicker points out, there have been no new technologies arising from all of this CERN particle research, while the electron transformed the world within 20 years of its discovery.Unzicker has annoyed people by pointing out that: “particle physics has come close to astrology.” [p. 124] but I view far too much of modern science, especially high-energy physics and cosmology, as retreating into its earlier obsessions with theology, including the origin of the universe and the foundation of reality. How anyone can give credence to invented particles like W bosons or ‘top’ quarks which exist for times too short to cross a proton [p. 43], never mind a human scale experimental detector, is beyond me. This really sounds like counting angels on the heads of very small pins. Furthermore, anyone relying on one special pair of invisible photons, out of hundreds of billions, to confirm the nature of reality should be awarded The Cross of St. Michael for proving the religious foundations of nature itself. Until the Renaissance, only the Vatican could fund thousands of highly educated specialists to investigate reality but they were never tempted to explode St. Peter’s Cathedral to unravel the mysteries of the world. How much more useful to everyone if all this academic brainpower (and billions of dollars) were to be focused on the real problems of the world instead of these theological obsessions. Let’s just stop all this self-serving, intellectual nonsense, get back to small-scale physics and like Unzicker suggests: “start paying physicists like monks while they follow their personal obsessions”.Unzicker makes a clear plea for the public sharing of raw, unprocessed data from these taxpayer-funded projects so that science can return to an objective, independent analysis of experiments outside the fierce pressures of orthodoxy and hidden assumptions. How independent reviewers of these multi-thousand authored papers can ever decide that the experiments described therein are error-free or the conclusions are reasonable is another of today’s unexplained academic mysteries.One of the positive results of reading this short book (152 pages) is to encourage readers to deepen their awareness of nature by studying earlier books by Andrew Pickering (“Constructing Quarks”), David Lindley (“The End of Physics”) and Sheilla Jones/Unzicker (“Bankrupting Physics”), which provide more extensive descriptions of this whole sorry ‘Quarky’ era. As one who gained much from reading this enjoyable book, I can only plea for a more extensive index and a larger bibliography. I must also confess how relieved I am that my life was not wasted in this pointless pursuit of particle physics as was possible when I was studying under Salam and Kibble. So, sorry folks, modern physics has not provided a satisfactory alternative explanation of the universe but then, again, neither did the professional theologians after 2,000 years of thinking. Each group demonstrating how self-serving some intellectuals can become, especially when working in large, well-funded ‘believing’ organizations.It is fortunate that not too many physicists have been lured into this Weird Wonderland as they continue to explore more fruitful areas of physics, such as Solid State, quantum optics and nanotechnology. Meanwhile, Unzicker characterizes CERN as “a Nobel-greedy big science company seeking to get close to politics and big money” [p. 111]. He also points out on the same page that: “Nobody ever got the Nobel prize for proving that something didn’t exist or by showing that someone else was wrong.”

⭐When I read Unzicker’s “Bankrupting Physics” I thought it would be nice if he treated particle physics in the same level of detail as he treated cosmology. Now he has done so! This is a unique book from which one can gain not only physical insight, but which reminds one that it is not priests that work at LHC but government workers, with all that implies.One aspect of particle physics that is usually ignored is that, for quite a while at least, “there would always be another signal”, even though it’s mass could not be predicted. I have elsewhere noted that the discovery of the muon, misinterpreted for a decade as Yukawa’s “pion”, did much to cement Yukawa’s model in place. Only in 2006 did Wilczek announce that Yukawa fails at hard-core distances. Now they tell us, 60 years later!Unzicker begins with the factual statement that the “Higgs boson” claimed by LHC does not resolve a single fundamental problem in physics. The promise of building the LHC was that “we would understand mass and everything” if we found the Higgs.” Baloney.A gigantic government effort, representing huge expenditures of money, was finding neither SUSY–on which almost all modern physical theories depend– nor the Higgs, the “missing” piece of the Standard Model. When a signal finally was found, it was destined to be the Higgs. Not just another resonance or even a tetra-quark, but the Higgs. Amazingly, even a year and a half after the ‘official’ announcement of the Higgs, all papers in Physical Review Letters still describe it as ‘Higgs-like’ or as a ‘candidate’.In short, another government-run establishment is making claims, not entirely unlike “you can keep your doctor if you’re happy” and “your premiums will go down”. These defy economic laws, but the government cares not. It has a goal and it will say what’s necessary.There are two stories here, and Unzicker tells both well.The one referenced above is that of government, which is more addicted to funding than to truth, and the social and intellectual cowardice required to work in such group-think environments where criticism is not tolerated. The herd mentality is polar opposite to Maxwell, Einstein, Schrodinger, Dirac, and the other creators of modern science.The above story is told well and this alone will engender resentment and criticism from most particle physicists. But the other story, the evolution of particle physics concepts, is also told very well. Beginning with the need for simpler theories, particle physics is going the wrong way, piling on parameter after parameter and inventing ‘isospin’, ‘strangeness’, ‘hypercharge’, etc. as if these were physical entities. He discusses what underlies the “five sigma” statistics, based on Monte Carlo software models and triggers, and systematic errors.Unzicker relates exchanges with particle physicists that, most of the time, end up with “someone else checked that” or “someone else understands that”, or “it’s complicated”. He is impatient with excuses, pointing out that it is the particle physicist’s job to solve problems that are today accepted as excuses. He points out that from the get-go physics does not have a theory for radiation from accelerated charges, and this is at the core of every collision. So much of ‘analysis’ is “subtracting background” and “triggering” on events designed to filter out all but what one what is looking for. (Dyson has worried about this same problem elsewhere.) I would’ve liked it if Unzicker had provided more detail on Pythias and other Monte Carlo simulation codes on which the enterprise is based, but the book is excellent as is.In ‘Bankrupting’s discussion of cosmology, he outlines the house of cards that is the current “theory”, with unproven concept piled on unproven concept, with no predictions forthcoming. In particle physics the ideas depart from mass, charge, and spin and focus on symmetries, gauges, isospin, eight-fold-ways and other mathematical concepts that overlay the data. On top of this up to 150 parameters are fitted to data. In short:”The Standard Model has nothing to say about the contributions of electrodynamics, nothing about masses, or ratios of masses, nothing about lifetimes, nothing of the relation to gravity, nothing about the deeper reason of spin, nothing about radioactivity, nothing on the nature of space, time, and inertia.”In other words, the Standard Model is “physics by government” and a complete failure as far as understanding particles goes. As Hoyle said: “the establishment defends itself by complicating everything to the point of incomprehensibility.” Unzicker is not successful in hiding his disdain, but that is not an inappropriate response from a concerned taxpayer. I believe that the unwieldy structures of modern physics (particles and cosmology) are poised to crash, but it is never certain how long dollars and power extracted from citizens can keep government failures alive. Perhaps a long time. Yet, Unzicker points out the turkey illusion: until the day before Thanksgiving all the evidence says that everything is okay. Whether focused on the application of 10^-25 second lifetimes or the problem of the “background” or the Monte Carlo simulations, or “triggers”, or the parameters that are simply adjusted until everything “fits”, Unzicker analyzes the physics concepts and the socioeconomic (power structure) at play with just the right amount of detail. He clearly points out that “observations” do not represent an unambiguous physical reality but an integrated structure of theoretical assumptions. And the most important fact:People “don’t even know anymore what is model and what is fact.”Einstein’s relativity is tested to the fifth decimal place; the LHC data is about 6% which agrees fairly well with the five or 6% results of lattice QCD and the current QED 4% uncertainty and proton size.In short if you wish to understand the failures and shortcomings of the Standard Model, and the (built-in) corruption of government physics, Unzicker’s book is the best available. Only by shining light on the processes will they be appreciated for what they are. And the incentives that drive the business.Unzicker goes further than I do, questioning even the most basic concepts of particle physics. He is right to do so. I believe some of concepts only because my much simpler theory leads to quark confinement. Otherwise I would go as far as he does.This book, with his “Bankrupting Physics”, and Jim Baggott’s “Farewell to Reality” and Smolin’s 2006 and 2013 books and Woit’s 2006 book expose the rotten underbelly of government science (i.e., almost all science today). It is a self perpetuating scheme that is as far from its roots as it is possible to get. A crash is overdue”Government science is the home of obedience and authority” and “intolerance of dissent” — all profound enemies of science. Because most of what the government spokesmen announce purposely excludes any recognition of this, it’s mostly PR designed to advance the enterprise, the enterprise being cushy taxpayer-funded jobs. As for understanding the severe problems with the Standard Model, Unzicker quotes”It is hard to make somebody understand something when his income is based on not understanding it.”As for the ‘facts’ behind it – “you don’t need no steenkin’ facts.” For example, the Tevatron collider, a big deal before LHC came online, was shut down in 2011, and it’s data not maintained. The thousands of dollars needed to maintain the data acquired at the cost of billions of taxpayer dollars is projected for administrators cushy retirements, and is not available for something as trivial as “facts”. We’ll tell you what to believe, you don’t need facts. And of course much of the facts are buried in computer code. You don’t need that either.I expect his critics to pick on one or two statements and focus on how wrong or how ignorant he is. There are statements he makes that I don’t agree with. But the book as a whole is right on. It makes more sense than the Standard Model. And the Higgs doesn’t make any sense. It’s a mathematical trick designed to fill a hole in a theory that ignores gravity and hence has a huge hole to fill. It’s a government created fake. It wont be the last.Particle physicists and believers in the virtue of government will hate this book. It is based on logic, history, and socio-economic analysis as well as a superb analysis of the evolution of concepts underlying the Standard Model.Beginning physics students will understand why they might wish to consider other fields of physics and will obtain a view that is never taught in the halls of academia (or admitted within the halls of government). Physicists in other fields may give thanks. Those who wish to have a clear eyed understanding of how modern physics works will find it in this book.A remarkable treatment thank you Alexander Unzicker.Edwin Eugene Klingman

⭐If it really goes this way in the science of today as written in this book then it is terrible and fearful. I think the Higgs theory is also very far from the truth as many of the physical theories nowadays (multiple universes, inflation, etc…) but I was in the hope that the scientists are working with fair tools and fair methods, and if they are wrong it is because is the truth is very hard to find and not because that they are not plays by clear cards. This book is about the evil side of science. If things go this way we will have a terrible future. Maybe it is the time to step back a few or more steps and to begin investigating the Universe by very sincere hearts and minds.

⭐seems like he knows his stuff, but rather badly written.

⭐ok

⭐Unzicker pushes the stab directly to the hearth of the problem within the modern theoretical Physics. While the most important unsolved topics from the twilight era of quantum mechanics in the ’20 are simply swept under the rug, the attention is today diverted on utterly complex and yet incapable of real predictions theoretical constructs like the Standard Model. By accumulating ad hoc hypothesis and free parameters, or even ad hoc created particles like the quark Strange, in the effort of justifying or filter out the outcome of huge amounts of experimental data, which are not even available to public examination, the perverse symbiosis between big experiments and unrelated, arbitrary and poorly motivated theoretical predictions gives birth to objects like the W particle or the Higgs Boson, which has been created in a laboratory as an extremely rare event, and yet is taken as responsible of the mass of every elementary particle, without actually predicting the value of anyone. Although all this should be evident to every student with some capacity of independent thinking, Unzicker offers also an historical review, showing how even Richard Feynman, which is worshipped as the father of this breezy way of doing science, was ambiguous about the real value of his speculations, was totally against the Group Theory and the QCD, and never spoke a word about the Higgs Boson, which has been lately sold to media as the long sought-after definitive God’s particle. As the author clearly states, this kind of self-referencing, self-fooling and self-replicating way of thinking does not belong anymore much to science, but more to a sectarian creed, brainwashing and parroting, and after my limited experience I totally agree with him.

⭐Hmmmmm…… This is a difficult book for me to evaluate, especially as a philosopher of science and particularly as a critic of scientific method, which is the author’s main target, I believe.First, just to comment on the general tone of the book; I have never read a book so full of invectives, accusations and ugly name-calling of well-meaning but possibly mistaken scientists in my life. The manner in which Unzicker tears apart adherents of the Standard model, String theory and even quantum theory is rude, frankly fractured and disorganized, and for a science writer, rather randomly constructed.Still, I gave it four stars because he does manage to make some convincing points, I will not say well-constructed arguments, that physical science , especially theoretical physics, has become excessively based on speculation upon speculation, and almost no observation. He is right that Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle has been almost completely ignored since about the 30’s.He is also right that this frenzy of pure theory, and the subsequent building of the Hadron Collider are the results of wanting to hold onto big research grants, as well as a hunger to keep research going by scholars (alas, a perpetual dilemma…).I don’t think he makes a solid case for the Higgs boson being a deliberate fake, but possibly an accidental delusion of the culture, that’s very feasible. But in this world, there is plenty of self deception to go around..So, worth reading if you can stand the nasty tone and the foul language……

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